Shiur 2—Shabbat, Parshat Beshallah, 5764

PAGES 9-16 SUMMARY

At the end of last week’s shiur, Ran was in the middle of questioning how he could dare speak to an honored assemblage, and had thrown in that in particular his topic, Creation, was a problem, since a Mishnah in Hagigah rules out teaching that material in a group at all.  Leaving the assemblage issue aside for a moment, he notes that the ideas he is going to share about Creation are intellectual ones, not derived from any kind of prophetic or divinely-given insight.  That means that his speech here is no more significant than (his example) the derasha that one would give at a wedding.  (Although wedding sermons were perhaps a tad more sophisticated than they are now, as witness the one that Rabbi Chavel published in Kitvei Ramban, volume 1).

While Ran has claimed that the Mishnah only meant to prohibit divinely inspired revelations of Creation, but allowed humans to figure out whatever they could on their own, he runs into a problem with Rambam’s definition of the term ma`aseh bereshit, the phrase that the Mishnah used.  Rambam claimed that the term refers to Nature generally, rather than just the act of Creation.  If so, though, Ran wonders why the Mishnah would prohibit discussing any of it, since there is nothing in his understanding of how the four elements work that he could imagine being prohibited esoteric knowledge.  Some knowledge, in fact, should obviously be publicized, such as medicine or farming.  Where, then, would be the dividing line between prohibited and permissible knowledge?

Form/Matter, Essence/Substance

Ran answers by using the common medieval distinction between form and matter.  This was a way of saying that objects might take on a certain shape and size, but that those just express in physical terms some deeper reality. So, too, the world has its external expression, but it also has an internal essence that is unknowable, except by Divine revelation.  To reveal any of the aspects of the matter of the world, Ran thinks, is fine, but to touch on the essence, which is not accessible to the human intellect, is what the Mishnah means (we will have to consider this in the light of modern science, below).

Ran gives one interesting example, noting that Rambam mocked Galen (the famous physician, whose works on medicine were consulted for hundreds of years) for admitting his ignorance about why people laugh.  According to Rambam, laughter goes to the essence of our humanity (an interesting view for an archrationalist, which raises the level of comedy to being something essential to our humanithy), so it could not be accessible to the human intellect.

What people discover on their own, Ran is saying, is external facts about the world; what is prohibited to teach is the world’s essence.  I would just pause here and note that the scientific revolution of the 17^th century that led to so much of the success of science since then came about by focusing on the facts that scientists could actually witness and verify experimentally rather than just positing the nature of the world.  Ran here, therefore, anticipates a dichotomy that has proven useful to science in practice—we do better when we try to understand the what of the world, leaving the why for philosophy, religion, or (best, in Ran’s view) God.

Ran’s vision of Creation, though, makes it really just another way of saying that we cannot understand God Himself, since the essence of the world is really the essence of what God imprinted on the world.  How, he asks, is ma`aseh bereshit different from ma`aseh merkavah, a phrase for esoteric knowledge of God?  Ran’s answer, which we will discuss below, hinges on his belief that God does not run the world directly (pretty common in medieval thought), but through intermediaries.  This was necessary, in their view, at least partially because God is so different, so Other than the physical world, that the gap has to be bridged before there can be meaningful interaction. [Which, by the way, is part of what Hashem meant when He told Moshe that no person can see Him and live].

FOCUSING UP OR DOWN

These intermediaries, their natures and activities, are really the focus of both ma`aseh bereshit and ma`aseh merkavah, with an important difference.  The former is trying to figure out how those intermediaries (known as the separated intellects) relate to the physical world, meaning a level of existence below them, while ma`aseh merkavah analyzes how they deal/ interact/ relate to God, above them.

Ran then digresses to show how Psalm 139 revolves around this point.  We are not here to study Tehillim together, although maybe we could in the future, so I will just point out that the chapter refers to Hashem knowing us, so that we cannot run away from Him.  One could have read this as stressing God’s knowledge of all of our actions, so that we cannot escape His scrutiny, a statement about Providence.  Ran, however, reads it as being about the qualitative difference of His knowledge, in that He knows us essentially and internally.  As opposed to humans, who have to rely on outward clues to know whether someone is happy or sad, Hashem knows. 

