 This program is brought to you by Emory University. We have around 1,500 scholars around the world. The Center sponsors advanced research projects and publications, clinical internships and fellowships, specialty courses, degree programs, two book series, and a variety of public forums and public conferences such as this. With this evening's event, our center begins what will be a year-long set of forums on the future of law and religion in various areas of specialty scholarship, including notably Jewish legal studies. In the spring, as you will note on your program, we are hosting a public forum on the future of law and religion in Islam, and we'll be training the binocular of law and religion on some hot issues, like marriage and family, church-state relations, and religion and human rights. The Decalogue lecture that we shall enjoy together this evening is a new named distinguished lecture series sponsored by our center. This lecture series is made possible by a generous gift from Professor Dr. Marion Leathers-Kuntz in memory of her late husband, Professor Paul Grimley-Kuntz. Paul was a beloved professor of philosophy here at Emory University. He was one of the great masters of the history of the Ten Commandments of the Western tradition, and he with Marion was a friend and admirer, and I understand a recruiter to this campus of our distinguished lecture this evening. We are honored to have as our Decalogue lecturer the great pioneer of law and religion study on this campus and indeed around the world, Professor Dr. David Blumenthal. To introduce Professor Blumenthal, I'm going to call upon my friend and colleague, Professor Michael J. Brode, who will serve as the chair of our proceedings this evening. Professor Brode is the academic director of our law and religion center and is by all accounts the leading scholar in Jewish law in the world in his generation. He will introduce our distinguished speaker. We do not engage in hyperbole at the Emory Law School. There's a commandment against that. He will introduce our distinguished speaker. He will chair our discussion with the distinguished speaker and our respondent Professor Michael Berger, and we turn to him to introduce David Blumenthal. Michael Brode. I'm hesitant to say anything nice about John Witte because he got up and said such totally untrue things about me that the truthful things about John is the director of the law and religion program and the center for the study of law and religion are hard to express, but he's built the center for the study of law and religion into what it is through his many years of directorship of the program and that which we all see here is fundamentally a tribute to him and his vision and his growth. I'm here because of him. Many others are here at the university because of John's vision for how to build a law and religion program. David Blumenthal has spent his past 30 years at Emory and this year celebrates his 30 years at Emory working in five distinctly different fields and accomplishing in each of them. That itself is a remarkable introduction. He spent many years dealing with medieval rabbinics and then he moved on to issues relating to the academic study of Judaism in the university center, then on to Jewish spirituality and then on to Holocaust studies and he's currently spent the last few years working through matters of Jewish theology. For a person to have mastered five separate areas of the Jewish tradition in 30 years of scholarship is a remarkable accomplishment and along the way he's dabbled in many other areas of Judaism, Jewish philosophy, biblical studies. Many different areas have fallen under his intensely analytic magnifying glass. He's also the father of Jewish studies here at Emory. He was the first one here and he's responsible in one way or another for the hiring of almost every single member of the Jewish studies faculty here and the Institute for Jewish Studies is a product of his vision for what Jewish studies should look like at Emory. He hired me personally and has worked incessantly, diligently, persistently to build Jewish studies at Emory. It's my pleasure to welcome him here to speak to us about a matter of Jewish theology. Please, David Willingford. It seems that hyperbole is the mode of the evening. Thank you, Michael, for your kind words and thank you to John Whitty and the Center for the Study of Law and Religion for choosing me as the opening speaker in this set of lectures honoring the 25th anniversary of the founding of the effort in law and religion here at Emory and in the law school. According to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis, when God wanted to create the world, God spoke and reality came into being. Let there be light and there was light. That there be affirmament in the midst of the waters and it was so. That the earth bring forth grass, herbs yielding seed and fruit bearing trees and it was so. No one in biblical times seems to have posed the question what kind of speech was this? How exactly did speech generate physical matter? Put more elegantly, no one asked what was there between the transcendent God and the material world? Was there a continuum which connected the purely spiritual with the purely material? Biblical thought did recognize the existence of angels, but they were messengers of the deity. They did not participate in the creation and ongoing management of the world. The question of what exists between God and the world was raised first in the early rabbinic period, that is, during the first millennium of the common era. Various answers were proposed, however none of them was comprehensive. It was not until the 12th century that this issue was addressed systematically by Maimonides, as we shall see shortly. The issue of the pluroma, that is the space between God and creation, continued to occupy scholars throughout the medieval period. It also occupied modern scholars of the medieval period. It was a favorite theme of the late Paul Kunst professor of philosophy here at Emory. I met Paul when he and his wife Marion, herself a distinguished professor of late medieval and early Renaissance history, and I, attended one of the great medieval studies institutes in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was then teaching at Brown University on a short-term appointment and was being considered for the position I now occupy at Emory. Paul