SHIUR 8

PARSHAT VAYAKHEL-PEQUDEI (HACHODESH)

152 (55)-END OF THE DERASHAH

SUMMARY THUS FAR

Over the weekend, three different readers whose judgment I trust commented on the difficulty of keeping focus in the course of reading this shiur.  I think and hope that that was a flaw in last week’s shiur in particular, and want to therefore take a moment to reorient ourselves before reviewing the rest of the derashah.

Ran had started with the issue of Moshe’s going into the cloud to confront God and his view that that entire incident was meant as a symbol for later generations, since Moshe himself did not need preparation for an encounter with the Divine.  The idea that God’s presence can come miraculously to Moshe—as opposed to all other human beings—helped Ran explain another 2 puzzling sections of the Torah.  Earlier in Mishpatim (the sedra where the cloud incident occurs; the editor of the Derashot thinks was when Ran gave this derasha, but we will disagree below), Hashem had told Moshe that he would send an angel to lead the Jewish people, and they had to be careful to listen to the angel, since he would not forgive their sins.

Ran noted the contrast between that section of the Torah and the one in Ki Tisa, where Moshe protests God’s not Himself going with them.  Ran had suggested that the guidance of an angel was both better and worse than God’s, in that the angel cannot punish as severely as Hashem, but also cannot forgive.  In Ki Tisa, after the sin of the Golden Calf, when Moshe secured forgiveness for the people, he came to understand that he would be able to intervene with God if necessary and forestall their destruction.  Once he was informed of that ability of his, Moshe could then plead with God for the significantly better direct Providence.

HOW MUCH OF GOD DID MOSHE SEE?

In order to do so—and now we are up to new material—Moshe needed some knowledge of God, because that knowledge would help him protect the people in times of sin.  Ran goes through the confusing passage in Ki Tisa line by line, but I will just summarize his conclusions.  He thinks, first of all, that when Moshe asked to see God’s “kavod,” he did not mean God Himself, since it is obvious, Ran says, that people cannot fully see God (and he quotes non-Jewish wise men who also pointed out that only God can know God).  From the response—man cannot see Me and live—Ran assumes that Moshe was looking for the kind of knowledge of God that ordinarily only comes after death, an idea we will return to below.

Even that, however, is denied Moshe. What He gives instead are the 13 Attributes, descriptions of the ways God acts in this world.  Our tradition is that that formula is so powerful that whenever the Jewish people invoke it, they can be sure that their prayer will not be completely rejected.  When God tells Moshe, soon after revealing those Attributes, that He is making a pact with the Jews and is about to perform wonders for them, Ran understands both the pact and the wonders as referring to this foolproof ability of the Jewish people, even without Moshe, to achieve at least some positive response from God.  I’ll suggest why the Attributes should work so effectively below.

Whatever we do with those Attributes, Ran thinks that Moshe was able to use them even more powerfully, so that it now became feasible for Moshe to ask that God Himself lead the people through the desert, rather than an angel.  Once Moshe leaves the scene, however, Ran assumes that the angel comes back, and it is that angel that Joshua encounters at the beginning of his book, as we’ll see in a moment.

A DERASHA ABOUT PROVIDENCE, AND METATRON

By this point in our study of this derasha, we can already realize that Ran is analyzing the various kinds of providence that apply to the Jewish people, so far offering two—God’s direct and that of an angel.  Ran assumed that once the Jews settled the Land of Israel, with a functioning Sanctuary as a venue of forgiveness and reconciliation when the Jews sin, they would have God’s Direct Providence.  In the desert, however, the angel is in some sense safer, because of the limits on the angel’s freedom to punish.  The downside of an angel is his rigidity, in that he is fundamentally a force of nature with specific required responses to various stimuli.

Ran now notes, though, that the Torah’s description of the angel is more exact, in that it refers to not rebelling against this angel because “My Name is in him,” which Hazal said means that this angel was Metatron, an angel seen as having a similar Name to God Himself.  Ran makes clear that he does not understand that statement any more than we do, but that it explains the reference here to God’s Name being in Him, and it also explains Yehoshua’s bowing down to the angel he meets.

