CHAPTER 9—THE SEPARATION FROM GOD BECAUSE OF OUR PHYSICALITY

In chapter 9, Rambam gets back to the main topic of Chapter 8, the separation that our physical nature creates between God and us. In Chapter 8, you’ll remember, Rambam had said it was our physical side that leads to change and decay in our bodies, and had gone from there to discuss the proper attitude towards our physicality (indulging it as little as possible, being embarrassed of our physical needs, etc.). In chapter 9, Rambam points out that that physicality creates an impenetrable barrier between God and us in terms of us ever being able to experience God directly. This means that even prophets—who have experiences of God—are not having direct contact. This is the meaning of the metaphor of a cloud (av he`anan, thickness of a cloud) that appears in so many prophecies—it’s not a physical cloud, it’s a metaphor for our physical nature being a barrier between God and us.

Rambam is not really interested in prophecy here (he discussed that in Part II), so I’m pretty sure that he is putting this here as part of his stress on the difference between physical and nonphysical beings. He cares about that difference because he is working his way towards a discussion of Providence, the extent to which God knows and affects events on this Earth; the barriers between Him and us become relevant to that discussion.

MATAN TORAH—AN ACTUAL CLOUD, AS WELL

Along the way, Rambam throws in one interesting thing—he has already said that the reference to a cloud in a vision of God is not meant literally, it’s meant to signify this barrier. Yet for the day of Matan Torah, the Giving of theTorah, Rambam points out that a pasuq in Tanakh (Shoftim 5;4) says that it was actually a cloudy, rainy day. Rambam says that was simply to strengthen the metaphor—an interesting example of where the actual events support a metaphorical interpretation—along the lines of a TV show that has the weather match the mood of the events. Here the weather matched the state of the Jewish people’s prophecy.

CHAPTER 10—WHO MAKES LACK? OR, ABSOLVING GOD OF RESPONSIBILITY

In chapter 10, Rambam discusses who can be considered to have created the lack of something. If a baby is born without sight, for example, is it meaningful to say that someone created that lack of sight? This will obviously be important for the question of whether God created evil or not (which itself relates to questions like why bad things happen to good people).

In Rambam’s time, there was a group of religious philosophers known as the Mutakallimun. Their contention was that the only real lack is the absence of being, but that everything else has some meaningful existence. For example, then, darkness is not the absence of light, but an entity of its own, as is cold, or blindness, and so on. (It has always seemed to me, by the way, that that is also the simplest reading of Bereshit, that darkness is an entity created by God—Rambam is going to offer another way of reading those texts).

If all of these things have a real existence, they need a cause, and then the question would be does God cause these things-- is it appropriate to say that God causes someone to be blind? Obviously, if not, then we have decided that God does not cause everything on Earth, and it hints at some sort of Zoroastrianism, where there are forces of good in competition with independent forces of evil. On the other hand, if God causes bad things, we get into the bothersome questions of why these things happen to apparently good people.

INDIRECT CAUSATION IS ALSO CAUSATION

Rambam does not totally reject the Mutakallimun's opinion, but supplies one important qualification. Rambam says that creating the possibility of something going wrong is in some sense like making it happen. So, for example, if someone removed the support beam of a house, we might say he caused the collapse of the house. Or, better, if someone refrains from saving someone when it's within his capabilities to do so, we say that in some sense he killed that person. We call someone the cause of something, then, not only when they actually bring it about, but also when they make it possible in a fairly direct way.

Rambam has one distinction that matters to him. There is a difference between when an act is essentially geared towards a particular goal, or when it simply has a nonessential outcome. There is a difference, for example, between when I actually kill someone, or when the outcome of my action is that someone died, but my act was essentially something else. This will be important because it will allow Rambam to say both that God created evil and yet that He didn't.

CREATING THE PHYSICAL IS CREATING LACKS

Since physical matter (and this is now bringing us back to his central topic, the relationship between God and the physical universe) has the possibility of failure and decay, it is only our physical nature that makes death, blindness, etc. possible. In creating the physical world, God can be called the creator of those results as well, so that in that sense He created all the lack and privation therein.

It is in that sense that Rambam understands the verse "yotser or u-vorei hoshekh, oseh shalom u-vorei ra, forms the light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates evil." In each case, Rambam notes, the prophet (Isa. 45;7) used the verb bore for the bad things, because God didn't cause them directly, He created their possibility by creating matter. The same goes for verses that talk about God creating mutes or blind people. In each case, it only means that God's having created the physical world made possible the existence of these evils.

Yet for all that He created them, He did not do so essentially, but just as an outcome of a physical world. In that physical world, the passing of the material from one generation to the next was a good thing, because it allows the world to continue and thrive over long periods of time. What we view as bad, in other words (our personal death), has on a larger scale a positive outcome. In that sense, it is accurate for God to look at the world and see that it is good, even though it contains death and suffering. Rambam even finds a statement of R. Meir's that death itself is what God meant by seeing that the world was good. Yet at the same time, the Midrash can claim, nothing bad descends from Heaven.

Rambam has thus managed to both ascribe all the privations of this world to God and yet not to Him directly (God doesn't necessarily decide that X baby will be born deformed, although since He created the possibility of deformity, in that sense He created this particular deformity). This double-sided view will, I believe, be important in our further discussions.

CHAPTER 11—IGNORANCE AS THE SOURCE OF SUFFERING

In this very short chapter, Rambam just points out that the large majority of the sufferings that people cause each other stem from a lack of knowledge. Whether people think they fight with or injure others because of some desire, or religious belief, or whatever, it always stems from a lack of knowledge on the part of one or both parties to the dispute. Had they known the realities of the world more fully, they never would have gotten into that dispute.