and Marion came to hear my lecture that dealt with successive stages in the development of the pluroma in Jewish thought. Anchoring myself in the pioneering work of Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, I showed in some detail the increasing complexification of this concept. Each new idea was added to the previous run, resulting in a kind of Dagwood-Bomstead sandwich with everything in it, so I think Paul would consider my metaphor rather flippant given the seriousness of the topic in medieval culture. Paul and Marion loved the lecture and they returned to Emory to lobby for my appointment to the newly created J. and Leslie Cohen Chair of Jewish Studies. If I know Paul, he put in more than one telephone call to the late Jack Boozer who chaired the committee. At any rate, they succeeded, and it is in part thanks to Paul and to Marion that I stand before you tonight. It is in a certain sense thanks to their efforts that there is such an active Jewish Studies component in the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. Marion, thank you. Paul is not here physically to enjoy this evening, but he is surely here with us in the theme I have chosen. The speech I gave was later published by Marion and Paul Kunst. It is also available on my website and it is an interesting continuation of this evening's lecture. Let us turn then to the first comprehensive articulation of the Problem of the Pluroma by Maimonides. Moses Maimonides was born in Córdoba, Spain in 1135, and if you visit that city today, you can see the famous statue dedicated to him, which to be sure is a fabricated portrait from a much later time. Maimonides was the sion of a distinguished rabbinic family, fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, and I suppose also in the local Spanish dialect. The great classics of ancient Greek thought had been translated into Arabic in the early centuries of Islam, and it is in that language, not in the original Greek or in the early Latin translations, that Plato, Aristotle and others, together with their commentaries, were known in studies. Maimonides set about studying everything, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, astrophysics, logic, rhetoric, and philosophy in short, all of the known human knowledge of his times. This body of knowledge he called Chochma, wisdom. In addition, Maimonides studied all that was to be known of the Jewish sources, Torah, Bible, Talmud, Midrash, the prayer book, Jewish law, Jewish ethics and so on. This body of knowledge he called Torah in its broader sense. He was also familiar with Christianity and Islam, the religions of his milieu. Maimonides was thus an enlightened Jew, educated in philosophic, scientific, and religious culture, though we must always remember that we are talking about the 12th century, not the 20th. Maimonides fled Islamic fundamentalism in 1148, traveling to what is now Morocco, then to what is now Israel, and finally settling an old Cairo for Stath in Egypt. In 1168, at the age of 38, he published his great commentary on the Mishnah. After his brother who supported him died, Maimonides sought work as a medical doctor, eventually becoming the court physician in Fatimid Egypt. He also accepted the responsibility of being the head and chief judge of the Jewish community of Egypt, completing his great Code of Jewish Law, the Mishnah Torah, in 1180. He died in 1204 and is buried in the Holy Land where one can still visit his grave in Tiberias. I need to pause for a few moments to talk about Maimonides' Code of Jewish Law, especially in this forum. In the centuries before 1180, there was no Code of Jewish Law. There was no set of volumes that contained all the laws enacted by the rabbis. There was no annotated laws of the state of Georgia, so to speak. There was the Bible with its laws scattered over many books. There was the Mishnah that is not a Code, but a reformulation by topic of the state of Jewish law at its time. There was the Talmud that is not a discussion of the Mishnah and certainly not a Code, but rather an attempt to demonstrate how to harmonize the received text of the Mishnah with parallel texts as well as with life and logic. There was an occasional summary of certain very practical laws, such as those of ritual slaughter. Finally, there was an extensive literature of response written by rabbis to questions in Jewish law that had been sent to them. But there was no Code to set the law in rational manner such that it could be observed and studied by everyone. This is the task Maimonides undertook to set the definitive practice and text of Jewish law for everyone. The Mishnah Torah includes laws dealing with ritual matters, as we would expect, the Sabbath holidays, prayer, and even the sacrificial system and the construction of the temple. Since, however, pre-modern Jewish communities also had their own court systems, the Mishnah Torah also includes laws dealing with civil and criminal matters, property transfer, contracts, damages, theft, murder, and judicial procedure. There are also laws dealing with what we would call ethics. Maimonides thus tried to be not only definitive, but also to be comprehensive. Indeed, as Islamic Sharia is intended to be a comprehensive legal system. The Mishnah Torah, the secondary Torah, is 14 volumes long. Furthermore, to make sure that everyone understood the law, Maimonides wrote it in Hebrew, innovating a new style of surpassing beauty. As soon as the Mishnah Torah was circulated, people disagreed with this law or that. They also disagreed with the method that gave only the law and not the reasoning or discussion behind the law. But the Mishnah Torah stood the test of time, becoming the first code of Jewish law, and becoming the only code to be comprehensive. Later codes are derived from it and are always of smaller scope. Only Maimonides grasped the whole. Given the utter centrality of law and Jewish culture, and Henchen Maimonides thought, where does one begin such a code? What is the first of the laws? For Maimonides, the first commandment is, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, which is the first commandment of the Decalogue, yet another link to our friend Paul Kunst. But what is the actual commandment here? What must one do to observe I am the Lord your God? For Maimonides, this verse means that one must have convictions about God, that one must