That leads to the same point, that we cannot hide our thoughts or moods from Hashem, but Ran is using it to also emphasize the difference between our knowledge and His.  God knows things as they are, we know them as they appear.  Bringing us back to the question of studying Creation, Ran is claiming that anything written in the verses is left open to human knowledge, and anything that is visible in the universe is, too, so it cannot be what is prohibited.

TO THE MATTER (PARDON THE PUN) ITSELF

Ran assumes that the order of Creation was from less perfect to more, an assumption that obviously puts humans pretty high up on the ladder, but causes a couple of problems, too.  First, Hazal speak about the first light of Creation as special, suggesting that it was most perfect, which would ruin Ran’s theory.  He dismisses that by saying it involves an esoteric secret, but that the light that functioned in Creation was just one of the four elements, sharing their unitary, and hence flawed, character.  The first day, then, was for making the elements.

I don’t intend to go through all the days of Creation, but I will note a few interesting points Ran makes: First, he thinks that light and dark on the first day were necessary to allow for the passage of Time, obliquely raising the whole issue of time, which we should discuss.  Second, he thinks that the sun and moon were completed on the fourth day as a prelude to creating higher animals, since the original light was insufficient.  Ran does not explain that insufficiency, but I will take a guess below.

Third, Ran thinks that the birds and fish were created on the fifth day because they are a lower form of animal than others, raising the question as to why humans didn’t get a day of their own.  His answer, that humans can be worse than animals depending on their actions, implies an important aspect of our humanity, our ability to waste it, or to use it to descend to the lowest levels of Creation. 

The tenuousness of people’s hold on their higher potential, Ran assumes, led to God’s placing them in Gan Eden, where they would be able to gain their physical sustenance easily, leaving them free to develop their spiritual side.  Those with sufficiently developed spirituality, he adds, would be able to survive without that physical side, such as Moshe and Eliyahu, each of whom lived for forty days without eating or drinking.

BALANCING THE PHYSICAL AND THE SPIRITUAL—A DELICATE DANCE

For Ran, that explains God’s words about the Tree of Knowledge, Eve’s mistake in eating from the tree, and God’s then expelling humans from Gan Eden for having eaten from the Tree.  God’s informing Adam that he would die on the day he ate from the Tree, in Ran’s view, was not a punishment, but a consequence; had it been a punishment, then it would be unfair for God to later curse men and women for having eaten from it. 

Rather, God was letting Adam know that his eternal Gan Eden existence, in which he had food easily and resided in a climate that fostered his health without much effort, depended on Adam and Eve’s concentrating largely on spiritual matters.   Like Moshe and Eliyahu, when Adam and Eve focused on the spiritual/intellectual, death would not be an issue for them.  The Tree, however, was so sensual, so pleasurable, that it would necessarily draw their attention away from the spiritual and intellectual to the physical and pleasurable.  As physical beings, though, they could not survive eternally.  In recognition of this, God had warned Adam that the day he ate from that Tree would bring death with it, as consequence rather than as punishment.

Eve’s misunderstanding God’s point led to her eating the tree, as far as Ran is concerned.  Eve understood the warning as meaning that the fruit of the Tree would cause death, like a poison; since, however, the Tree was so beautiful and the fruit looked so tasty, she could not imagine that they would be poisonous (an interesting perspective, especially in an America where people poison themselves all the time by overindulging in foods and drinks that are good in moderation but deathly in excess), and so she ate from it.  Once having done so, hers and Adam’s attention was, as God had warned, drawn to the physical, sensual, and ordinary, so that they could no longer live forever.

