In a brief but productive conversation this week, one of the participants in this shiur informed me that he is completely lost by what we have been doing. I don’t know if that is true for others, but I apologize if it is. Let me pause therefore for three reassurances:

1) The discussion of cosmology (of Yehezqel’s prophecy, of the cosmos and how they relate to the Ma`aseh Merkavah, etc.) will end at the end of Chapter 7 (next week’s chapter). From there Rambam discusses Providence (the extent to which God knows and influences events in this world) which has some technical philosophy to it, also, but is more clearly related to our concerns. Rambam also has a discussion (in broad terms) of the Book of Job, which I hopefully can present comprehensibly. By Chapter 25, Rambam moves on to reasons for the commandments, chapters I expect to have really broad interest, for the rest of the book.

2) I don’t know how people have been reading these shiurim. I have not tried (as I do in the Maharal shiur) to make these completely accessible even if someone does not read the original Rambam; perhaps that was an error. I will attempt to do so in the future, although often what is interesting to me is not so much what Rambam says (since it has to do with his view of the cosmos, which I often do not share), but the interpreting he had to do to allow himself to say it. So often, it’s how he managed to take a verse in Yehezqel that seems to say, for example, that God has a body, and interpret it to mean something completely different, and philosophically tenable.

3)Another reader suggested that headings of the different sections of my presentation would help. I will provide such headings from now on.

4)I believe the shul will soon be getting a scanner, so I will be able to include the particular sections of each chapter that I am explaining, meaning readers will not have to consult their own copies of the Moreh as carefully.

5)If there comes a point in the next few weeks when it becomes clear that the material is completely uninteresting, I can also simply skip to Chapter 25 and begin our study of ta`amei mitsvot, reasons for the commandments, in the Rambam.

PLEASE GIVE ME FEEDBACK, SO I CAN KNOW WHETHER THIS PERSON’S EXPERIENCE REFLECTS EVERYBODY’S—I CAN MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO MEET EVERYONE’S NEEDS, BUT I NEED TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON TO BE ABLE TO DO SO.

MULTIPLE VISIONS OF GOD—AS RAMBAM AND THE TALMUD UNDERSTOOD THEM

At the beginning of chapter 5, Rambam notes that Yehezqel refers to his experience as mar'ot Eloqim, visions in the plural, when it seems to all have been one vision. He also notes that Yehezqel uses the word "va-Are, and I saw" three times-- when he envisioned the hayyot, the ophanim, and the image of a man sitting on the chariot. According to Rambam, this indicates that Yehezqel had three different types of vision. The word "visions" in mar’ot Eloqim, then, refers to different qualities of prophecy in the different areas. Rather than one big vision, in other words, when Yehezqel saw God, as it were, he actually saw three pieces of a puzzle, with different qualities of vision for each of the individual, but joined, pieces.

Rambam then points to a Talmudic discussion (Hagigah 14a) that he interprets as making his point. The Gemara makes rules for how to teach this section of the Prophet to others. Some parts can be taught as usual (with no attempt to encode the information esoterically, to limit the audience that would understand). Others can only can be given be-roshei peraqim, literally with chapter headings, but which means that the teacher could only give the general concepts underlying the vision, leaving it to the students to figure out the rest. An example might be if someone taught the game of chess by telling only how the pieces of move and some very broad strategic concepts.

Yet other pieces of the prophecy, according to the Talmud, must only be revealed to those who have already displayed their own abilities to infer these things. Before a teacher could teach, then, the student would have to demonstrate some insight gained on his own. There is actually a story in the Talmud that R. El`azar b. Arakh asked R. Yohanan b. Zakkai to teach him these issues, and R. Yohanan first insisted that he (R. El`azar b. Arakh) demonstrate that he had inferred useful information on his own.

Since Hazal separated the strategies by where Yehezqel used the word "va-Are," Rambam believes they had already understood those three statements as pointing to 3 stages of vision. Before we get to the last paragraph of the chapter, let's pause to think about why Rambam brought in the Sages of the Mishnah. Not only does he bring them in, he credits Hazal with drawing his attention to the distinction among the various stages of the vision, when they only used those different pieces of the vision in a very different way from Rambam. Hazal differentiated how we teach those parts of the prophecy to others, where Rambam is claiming that there is a difference in how Yehezqel experienced the vision, based on those words.

While Rambam may be right, and Hazal may even have agreed with him, his inference from Hazal could certainly be debated—after all, they only discuss the sections of the prophecy in terms of how to teach it to others. That distinguishes among the parts of the prophecy, but not necessarily between the quality of the prophecy Yehezqel had. Why, then, does Rambam mention and stress that he has gotten this idea from Hazal?

THE VALUE OF QUOTING HAZAL

We have to remember Rambam's underlying missions-- to show that Tanakh does not violate the truths of philosophy and to show that the earlier Sages already knew the claims he is making. Rambam does not wish to be revolutionary, because that is generally a negative quality in Judaism. Rather, he wishes to demonstrate that he is actually correctly explaining tradition.

Beyond quoting Hazal to show their awareness of his issue, Rambam cites all of the opinions in the discussion—wouldn’t one have sufficed? If you look at the opinions the Rambam cites, you’ll see that one of the opinions, that of "the Others" allows teaching the first two parts of the vision in abbreviated form-- chapter headings—and the last part only to one who has already figured much of it out for himself. If you think about what Rambam has been doing in these chapters, you’ll realize that he has followed that opinion. He has given us a brief sketch of the hayyot and ophanim (perhaps too brief for real understanding) and—as we’ll see briefly in Chapter 7—left the hashmal almost completely unexplained.