Ordinarily, Ran notes (with examples of others in Tanakh), we do not bow down to angels.  The reason that Yehoshua does is that it was this angel, whose arrival had been delayed by Moshe’s successful prayer to keep God’s direct Providence throughout Moshe’s life, the one whom God had warned us to listen to carefully because His Name was in him.

That also explains for Ran the Torah’s choosing this segment to remind the Jews, yet again, not to bow down to other gods.  It is because God had just told us to treat this particular angel with such respect that He wanted to emphasize how exceptional a circumstance that was.

The permissibility of bowing down to this angel and the need to obey him might fuel idol worship in another way.  The seed of idolatry, in Ran’s view (echoing Ramban), is that people (correctly) believe that there are subsidiary powers that run various aspect of the world (we would today call them forces of nature).  If one only assumes—although Ran thinks both assumptions are incorrect—that these angels/forces care about our actions (so that our offering incense to them, for example, would please them) and have the power to shift their ways of acting (so the Rain Force could decide to rain as a reaction to a human’s offering), idolatry becomes a natural response.  Having here allowed just such actions, God emphasizes that that was only for this one angel, but we cannot bow down to any other forces, angels, or whatever. 

WITCHCRAFT

Ran’s theory of the origins of idolatry leads him to differentiate between two kinds of acts that non-Jews take to shape their future, defining for use which are permitted and which are prohibited.  Since Ran assumed that non-Jews were not stupid, he likewise assumes that many of their odd practices were actually effective, that in some nonobvious way these acts address the forces of nature so as to produce a certain result (such as if I were to use a magnet to draw objects to myself—that is using a force of nature to achieve a result). 

Such acts, he thinks, are permissible to Jews as well.  So if, for example, medical science “knew” that garlic warded off various illnesses, Jews would be equally allowed to wear garlic—or, more interestingly for our understanding of Judaism because this actually happened, to wear  talismans or charms with amulets in it—to ward off disaster.

Acts that are geared instead towards appeasing/impressing the force itself (so if I prayed to Magnetism, or offered it a sacrifice) are prohibited, and are the definition of not going in the ways of the non-Jews (and Ran cites Rambam to agree with his view).

That does not explain witchcraft, however, which clearly is effective (although Rambam, of course, disagrees, Ran thinks enough verses in Tanakh indicate its effectiveness to be a problem for his theory).  Ran therefore notes that witchcraft works by preparing people on Earth to be impacted by destructive forces.  While this is natural in the sense he offered before—he thinks witchcraft does not appease these forces, it just puts into place the circumstances that would bring about their coming into play—it is still prohibited.  To explain, he claims that these forces are not always operative, they are available for when God needs them (as in the plague that killed the first born).  By people’s calling these forces into play, they are acting contrarily to God’s plan and hopes for a world that operates for the good; they are therefore prohibited.  And with that the derasha ends.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF PROVIDENCE

In this complicated, and extraordinarily textual, derasha, Ran has offered a sophisticated view of how the world works.  At the top of the Providence food chain is God, Who can intervene directly in the world when He wishes, and did so for the Jews in the Exodus, in the desert (thanks to Moshe’s successfully learning how to avoid His full anger), and again after the construction of the Tabernacle (or, perhaps, the Temple).

The advantages of God’s Providence are that He is not bound by the necessary outcome of any situation.  Should God wish to have the Jews attack the Emorites even though nature would ordinarily be on their side, should He wish the Jews to have bread where there is none, should He wish…well, there is no limit to how God can alter nature to help.  On the other hand, God also can choose to judge actions most harshly, a danger that Moshe managed to avert by learning the 13 Attributes.  Note that Moshe’s use of them seems to have been more skilled than ours, since God stayed directly with the people only until Moshe’s death, despite our already having the 13.

The issue of “use” of the Attributes deserves a little more attention, since it, too, seems to veer dangerously close to magic, an idea that contradicts God’s radical Freedom.  I believe that knowledge of the Attributes is so powerful because it lines the person up with what God wants for the world.  God’s granting a request is not us manipulating Him, then, but His agreeing that as long as we try to adopt His Attributes in our own lives, as long as we are aware of the centrality of imitating God, He will not fully reject our pleas.

The idea that dead people gain a greater appreciation of God than live ones fits well with the belief in life after death and resurrection.  More than that, it also explains the strand of the tradition that suggests that when people come back to life, they will no longer be bound by all the prohibitions of the Torah.  If they have, in death, achieved an understanding of God they could not have while alive, we can understand that they would no longer need the same guidance.