have positive knowledge about God. That too is part of Jewish law. In this way, belief became a formal part of Jewish law. Indeed, the laws on belief constitute the first ten chapters of the Fourteen Books of the Mishnah Torah. Belief also concludes the code, where one finds the laws pertaining to messianic times. Proper belief then for Maimonides was not simply a matter of speculation. It was a matter of law. In fact, it was the first matter of law. And so in 1190, he completed his great work of philosophy, the guide for the perplexed. The purpose of this book was to reconcile Torah, Jewish thought, with Khokhmah, philosophical scientific thought. For it was the juxtaposition of these two worldviews that was the source of perplexity for many enlightened Jews. To understand how Maimonides reconciled these two worlds, we need to study his philosophical scientific worldview first. And it is to this that we now turn. I ask you to open your programs and have a look at this diagram that the Center has very kindly provided for you. The neo-Aristatelian worldview common to Jewish and Islamic philosophers of this period contained two chains of being. A material hierarchy and a spiritual hierarchy. The material hierarchy comprised the physical universe as it was then known. It was a geocentric universe with the world, our earth and the middle. And it was a world in which there was no empty space. This latter is very hard for moderns to understand because we are accustomed to thinking of the universe as composed of bodies moving through empty space. By contrast, the world to the ancients and the medieval was, as Maimonides notes, like an onion with each layer touching the one above it and below it, there was no empty space. At the center of this onion of this universe was the earth with its inhabitants and atmospheric air and you can see that clearly on the chart. Above and completely encircling the earth were four solid spheres, each of which touched the one above and below and all of which were transparent. They were the spheres of elemental earth, elemental water, elemental fire and elemental air. These being the basic elements according to Aristotle. From these elements, their real counterparts in this world were made and from the counterparts, all of physical reality was compounded. Above and completely encircling the spheres of the four elements were an additional nine solid spheres. Each touched the one above and below, all were transparent. The material substance of these spheres could not be made up of the elements for the elements were below the spheres in the hierarchy, as you can see. Rather, the material substance of the nine spheres was made up of a fifth substance called the quintessence, from which we have that word. Each of these spheres contained bright bodies. Many evils differed on the sequence, but they did agree on the following. The lowest sphere contained the moon. This too is very difficult for moderns to understand because we think of the moon as a body moving in space, but there was no space in the Middle Ages. So the moon was a bright body set in a solid, transparent sphere which revolved around the Earth. The other spheres contained the planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the remaining planets, of course, being modern discoveries. The sphere in the middle of the hierarchy contained the Sun. The next of the highest sphere contained all the other stars because, as we observe the heavens with our naked eye, all the other stars appear to move in unison. The outermost or ninth sphere was the one that rotated once every 24 hours and it was called the diurnal sphere, as you can see. The whole universe rotated around the Earth. The outermost sphere rotated once in 24 hours, it touched the next sphere down the chain of being and caused that sphere to rotate and that sphere touched the next and caused it to rotate and so on down the chain of material being. For Aristotle, as for the medieval, this was not only a matter of movement, it was also a matter of causation. Rotation caused causation. To put it in its most elegant form, the motion of the outermost sphere set all the other spheres in motion thereby generating causation. All action resulted from this motion slash causation. You might ask the question, what keeps the whole system moving? What moves the outermost sphere? Aristotle and hence my monities had an answer. There is a prime mover who feeds energy into the material hierarchy sustaining the motion that is sustaining the chain of causation. This prime mover is, for people of the book, God and this is one of the logical arguments for the existence of God in my monities and indeed in much of medieval theology. This then was medieval physics and astrophysics. There was only one major problem with it. It was wrong. As we observe the heavens with the naked eye, the fixed stars appear to move in unison as one would expect if one were looking up from the inside of an onion. However, the planets have an irregular movement against the background of the fixed stars. They appear to move in loops on successive night. So one night Venus is here, the next night it's here, then it's here, then it's here, then it's here, then it's here, then it's here, then it's here. This phenomenon is known as the retrograde motion of the planets. To account for this phenomenon, the ancients and medievals created a very, very complex set of spheres within spheres, some of which move contrary to the general movement of the heavens. But the mathematics just didn't work. It couldn't work because the model was wrong. The universe is not geocentric. The planets and stars are not bright bodies in solid translucent spheres and there is such a thing as empty space. Indeed it is the discovery of the non-geocentric character of the universe and the existence of space that signals the end of the Middle Ages and constitutes the shift into the modern world. Some of the ancients and the medievals, including Maimonides, knew that the Ptolemaic universe, which we have just described and as it was known, was faulty. Maimonides knew the math didn't work, but it was the best explanation they had and it explained for them the material chain of being, the material hierarchy. The spiritual chain of being, which is on the left-hand side of your diagram, began in God. God in this understanding was not taking walking, feeling, anthropomorphic, anthropopathic