Let me just note that that is the kind of hint in the Rambam I find most interesting—a case where the text is obviously odd, and it turns out that it forces us to learn something new about Rambam’s views and presentation. Those hints almost invariably, I believe, were put there intentionally by Rambam, which is an astounding piece of authorial work.

EXPLAINING THE ORDER OF YEHEZQEL’S VISIONS

In the last paragraph of the chapter, Rambam calls our attention to the order of these visions. (Remember, for Rambam they are really almost separate visions, since they differ in quality). Yehezqel first saw the hayyot, then the ophanim, then that which was above the hayyot (the raqi`a (the firmament), the chair, and the likeness of a man on the chair). Once it's been pointed out, we can see that this is an odd order, especially in Rambam's interpretation of the vision. If Yehezqel is seeing the interface between God and the Earth, the vision should either have proceeded from the bottom up (starting with the ophanim) or from the top down (starting with the man on the chair, surrounded by the hashmal).

Rambam says that the vision of the hayyot preceded the ophanim because of their "nobility and their causality". I’m not quite sure what he means by nobility—it sounds like Yehezqel saw the more august part of the vision first, perhaps to give him a sense of the grandeur of what he was seeing, before going back to the lower parts of it. Causality we understand better, since Rambam believes that the ophanim move only because of the hayyot. In seeing the hayyot first, God has given Yehezqel a foundation on which to understand the ophanim.

This suggests, by the way, that Yehezqel was not coming to all of this as a result of his own thoughts, because a human intellect would probably have to work from bottom up. In fact, Rambam will point out that it wasn't all Yehezqel's intellect at work, but that's in Chapter 7. Note, however, that Rambam says "and because of other things too." I have no idea what they are.

But why place these two before the hashmal? Rambam says that it is because the hashmal is inferred from the other two, which sounds like prophecy has at least some intellectual element--- Yehezqel does not simply have visions, he builds up new knowledge (and visions) based on what he has seen before. In this paragraph about the order of the vision, then, Rambam has actually reminded us that a portion of prophecy is a simple intellectual endeavor, using previous prophecies to increase one's understanding of other topics.

QUANTUM PHYSICS AND THE MERKAVAH?

If I might be permitted a moment for a flight of fancy, Rambam's interpretation seems to me to be translatable into 20th century terms. His main interpretation of the vision (leaving out the spheres and the elements) is that the interface between God and Earth runs through the stage of the hayyot which are actually responsible for the movements of the fundamental matter of the Earth. After considering those two, we would be better able to understand the raqi`a, the point of break between Earthly and Divine.

Based on my minimal knowledge of quantum physics, the same truths could be applied. At the quantum level, matter behaves differently than what we know in regular life, although in some sense objects are made up of quantum motion (and thus wholly subordinate to it). Were quantum physics to be the hayyot, ordinary matter the ophanim, and the edge of matter (such as light, which operates as both a particle and a wave) the hashmal, I think Rambam's reading of Yehezqel would work very nicely. Anyway…

YEHEZQEL AND YESHAYAHU

In Chapter 6, Rambam notes that Yeshayahu also had a vision, with fewer details, but also fewer equivocations such as "the likeness of," "the form of" and so on. Again quoting Hazal (and, I believe, for reasons similar to those we saw earlier in this shiur), he points out that Hazal equated the visions, meaning they, too, saw the commonalities among them and saw them as addressing thesame topic. Then he (Rambam) explains the differences among them.

Yeshayahu, Rambam says, was addressing an audience with a better knowledge of God, so that detailed descriptions were unnecessary (Rambam's analogy is to describing a king's train-- someone who lives in the capital would just say to a friend, I saw the King today). Yehezqel, however, was addressing people of less sophistication in these matters, so he had to go into greater detail-- which, of course, helps all of us, who are not already at Yeshayahu's level.

HAZAL’S VIEW OF THE TWO PROPHETS

Rambam then points to a statement of Hazal that may say what he just said. When comparing the visions, Hazal said that Yeshayahu was like a city dweller, and Yehezqel like a villager. Once we know Rambam’s view, Hazal sound very much like him—Yeshayahu was addressing his peers, who knew the King better than the villagers whom Yehezqel was adressing.

However, and this is puzzling, Rambam then raises another possibility-- that Hazal meant that Yeshayahu personally was at a higher level than Yehezqel, and therefore saw the vision more clearly. Why does he raise the possibility at all, since it ruins his previous reading of the differences among them?

Rambam may simply have been acting with intellectual honesty, pointing out that Hazal’s statement does not really echo what he said. Hazal characterized the differences in the visions based on the differences in Yehezqel and Yeshayahu personally, not the audiences they were addressing. If so, Rambam is candidly admitting that Hazal had a different view from his own.

RAMBAM WILLING TO ACCEPT ANOTHER OPINION AS MUCH AS HIS OWN?

But Rambam does not seem uncomfortable with the second reading, as if it shows that Hazal differed with him. Rather, he presents it as a viable possibility. It seems to me, then, that Rambam might be slipping in an important piece of information, which we would only detect if we were reading carefully.

Note that in Hazal’s reading, the prophets were not recording their visions according to the audience, but simply were relating their vision as best they could, each at their own level. Granted a vision of God, they recorded for posterity their impressions of it (keeping in mind the caveat that they could not express it in a manner where a person who was unready for it could fathom it).

If that is true, though, which vision would be the one more productively studied for an understanding of Maaseh Merkavah? I would think Yeshayahu’s, since he had a better grasp of what he saw. So Rambam may be suggesting, to those ready to pick up on the hint, that for all that he has spent his time on the visions of Yehezqel, the better information comes from Yeshayahu.