THE MINDFUL LIFE

Rambam has just prescribed paying attention to what we are doing when we say Shema, from there to when we study Torah, and from there he moves to when we study other parts of Scripture, or perform any of the commandments. In each of these situations, Rambam sees attentiveness as the key to closeness to God. What is interesting about this is that, as far as he expresses it, simple thinking is all that is required here-- I don't need to be thinking about the exact nature of God when I shake a lulav. As long as I keep in mind my monotheistic conception of the Creator, and that I have been commanded by Him to shake this object as part of the Sukkot holiday, with whatever insight into that practice that I can bring to bear. Attention would seem to be sufficient.

DOWN TIME

Rambam seems to be aware that it is nearly impossible for anyone to focus on God and Godly matters in this way all the time, so he mentions that there are various occasions when one can freely think about necessary worldly matters or even whatever comes to mind. Such times include when eating or drinking, speaking with one's wife or small children, or with ordinary people (that is, those who do not appreciate the deeper matters in life). He notes that he has thus provided many stretches of time in which to think about the household, property, and all similar matters. Times when one is alone, or lying awake in bed, are prime opportunities for other kinds of thoughts, those that focus on God, and Rambam declares it to be extremely important to take advantage of such opportunities.

In that expression of the goal, Rambam seems to be saying that we should strive to live a dual life. In one aspect of our lives, we would function as normal human beings, caring about the acquisition of property, securing a comfortable lifestyle, being careful of our physical health, and so on. Yet another part of our lives would focus solely on God, on performing rituals that direct our attention towards Him, and being attentive to those rituals in a way that would shape us as God-focused people.

In our times, these ideas might almost seem so simple as to be banal. Certainly with the influence of Eastern religions and practices-- many of which make attentiveness to oneself an end of its own-- the notion that what we focus on in our lives shapes who we are is clear. What is important in Rambam's presentation is: 1) that just attentiveness isn't enough; it has to be based on as sophisticated an understanding of God (on purely intellectual grounds) as possible, 2) the focus of our attentiveness, in contrast to Eastern religions, is God, not ourselves (God is the end, not humans), and 3) it is the actual practice of such mindfulness that brings one closer to God, not the intellectual discussion of it-- my writing about this notion, for example, might help me focus on God while I am actually recording this shiur, but unless I repeatedly perform such mindfulness exercises (with God as the focus), I will be no closer to the inner sanctum of the palace than I am today.

THE EXCEPTIONS

Rambam gives the distinct impression that a bifurcated life is the best that we can hope for. At the same time, he notes four people from Jewish tradition who went one step further. Basing himself on the verse in Shir haShirim, ani yeshenah ve-libi er, I am asleep but my heart is alert, Rambam says that Moshe and the Avot all reached the level where even their mundane activities were involved with God. While outwardly they were involved in digging wells, negotiating with non-Jews and so on, even at those most mundane moments, their focus was on God. In fact, he sees their goal (all of them) as having been establishing a religious community-- although he doesn't elaborate how Yitshak and Yaakov were working in this way. That means, though, that in some way each of the Patriarchs and Moshe was, in Rambam's view, focusing on creating a religious community, the Jewish people. In focusing on that goal, they managed to convert everything that they did into an act of connection to God.

It was by virtue of that level of theirs that they merited, in Rambam's view, special Divine Providence, so that they had health and wealth, etc. (this connects to Rambam's general opinion that Providence eases the lives of the righteous so that they might continue to grow in their knowledge of God). In addition, it was their achieving this level that God made a lasting covenant with them, which would be passed on throughout the generations.

A personal story. Many years ago, I wrote a graduate school paper on the last chapter of the Guide, in which I advanced a theory as to what Rambam saw as the highest level of God. Although I will elaborate it when we get there, I basically argued that Rambam saw acting within the world as helping our understanding of God, as furthering our intellectual perfection. Prof. Aviezer Ravitsky (who taught the course for which I wrote the paper) pointed out that Rambam's reference to actions within the world as being a case of ani yeshenah ve-libi er indicate that they are not inherently actsof worship, although truly special people can maintain a focus on God in spite of that.

Since I couldn't argue with him then, I will argue with him now (with you as the referee). Rambam here seems to use the verse from Shir haShirim to mean that the person takes an activity that has a clearly mundane purpose and yet manage to make it an act of focus on God. It is not just that the Avot managed to think of God while they were tending their sheep or digging their wells. Rather, since the whole purpose-- for them-- of those secular activities was to foster the creation of the nation of the Jewish people, they managed to convert the actions themselves into acts of spreading God-awareness in the world. The verse means, then, that although the actions that I am now doing can be done with no God-meaning to them at all, my heart's being awake converts them into an action with a whole different set of ramifications.

CAN WE GET TO THAT LEVEL?

The translator of the Guide, the late Prof. Shlomo Pines, notes an interesting ambiguity in Rambam's language. He says, after describing the level of Moshe and the Avot, that this is not a level to which someone like him can aspire for guidance. Prof. Pines notes that it is unclear whether Rambam meant that he himself couldn't hope to reach such a level, or that he could not hope to reach a level where he could actually guide others (with the question of where Rambam saw himself as a significant difference between the two options). The rank before that one, however (where a person has two parts to life, but manages to limit the mundane parts to only those areas that would have been mundane anyway), is eminently attainable to all, and we should beseech God to remove the barriers to it, even though most of them stem from our own sins. (Since I have made a practice of pointing out places Rambam seems to casually contradict the academic reading of him, I would note that the call for beseeching God apparently assumes that prayer works in more than just a psychological way, that God does sometimes answer our requests.

A SPECULATION ON PROVIDENCE

Rambam writes that a remarkable speculation has just come to him, although the Guide is so carefully structured that it is hard to take this literally. In any case, having mentioned that Divine Providence stayed with Moshe and the Avot at all times (since they were always focusing their intellects on Him), he sees this as an opening to discuss situations where Divine Providence does not protect a good or righteous person. Since, as he has said, the vast majority of people cannot focus on God at all times-- they have holy times and mundane times, and they work to limit the mundane times to situations where they are not performing religious acts-- it means that they will be somewhat disconnected from Providence during their mundane times.

This has to do with Rambam's notion of Providence, where he claimed that Providence (God's protection for a human being) has to do with how much that person has developed his intellect towards Him (we do not need to go into detail). Even without detail, though, his theory means that only when a person is actually focusing on God does he merit Providence. Rambam does note a distinction between those who sometimes have the proper focus on God (during the recitation of Shema, for example) and those who never do. The members of the former group are like scribes who are not currently writing-- they have the skill to connect to God, they are simply not currently doing so. The latter group, however, have no ability to reach a connection to God in this way.

It is based on this view that Rambam develops an understanding of how bad things can happen to fundamentally good people (and to a fundamentally good Jewish nation). It deserves a fuller analysis than I have room for here, so I will leave it for next week, be"H. Shabbat Shalom.