God of biblical and rabbinic traditions. Rather, God was the abstract divinity, the God removed from all change, motion, feeling and action. God had been purified, perfected into a beatitude. God had been made so sublime that God did not really act. At most, God in this world contemplated God's self. The divine was thought thinking itself, mind contemplating itself. God was, as Aristotle and following him Maimonides put it, the knower, the known and knowing all contained in one. I like to say that when we humans contemplate ourselves, we get a headache. However, as a result of God's pure contemplation of God's self, being overflowed from God. The medieval called this process of the overflow of being, emanation, and they used two fine metaphors for it. God's being overflows as the fountain continuously and effortlessly pours forth water, or as the sun without conscious will or effort radiates light. This overflow from God did not spill indiscriminately through reality, but formed itself into a non-material being that was made up only of that which it had received of spiritual, intellectual energy. This first being was called the first intelligence or the first intellect. It too, like God, could think. Because it was however extra-decal, that is separate from God, the first intelligence could contemplate both God and itself. And if you look at the diagram, you can see that very clearly. When the first intelligence contemplated God, the overflow emanated from it further into reality, generating the second intelligence. But when the first intelligence contemplated itself, a lesser degree of reality than God, the overflow emanated the outermost or diurnal sphere. We have then the continuation of the spiritual hierarchy spilling down, and the beginning of the generation of the material hierarchy. Here things were simple, and you have to follow along in the chart. The second intelligence contemplated the being above it, which is the first intelligence, being spilled forth and emanated the third. It also contemplated itself and emanated the eighth sphere. The third intelligence contemplated the second and generated the fourth. It contemplated itself and generated the seventh sphere. Things proceeded to the ninth intelligence, which contemplated the eighth and emanated the tenth intelligence. It also contemplated itself and generated the sphere of the moon, together with the spheres of the elements, as you can see on the diagram. This spilling down of being through the spiritual and material hierarchies always reminds me of the champagne fountains that one finds at fancy parties. Though again I suspect, Paul Kuhn's sense of humor would be stretched to the limit by my imagery, given the seriousness of this issue and many evil thought. When the tenth intelligence, also known as the agent intelligence or active intellect, contemplated the ninth intelligence, it generated the human intellect. The human intellect then stood in the direct line of the spiritual hierarchy. It was a chip off the old divine block, so to speak. The tenth intelligence had other functions. Plato had taught that the ideas of table-ness, of human-ness, of beauty, and of truth, et cetera, actually exist somewhere. Philo followed by Plotinus and then the Neurostratelians believed that the location of these Platonic ideas was in the mind of God, that is in the lowest of the intelligences, the tenth intelligence. Thus when the tenth intelligence contemplated itself, it emanated the Platonic ideas to matter in order to form the specific objects of this world. The second function of tenth intelligence was then to contain the Platonic ideas and through self-contemplation to emanate them to material reality as necessary. Let me summarize. The philosophic scientific world view of Maimonides contained the following. One, a spiritual hierarchy which began with God and descended through spiritual beings down to the human intellect and the Platonic ideas. Two, this spiritual hierarchy functioned by contemplation of one's superior and of one's self, this contemplation being actually generative for being flowed from thought. And three, a material hierarchy clearly defined by the physics and astrophysics of the time which was shaped and given form by the parallel spiritual hierarchy. By contrast. The biblical rabbinic world view taught that there is a God who is the very embodiment of personhood. God is creative. God is concerned. God is active. God generates, creates and guides nature as well as history, especially the history of the Jewish people. There is no continuum in the Pluroma. There is rather the transcendent God who acts with will and wisdom upon that which God has created. And it was to the harmonization of the philosophic scientific world view which we have just talked about with the biblical rabbinic world view which is probably better known to all of us. It is to the harmonization of these worlds that Maimonides dedicated himself. Maimonides said about harmonizing these two worlds by reflecting on language. Always logical. He began with the word image as in in the image of God he created them. What does this really mean Maimonides asks? Does it mean that God looks like us? If so, is God white or black or yellow? Is God male or female? And does he look like Michael Broyd or John Whitty? This can't be serious, Maimonides argues. The word image must be a metaphor for some spiritual quality that we humans share with the divine. If God is as we have already learned, mind contemplating itself, then humans are in the image of God in so far as they have minds and use those minds. Similarly, Maimonides asks, what does it mean to say God said? As in God said, let there be light. Does it mean that God actually spoke? Does God have vocal cords? Did God speak loudly or softly? This too, Maimonides argues is nonsense. The word said must be a metaphor for the spiritual intellectual process that we have seen. If God acts through emanation, through overflow of spiritual energy, then God said really means God allowed an overflow of being to emanate from God's self. The whole first part of the Guide for the Perplexed is devoted to discussing one term after another and to showing that when we use these terms in reference to God, they must be metaphors for spiritual intellectual processes. In doing this, Maimonides established the cardinal principle for