That being true, Ran can now make sense of the punishment for eating from the Tree as well.  This week, we’ll only see the man’s punishment, expulsion from the Garden, and the necessity of working hard to earn his living.  Ran says that if someone wastes the blessing of having his needs come easily, his punishment is then to make him work hard and immerse himself in the pursuit of that activity.  The punishment, in other words, was to have to do more of what the original crime was (such as parents who catch a twelve year old smoking, and then make them smoke a whole pack so they will learn how awful it is). 

Ran will go on in this vein for the other punishments as well, but we’ll have to see those next week.  Now, I want to come back to a few of the points Ran made and discuss them more fully.

ESSENCES VS. APPEARANCES

Ran’s fundamental answer to why he should be allowed to teach about Creation despite the Talmud’s apparent warnings against doing so is that he is only going to teach what Scripture says and what is visible to the human eye, whereas God knows the essential nature of things.  The only way for us to know that would be through divine revelation or inspiration, and that we would not be allowed to broadcast.

As I mentioned, that is first interesting because modern science was in fact founded, and succeeded, by foregoing the attempt to get at essences.  But it also leads to two more conclusions about science.  First, as long as science is focused on the what, religious Jews should have no problem with it, whether in terms of going back to the Big Bang, or going into the deep physical structures of elementary particles and whatever superstrings may underlie them.  Second, where people venture from descriptive science—what things are like, how they interact physically, etc.—to teleology, to deciding on the ultimate purpose of things, they are treading on dangerous ground, since those might be attempts to analyze aspects of reality that are not amenable to human intelligence, and are included in the Mishnah’s prohibition of analyzing Creation in the wrong fashion.  Evolutionary biology, for example, attempts to determine the purpose of various physical aspects of people and animals; where it notices a useful function of something, we have no problem, but, at least for Ran, the move to purpose is problematic.

RAN BREAKS HIS OWN RULE?

And yet, Ran’s analysis of Creation seems to violate exactly that rule.  He assumes that Creation goes from less developed to more developed, and that people were the goal of Creation.  I suspect that Ran would answer that he is not figuring out this stuff on his own, but inferring it from what is written in the Torah for everyone to see. 

That will be a fundamental point to keep in mind as we go through the work—Ran is comfortable making assertions about the structure of the universe (beyond the physical) as long as he finds support for them in Scripture.  For all that he seemed to take a positivist attitude towards understanding Creation—that we can only investigate those aspects that we can discover intellectually—that includes, for him, all those elements of Creation that Scripture tells us about, even if we could never have discovered that experimentally.  This is a huge loophole; as we will see, Ran spends much time in this derasha and the next on deep structures of the universe that are not experimentally accessible.

This also gives the lie to Ran’s modesty about his endeavor here.  While in some sense he has proven that he is allowed to do it, he downplays the extent to which he will, in fact, be revealing to a broad public aspects of how the world works that are not generally accessible to ordinary human beings.  He may be right that the Mishnah in Hagigah would not have minded that, but if so, it narrows the Mishnah’s comment greatly.

MAASEH BERESHIT VS. MAASEH MERKAVAH

In distinguishing the two types of esoteric knowledge that that Mishnah refers to, Ran had said that the former was how the mid-level beings express God’s influence on the world while the latter seeks to understand how they relate to God Himself.  This split gives us an example of an important medieval concept whose modern applications are not so clear:  God was seen as so Other that He did not relate directly to the world, but through intermediaries.  To get any experience of God, really, humans had to go through these intermediaries (but not worship them or pray to them).

Ran is pointing out, though, that the kind of glimpse of God one gets depends not only on how well one manages to connect to these beings, but also which aspect of their existence the person is paying attention to.  If I study physics to understand how elementary particles bring about the world—a sort of updated version of the intermediaries between the multi-dimensional universe—I am certainly studying God in some extended way, but only in the way that He relates to the world through the laws of physics.  That would be different from trying to gain direct knowledge of God by studying the underlying principles of the controlling forces of this world, a much harder, and possibly prohibited activity.