OTHER THAN GOD

Below God is Metatron, a shadowy figure whose role Ran does not explore fully.  Metatron is different from any other angel in that God’s Name is within him (whatever that may mean), that Jews have the right to bow to him, and a special obligation to listen to him.  This indicates a middle level between being a force of nature and as free as God, the nature of that middle ground is not elaborated here.

Below Metatron are forces of nature, which Ran calls angels.  These forces can be manipulated once understood, as we now use microwaves to magically heat food.  They cannot (Ran thinks as a matter of fact, not only of prohibition) be manipulated, both because our manipulations do not affect them and because they have no power to alter themselves (Ran does not address what the nature of their sentience is, but we will have to investigate that another time).  Attempts to manipulate them, rather than take advantage of a deep understanding of how they work, are prohibited as ways of the Emorite.

That is only true, however, of positive forces of nature.  Negative forces such as witchcraft—which Ran sees as being held by God for use only when necessary—may not be manipulated even in natural ways, since they contradict God’s hopes for the world, a world that would run for the good. (That raises interesting questions about how Ran would view using destructive forces for positive purposes, such as nuclear energy.  I assume he would be in favor, but wonder how he would differentiate that from witchcraft, which was also used for the benefit of the person invoking it; in that case, then, it was producing a positive result).

While it is, then, a complicated derasha, we can now see that it takes on a significant central issue, the kinds of providence that exist, in general and for the Jewish people at various stages of their national existence.  An important player in that drama is Moshe, whose miraculous level of prophecy enabled him to elicit from God knowledge that allowed him, Moshe, to convince God to stay with the people throughout their time in the desert, and left us with the 13 Attributes we invoke so often during the Yamim Noraim.

SUMMARY, DERASHA 5, 168-73 (61-3)

PROPHECY

As we begin this derasha, I note that the new edition assumes that this was for Parshat Vayetse, since there are repeated references to Yaakov’s dream.  Similarly, the previous derasha was seen as being from Parshat Mishpatim, as that was where the crucial text appeared.  Since this derasha comes after the previous one, however, I think it is more accurate to say, as we said before, that Ran is ordering them topically rather than textually.  This derasha begins with a discussion of prophecy, taking as its text the claim in the Talmud that prophecy only comes to one who is wise, modest, mighty, and rich.

Ran opens up by asserting the necessity of prophecy in the fabric of Creation.  Since God created the world for people to worship Him (a claim, incidentally, that Rambam vigorously rejected; Rambam assumed we could not know why God created the world), it would be necessary for Him to have His shefa, His beneficent emanations, affect us directly.  That cannot happen purely intellectually, however (and this, too, seems to diverge from Rambam), since the soul is not an aspect of ourselves that can be understood purely intellectually, so the means of its sustenance and flourishing cannot be conveyed intellectually either. (That is in and of itself an interesting claim; theoretically, I could intellectually infer how to benefit a non-intellectual aspect of the world, but Ran assumes not).

Once we recognize the necessity of prophecy, we inherently also know that it can only happen to someone with wisdom and modesty, which Ran takes as a catchall for intellectual and ethical greatness.  He sees that requirement as almost natural--  Prophecy extends from nonphysical beings, and in nature things are attracted to that which is similar to them (a view of Ran’s we have seen before), so they will be drawn to people who emphasize their spiritual side and withdraw from those who do not perfect their character and intellect.

That, in fact , is the message that Ran sees in the ladder of the dream, showing angels rising and descending.  They emphasize to Yaakov that people have the ability to rise or fall (to be more like angels or like animals) and that the process is dynamic and constant, with no human rising consistently. Rather, as long as the person involves himself in spiritual matters, he will rise, and when not, he will fall.

The question that still bothers Ran (as we have seen before) is why the prophet should need to be mighty and/or rich.  Remember that Ran rejects Rambam’s reading that these terms refer to character issues, control of one’s inclinations and being satisfied with one’s financial situation; because of the Talmud’s claims about Moshe, Ran thinks these are meant in their literal way.  His answer to that question, and what it says about prophecy, we will see, be”H, next week. Shabbat Shalom.