his harmonization of the philosophic scientific worldview. When science contradicts biblical and rabbinic texts, the latter must be reinterpreted to conform to the philosophic scientific worldview. This is hard for fundamentalists of all religions to understand because it seems to contradict the literal meaning of sacred texts. However, Maimonides argues that the literal meaning must be the meaning that is closest to truth, not the one that is closest to the text. Two more examples. Biblical and rabbinic texts talk about angels, about heavenly beings who sometimes look like humans but who have supernatural powers. They appear, they disappear, they ascend to heaven on fire, and they encircle God's throne and sing praises to God. This can't be true, argues Maimonides. There is no room for such beings in the spiritual and material hierarchies of the philosophic scientific worldview. So what are angels according to Maimonides? Angels, he teaches, are either natural forces inherent in the material hierarchy, such as motion, or angels are metaphors for the ten intelligences of the spiritual chain of being. In the Mishne Taram Maimonides even lists the ten most important angel names and clearly identifies them as the ten intelligences of the spiritual intellectual hierarchy. Biblical and rabbinic texts use many, many concrete images in talking about God. God speaks, sits, and walks. God gets angry and rejoices. God has a powerful hand in an outstretched arm and so on. These terms are all anthropomorphic or anthropopathic. That is, they are terms pertaining to human form, human feeling, and human activity. Yet, they are used to describe God in the classic sources. All these terms cannot be true, argues Maimonides, because they make no sense in the context of the philosophic scientific view of reality. Rather, he teaches, and I quote, all those terms are metaphors, turns of language. The Torah speaks in the language of human beings. All these terms are applicable only to lowly dark bodies that dwell in houses of matter, whose root is in dust. Well, God, may he be praised and blessed, is above all this. End of quotation. Again, in dealing with the question of whether the universe was created at a specific moment in time, which is the view of the Torah, or whether it might have no beginning in time at all, which is the view of the philosophic scientific world, Maimonides states clearly, and I quote, know that our shunning of the affirmation of the eternity of the universe is not due to a text in the Torah which teaches that the world was produced in time, because we could interpret such texts as figurative, as we did in proving that God has no body. End of quotation. The principle of harmonization is thus clear. When science and religion conflict, we reinterpret religion. When truth and text clash, we reinterpret text. Given then Maimonides' philosophic scientific worldview and given his principle of harmonization that opts to reinterpret biblical texts where they appeared to clash with scientific truth. How does Maimonides interpret such classical Jewish doctrines as creation, prophecy, revelation, providence, immortality, prayer, and mysticism? Let us turn again to the diagram provided by the Center and ask, where on the diagram is each of these religious moments? This may seem strange to you, but we will not be here all night. For having come this far in understanding Maimonides, we will be able to answer each of these questions now in very short order. Creation for Maimonides is not the sixth-day narrative of the actions of a concrete God who brings reality into being by speaking the holy ten words. It is rather the point at which God allows spiritual intellectual energy to emanate from God's self. On the diagram, creation is below the letter D in the word God, if you look carefully. That is where creation takes place, the willful allowing of energy to flow forth from God. Prophecy for Maimonides is not the sudden calling of the prophet by God independent of the prophet's readiness or prior preparation, as indeed Jeremiah and Moses and others complain. It is rather the point at which God allows spiritual intellectual energy to enter the intellect of the prophet. For this to happen, the prophet must first be prepared by careful study and contemplation. But when the prophet is ready, and if God wills it, the prophetic experience, the prophet experiences an influx of spiritual intellectual energy that descends down the hierarchy of spiritual being. The prophet then renders that influx into images, words, stories, and laws. On the diagram, prophecy is below the number one in the term 10th intelligence. And this is the point of contact between the human intellect and the divinely emanated intelligences. The same word is used in Arabic, the language of the guide for both intellect and intelligence. Revelation, that is the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, is a form of prophecy, except that it is to the whole Jewish people. For my monadies, it is not the fire on the mountain accompanied by a shofar on the voice of God. It is rather the point at which God allows an influx of spiritual intellectual energy to come down the chain of spiritual being and to enter the intellects of the entire Jewish people. On the diagram, Revelation 2 is below the number one in the term 10th intelligence. Since none of the people except Moses was fully prepared for this influx, the people withdrew from Revelation and asked Moses to receive it from God. Moses, by contrast, was fully prepared and it was he who received the influx of spiritual intellectual energy and it was he who formed that energy into words, images, stories, and laws. This leads to the startling realization that the text of the Torah is really a fusion of the human and the divine, of the truly spiritual with the language of human beings, a very powerful theological stance. Providence, that is the means by which God guides the world, is not for my monadies a seemingly haphazard process by which God intervenes in nature and history. It is rather the ongoing process of emanating spiritual intellectual energy down the chains of spiritual and material being. This flow of energy sustains and orders the universe. Should God choose to cut it off, the world would wink out of existence, as my monadies says at the beginning of the code. On the diagram, providence is either below