I point this out because I think it is worthwhile for us to remember that part of Jewish thinker’s celebration of and interest in Nature was in that it revealed its Creator.  Watching how the world works, what activities promote health and success, and which do the opposite, which societies and species thrive and which get thrown on the dustbin of history, are all seen as avenues for glimpses of God.  Even without the medieval views of physics, etc. that we have moved beyond, the underlying principle remains the same: the world reveals the glory of God.

NEEDING A SUN AND A MOON

Ran assumes that the need to have bodies that produce light only came about when there were life forms such as fish and birds.  In terms of modern cosmology and physics, this is nonsense, but I think there is an interesting point being made.  Ran is assuming that the light of that time was the same as the light eventually given by the sun (obviously, our understanding of physics does not know how to produce that light without a burning star), but that it was higher life forms that necessitated actual bodies.  Why?  I speculate that animals are seen as having some primitive form of consciousness, and that the presence of the sun and the moon would help them understand day and night, give them a physical expression of the passage from one to the other.  If that is true, however, it suggests that God cared even about animals being able to understand the world to the extent of their capabilities, a provocative idea I don’t have space to explore further right now.

PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL

Last week we already discussed the whole question of why there should be a bodily resurrection and noted that it would not be so that the body could get sustenance, since it would no longer need sustenance.  Here, too, Ran assumes that the need for physical sustenance—food, sleep, and so on—stems from a flaw in our current condition.  Had Adam maintained the proper focus, he could have gotten by on much less food and not needed a slew of other physical experiences.  I stress it here because it is one of many examples we will see where Ran assumes the reality of the spiritual, by which I mean that he thinks spiritual activity (which occurs mostly in the brain or soul of the person) affects the physical as well, with Moshe and Eliyahu being prime examples.  This theme, of how spiritual acts have physical consequences, will recur often and is worth following when it arises.

PUNISHMENT OR CONSEQUENCES

Ran’s presentation here offers another example of a result that is a consequence rather than a punishment (the dispersion of the generation of the Tower of Babel was the first), suggesting that it, too, is an important part of his thought.  One question to consider is how he draws the line—I could easily imagine someone saying that God’s “curses” of the actors in the Tree of Knowledge story was also just laying out the consequences. 

Ran might answer that if it is mentioned beforehand it is a consequence, after it’s a punishment.  Or, he might think that the first one is just a consequence, if more are added to it later, they must be punishments.  Rambam, I would note, sometimes seems to think that consequences are built into Nature by God to serve as punishments (meaning he not only rejects the distinction, he sees the consequences as in essence being punishments).

Regardless of how Ran knows which are which, I think the underlying premise cannot be stressed enough.  We tend to think of bad results as a punishment, a slap on the cheek.  Ran is saying that there are different kinds of slaps; some result from our running up against a law of how the universe ones that we either ignored or didn’t know (a child who, God forbid, walks out of a 4^th floor window is not then punished for his act; his fall is just the way the world works).  Ran would extend that to things like the eating from the Tree, the people of the Tower, and other examples we will see.  To start our thought processes going, it is worth thinking how we might apply that idea—what negative occurrences would we think of as consequences of our actions (lung cancer for smoking, probably) and what would we think of as punishments (lightning striking a person in the middle of a clear summer day as the person tries to violate Shabbat would be an example if it ever happened), and which are inbetween (I won’t give examples, as people are sensitive on this topic, as I have many times discovered).

Two last points before we adjourn until next week: First, the idea that Adam’s punishment was that he would be forced to immerse himself in the physical world he had embraced by eating of the Tree almost seems like a consequence, but Ran sees it as a punishment.  I think he means that sometimes our actions lead us down a certain path, and we become enmeshed ever deeper in what we had not intended to take over our lives.  In particular in making money I think this is a grave danger—we start out intending to make only so much, but then we become caught up in the pursuit (rather than, for example, striving to make more so that we can gain more influence and make the world a better place, or give more charity, or invest in risky but worthwhile ventures), and cannot disentangle ourselves.  Ran sees that, in Adam’s case, as the punishment he was given for having become involved in the physical to begin with.