AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION, I HAVE DECIDED TO END THIS COURSE AT THE END OF JUNE. BE`EZRAT HASHEM, WE WILL COMPLETE THE THIRD PEREK BY THEN. I WILL RESUME OFFERING AN E-MAIL SHIUR IN SEPTEMBER, ALTHOUGH I PLAN TO OFFER ONLY TWO: HALAKHAH IN BRIEF AND ONE OTHER. FOR THE OTHER, THE CHOICES WILL PROBABLY BE 1)CONTINUE MAHARAL, 2)CONTINUE MOREH NEVUKHIM UNTIL THE END, 3)MISHLE, 4)PEREK HELEK (THE LAST CHAPTER OF SANHEDRIN, DEALING WITH VARIOUS AREAS OF JEWISH BELIEF. THE CHOICE WILL DEPEND SOLELY ON WHICH GETS THE MOST REGISTRATION BEFORE JULY 31ST.

VARIOUS FORMS OF LOVE

Hard on the heels of his pronouncements regarding seyagim, fences, R. Akiva mentions three different expressions of God’s love that we see regarding human beings. Maharal explains that R. Akiva, having prescribed stringencies to protect our holiness, was now trying to justify the importance of safeguarding that holiness. If people were simply slightly more sophisticated animals, expending time and effort to safeguard their sanctity might seem less than worthwhile. R. Akiva therefore points out that even ordinary human beings have advantages over animals (and over the angels, as we’ll see in a moment).

First, R. Akiva notes that human beings in general are "haviv, loved" (we’ll have to explain the nature of that hibah more fully), because they were created be-tselem, translated in English as in the image of God. More than that, however, they were informed that they were created in that image, as the verse in the Torah tells us that people were created in the Divine image. In two other ways, the Jewish people were singled out as targets of special hibah, in that they were given a keli hemdah (the Torah) and that they were called banim laMaqom, sons (or children) of God. In each of these cases, an added measure of hibah was involved in their having been told about it.

THE TSELEM ELOQIM—WHAT IS IT?

Maharal has several questions, the most important of which is the nature of the tselem that humans possess. Maharal assumes that the hibah to which R. Akiva refers places humans not only higher than the animals, but higher in some significant way than the angels as well. That being the case, it is not possible to think of the tselem as being our intellects, since the angels outdo us in that area.

Instead, Maharal suggests that it is our human bodies that should be thought of as the tselem. At first glance, this seems the exact kind of paganism that centuries of Jewish thinkers (particularly Rambam) had combated. Saying that our bodies reflect the Divine image was certainly a problem, a problem Maharal recognized.

MI-BESARI EHEZEH ELOKA

Maharal avoids this trap by suggesting that the human body symbolizes aspects of the Divine, rather than that the actual form of the body reflects the form of God in some way. In his view, human characteristics such as our walking upright, having two eyes, the heels of our feet, all remind us—if we understand them correctly—of attributes of God. Specifically, our walking upright indicates a lack of subservience, our eyes remind us of God’s awareness of good and evil, and our heels can remind us of the ubiquity of sin (the underbelly of human existence, as it were).

To support his theory, Maharal notes the verse from Job that I used to start off this section. The verse literally means "from my flesh, I will envision the Lord." Rashi and Ibn Ezra both read the verse as referring to the troubles Iyov was suffering, so that he meant that through his travails he was being taught more about God. In Maharal’s reading, however, the word besari should be taken literally, that through his flesh, and his symbolic understanding of the various parts of his body, he was better able to achieve a vision of the Divine.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to note the importance of Maharal’s comment. While I do not know if this is original to him or not, his comment here takes us remarkable close to the simplest reading of the verse in Bereshit, that man was created in God’s image. Maharal avoids the disastrous consequences of the belief in God’s having a body, but salvages the importance of the human body (and not just the mind or the soul) in helping us reach a closer connection to God. We have seen many times before Maharal’s suspicion of people’s physical interests and appetites; his comments here give us a glimpse of the countervailing value he saw in the appropriate attitude towards one’s body.

OTHER EXPRESSIONS OF THE TSELEM

Maharal adds two more differentiating aspects of people’s tselem that advantageously separate them from the angels. First, he notes that people rule in the lower world the way that God does in the upper world (the meaning of people’s upright posture). This explains for him a gemara in Berakhot that says that once a person needs to get monetary assistance from others, his face changes. For Maharal, our faces ordinarily shine with the light of our ruling the lower world; once we are no longer independent, however, we lose some of that shine.

The question of the glow of people’s faces leads Maharal to an even more interesting claim about how people differ from angels intellectually. He has already conceded that the angels’ intellect is superior to ours in many respects; he nevertheless suggests that man’s intellect contains a spark directly from the Sekhel haNivdal le-Gamrei, the completely Separate Intellect. He supports this idea from the glow of human faces, which is a non-physical aspect attaching itself to a physical body. That mixing of the physical and non-physical leads to his view that we have a spark of the actual Divine Intellect in us. That spark explains how Yaakov was able to wrestle the angel and win, since the Divine spark within Yaakov gave him an advantage.

Maharal notes and accepts the Mishnah’s indication that non-Jews have this Divine spark, although he does believe that Jews have it to a greater extent. The more important distinctions between Jews and non-Jews, however, was that Jews received the Torah and were called banim laMaqom. What was the special love involved in these two? In terms of the Torah, Maharal suggests that the Torah is the blueprint of the world. Possessing the Torah tells us how to live in this world in the way that will make that world work most productively.

TORAH AS BLUEPRINT—HOW LITERAL A STATEMENT?

I find this comment interesting in that it falls squarely on the side that Torah and mitsvot are inherent to the structure of the world. There have been many views of mitsvot in Jewish thought, some of which focus more on mitsvot’s effect on us as people, and some on their effect on the world. In saying that mitsvot give us an edge over non-Jews in that they show us how the world works, Maharal is saying that we know, by virtue of our possession of mitsvot, how to construct a more successful social, political, and economic order than others. It suggests further that statements of the Torah on seemingly religious issues are in fact statements about how the world actually runs, rather than just about how we should act.

Another example of such a statement is Ramban’s interpretation of the verse in Vayikra that refers to the Land of Israel spewing us forth if we commit certain sins. Ramban explains that the Land of Israel itself is sensitive to particular kinds of sins and will not tolerate those—Jewish or non-Jewish—who commit those sins while living there. Here, too, we see an understanding of the Torah and its dictates as representing the underlying rules of order for the world.

KNOWING OF OUR HIBAH

What is the extra value in having been told of this hibah(in each case)? Maharal sees that informing as showing us that the hibah was not only theoretical, but was actualized in reality.

BANIM AND HIBAH

The last clause of the Mishnah, referring to the Jews as "children" Maharal sees as expressing a more direct connection between the Jews and God, although he does not elaborate particularly. For the word hibah (and havivin), Maharal explains that it means that we bear a certain similarity to God, which creates a connection between the two. That reading would mean that in creating people with a tselem Eloqim, God established a connection with us. In giving the Jewish people the Torah, He furthered that connection by showing us the blueprint for the world, and how to most successfully navigate that world. Finally, in seeing us as "children" in some way, the connection was strengthened even more, since in creating a familial relationship, God had identified us as particularly connected to Him.

All of which are ample reasons, in Maharal’s view, to adhere to all the seyagim, the boundaries, mentioned in the previous Mishnah.