the D in God or it is below the number one in the term 10th intelligence. Immortality for my monadies is not going to heaven after death and enjoying the delights of paradise. It is not even studying Torah at the feet of God. Those are metaphors. It is rather the return of the human intellect, which you can see on the diagram is that chip off the divine block. It is the return of the human intellect to the 10th intelligence after its separation from the body of death. Ideally as one approaches death, one should spend one's time contemplating these hierarchies and putting oneself in the presence of God. And then when one dies, one dies with a kiss, which is to be sure a metaphor for spiritual intellectual bliss. On the diagram, immortality is below the number one in the term 10th intelligence. I need to spend a moment talking about mysticism, especially my monadies unique type thereof. Mysticism is not amulets and incantations. It is also not achieving trans states induced by reciting mantras or taking drugs or alcohol. And certainly mysticism is not about popular rock stars parading semi-nude in public and wearing capitalistic names around their necks. My monadies was unalterably opposed to such things. Rather, mysticism in general is the rigorous and systematic practice of very special types of meditation. For my monadies, mysticism is the process of meditating upon the spiritual intellectual and material hierarchies that comprise his worldview. It is a standing before, a standing before the spiritual intellectual presence that is God. Mysticism is not the emptying of the mind, quite the contrary. It is the filling of the mind with knowledge of the spiritual intellectual material hierarchies and their relationship to God and to the sacred texts of Jewish tradition. Mysticism for my monadies, and this is very, very important, is the reversal of the emanation process. It is a climbing up of the ladder of a being, just as creation, prophecy and revelation are a coming down the ladder of being and overflow coming down. Mysticism is the reversal of the emanation process, a climbing up of the ladder. For my monadies, true worship is rational, intellectual, philosophic mysticism. Prayer, for my monadies, is the proper recitation of the liturgy together with proper intent. Worship, avodah, is the term my monadies uses to designate the stage beyond prayer, the stage beyond study, the stage beyond philosophy and science, which is the stage of meditating on God, of being in the presence of the spiritual intellectual force that is God. On the diagram, mysticism takes place below the number one in the term 10th intelligence, the point where the human and the divine meet, but it is there at our initiative, in our path back up the hierarchy to God. These religious teachings, which we have gone through rather rapidly, have complications to be sure. Is creation a moment in time or could the creative process be always ongoing? And what difference if any would that make? How can one know that the prophecy of the prophet is true and not false? If the text of the Torah is part human and part divine, how does that affect, if at all, its binding qualities revealed law? If immortality is a function of the human intellect, what does my monadies think happens to the human soul? If mystical meditation leads to bliss, what is the purpose of observing the commandments, why not just meditate? My monadies deals with all these questions, though we do not have time to deal with all of them here. I think actually there is very little he did not take into careful consideration in evolving the system of thought. Each of these classical religious teachings fits beautifully, indeed seamlessly, into the philosophic, scientific worldview of my monadies. Just as all obligations, ritual, civil and criminal, ethical and others, fit seamlessly into the structure of Jewish law, Chochma interacts with Torah, wisdom shapes revelation, while revelation includes wisdom. Put differently, science generates faith, and faith encompasses science. I am always asked, what would my monadies say if he were alive today? I cannot, of course, speak for him, but I think he would say the following. The geocentric view of the universe was proved wrong by Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus. The earth is not at the center of the world, the universe is not made up of solid transparent spheres, but is spaced with bodies located in it. One cannot ignore the evidence of dinosaur skeletons. Rather, one must look to contemporary science and determine what is the most reasonable explanation of reality. Then, one must move from there to our sacred texts. The principle of harmonization, however, would still apply. We use the best philosophy and science that we have, and then we interpret sacred texts. Revelation can never be nonsense. It can be metaphoric, for indeed, the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. In the end, Jewish life must be composed of law and of law abiding patterns of behavior. This includes the commandment to have positive, philosophic scientific knowledge of reality and of God. It also includes the reality, not only of saying one's prayers properly, but also of placing oneself in the spiritual, intellectual presence that is God, and in dwelling in that presence as fully as one can. In Maimonides, we see the fusion of deep spirituality, profound intellectuality, rigorous science, all-embracing law, full observance of Jewish ritual, and an honest intellectual faith rooted in science, thought, and in the rational, mystical life. Thank you. David Blumenthal is my teacher. Michael Berger is my friend and colleague, maybe even partner in crime on occasion. He is an associate professor of Jewish thought and ethics in the Department of Religion, a graduate of Princeton, Columbia, ordained at Yeshiva Haaretzion in Israel, and a wonderful, positive force for Jewish life in Atlanta, having returned this year from his two-year sabbatical as the headmaster of Yeshiva Atlanta. I welcome his remarks. I agree. I want to thank Professor Broide for inviting me to respond to Professor Blumenthal's lecture tonight. As always, Professor Blumenthal has offered us a lucid, well-organized presentation of very challenging material. That's a charitable term for medieval physics and metaphysics, and also sought to show its relevance for us today. If I may review Professor Blumenthal's presentation tonight, I understood him to be sharing with us the following. First, he described my monities' understanding of the hierarchies of both the material and spiritual world and their interrelationship, which for the most part was the regnant medieval philosophic scientific worldview in the 12th century, at least among the Aristotelians. Then, Professor Blumenthal explained my monities' principle of harmonization, by which my monities resolved apparent contradictions and conflicts between science and biblical rabbinic texts, particularly their language about God and spiritual beings, by reinterpreting that problematic language. And finally, applying this principle of harmonization more broadly, Professor Blumenthal showed how my monities interpreted such key religious concepts as creation, prophecy, revelation, and mysticism in a way that would fit into his philosophic scientific worldview, a model for us today as we struggle to reconcile mutual commitments to faith and religion. A lot more about this was said, obviously, but I think this is a fair summary of Professor Blumenthal's lecture. What I would like to do in my response is address the second theme specifically, and from there get into my more significant reaction to his third and final point about relevance today. When Professor Blumenthal raised my monities' principle of harmonization, he stated it concisely and boldly. When science contradicts biblical and rabbinic texts, the latter must be reinterpreted to conform to the philosophic scientific worldview. I think this is not an unreasonable characterization of my monities, but let's unpack it. Science from my monities was, as we heard tonight, a mixture of physics, the four elements, the structure of the universe, and philosophy, logic, reason, theology, and metaphysics. These were sources of truth, and in fact, my monities as a typical medieval scholar would have considered philosophy the highest science because its arguments and proofs yielded incontrovertible claims about what is true about the world. In other words, the proof, the philosophic proof of God's existence yielded a truth that God exists as valid as and even more valid than any claim about the earth or the moon that we make based on physics. Philosophy, physics, on an equal par. When biblical and rabbinic texts seem to say things contrary to these philosophic truths, then my monities argued for reinterpreting the texts. I think my monities had a deep and sophisticated understanding of language and realized both that it is an imprecise instrument, a single word in a culture can signify different things, and that language also evolves, that a word or term may have one meaning in one era and an entirely different one in another. Therefore, when the Bible or rabbinic texts are in apparent conflict with the scientific world view, since language is the more malleable of the two, it can give way, in a face-saving way, of course, through reinterpretation. In other words, in cases of this type of conflict, one of the competing rivals is, in my monities' view, less rigid. Language is more fluid, and so he prefers to work with the more flexible of the two. The reason I say this is that in the Guide to the Perplexed, my monities spends many pages showing that the Aristotelian proofs that the world always existed are not better or more convincing than the proofs that the world was creative from nothing. It's a stand-off. No argument really wins. My monities goes out of his way to show that in this particular conflict about whether the world was created or always existed, philosophy and reason do not back a horse in this race. He is therefore comfortable insisting that the Bible's view of creation is correct. Or more accurately, he has no reason to reinterpret the text from its simple meaning. This is the context of the Maimonidian passage Professor Blumenthal quoted about reinterpreting creation. While Maimonides does state that if philosophy proved the Aristotelian view of the eternality of the world, he'd reinterpret scripture, I think it's important to state that Maimonides also believed the contrapositive. When philosophy or science is not clear, he'd favor the simple meaning of the biblical and rabbinic texts. And that leads me to my main point. The legitimacy of extending Maimonides' approach beyond this limited context. In summing up the principle of harmonization, Professor Blumenthal said, and I quote, when truth and text clash, we reinterpret text. As I said, I think that's a reasonable read of Maimonides. But Professor Blumenthal added, when science and religion conflict, we reinterpret religion. I do not think Maimonides would agree with that generally, or at least he'd ask a lot of questions about it. Because he wouldn't quite understand the terms science and religion as most of us use them. Allow me to explain why. First, as Professor Blumenthal himself noted, medieval science was a very different enterprise than modern science. It was not based on the scientific method, on experimentation, replicability, and other bases for determining scientific facts and truth. It was a mixture of tradition, empirical observation, and logical reasoning and induction. I'm glad Professor Blumenthal cited the case of Western civilization's rejection of Ptolemy's geocentric universe in favor of the Copernican solar system. That shift itself was not the dawning of the modern era, but the reasoning behind it was, observations and precise measurements no longer supported the old theory sufficiently, and so it was rejected. The fact that the old theory was in place for almost 2,000 years, and the church supported it meant nothing. Scientific reasoning barreled through and totally demolished it. This was part of a larger shift in thinking, how claims are proven true, and what counts as a valid claim about the world. The modern scientific understanding of cause and effect supplanted a world where matter in general behaved somewhat anthropomorphically. To use the example made famous by Galileo, Aristotle explained falling objects by stating that the nature of a rock caused its motion to return to its source. That's why a rock fell. It was trying to go back to the center of the earth because a rock came from the center of the earth. That's why Aristotle thought rocks fell faster than feathers. Galileo instead explained it in terms of a force called gravity. That is the cause, not the rock's desire. So modern science, in essence, said to medieval science, no, there are no metaphysical or supernatural realities. There are no forms, platonic forms, out there behind the world of matter that we see. There are no spiritual beings out there. There are only natural forces, like gravity, that are indiscriminate, apply equally to all bodies, and are inviolable. And if it's not a good explanation of nature as we see it, it just means we have to dig more deeply and figure out what scientific rule is at work. In such a scientific world view, with no appeal to metaphysics or philosophy, God no longer plays a role. Thus, when the French physicist Pierre Simon de la Place explains his theory of the universe to Napoleon, Napoleon is said to have asked, where does God fit into your theory? To which Laplace replied, I have no need for that hypothesis. Returning to Maimonides, we must be candid and admit that over the last three to four hundred years, the gap between a godless science, whether atheistic or agnostic, and theistic religion has widened. Whereas in Maimonides' age, there were more or less overlapping circles with certain areas of non-consistency, now we have less and less being shared between the two. I'm just not sure what Maimonides would have thought about the term science as he would have learned it in today's universities and laboratories. Is it Chochma? I'm inclined to think that he would agree that it is. Can it be rationally reconciled with Torah? I'm not sure it would be possible in the same way that he did it. Second, Maimonides would not have extended his willingness to reinterpret biblical rabbinic texts, by which I think he meant narrative, to reinterpreting religion in general. When we say religion, and certainly in the Jewish context, we think of normative components, do's and don'ts, as well as beliefs, and also narratives and values and insights and ethics. Maimonides could easily reinterpret language and did, but I am quite confident that he would not have taken the laws of the Torah and reinterpreted them. He may have given them reasons that were more logical or natural to today's sensibilities. But for him, the prophecy of Moses was immutable and included a multiple of oral explanations that were binding on every Jew. So if science, let's say, proved that there is no harm whatsoever in the eating of certain non-Kosher foods, Maimonides might seek another rationale for it, but he would never reinterpret the commandment prohibiting the consumption of those foods. As I read him, Maimonides thought the commandments were an exceptional form of prophecy and revelation to Moses that was unique in history and could never be altered. So while I accept that Maimonides reinterpreted Jacob's struggle with the angel as an event in Jacob's dreams, because after all, first, second, third, or fourth intelligences don't wrestle or strike people's hips, that does not mean that the prohibition against eating the sciatic nerve of cattle and sheep should now be discarded or become merely optional, simply because it was based on the fertile imagination of an ancient slumbering ancestor. In sum, I think Maimonides would find today very, very confusing. For him, the educated individual would find on Aristotelian physics and metaphysics as well as Greek and Islamic philosophical theology all at the same table. In contrast, contemporary society elevates the physical sciences to the top of the truth ladder, with philosophy a humble member of the humanities, along with art and literature, where truth is a term rarely used. Theology, where God is taken seriously as a matter of study and reflection, is nowadays relegated largely to seminaries and divinity schools. Indeed, it is hard to find it even included in the typical college curriculum other than as in historical curiosity. Were he alive today, Maimonides would struggle much more than he was want to. Because two worlds that he worked mightily to harmonize 800 years ago have moved so far apart that they barely overlap. Reconciling an Aristotelian view of a prime mover with the biblical view of a personal, active God is possible because at least the two systems accept the notion of a deity. Modern science, in contrast, has no need for that hypothesis, thus rendering harmonization of disparate world views far more difficult. While we stand in no less awe today of Maimonides' project than earlier generations, its relevance for us today, and I say this with more than an ounce of pain, is not as apparent to me as it is to Professor Blumenthal. In today's bifurcated intellectual climate, I am not at all confident whether Maimonides' familiar and successful strategies would serve him or us, as well as it did eight centuries ago. In the 1980s, the eminent historian Arthur Hertzberg wrote the following, distinguishing between what we learned from Maimonides as he would have wanted us to learn from him and what we make of him because that is what we want to hear remains an insoluble problem. In the 12 years I have had the privilege of knowing Professor David Blumenthal, I've come to realize that he is among that special elite group of scholars who struggle to understand Maimonides do in part to their own intellectual passions, but also because they find in him echoes of their own spiritual and intellectual biographies. The pursuit of truth, coupled with a firm commitment to Jewish practice and faith, is rare in current academia. For 30 years, David Blumenthal has been inspiring us all to join him in that struggle, to join Maimonides. We hope he continues in that struggle for many years to come. Questions are brief remarks that you direct to one of the speakers with the desire of hearing their response. The Jewish community is particularly at a loss to question people intelligently in this type of event, and they tend instead to make statements. We have a few short minutes for questions. Members of the audience who actually have questions should please feel free to go to one of the microphones or another, and I will emcee this activity. Did Maimonides address the non-believer? It was always an assumption by all the Jews at the time that there was an actual intelligent God out there. Do you ever have any address to about the non-believers among the Jewish population? In the sense that the people whom he chose to address were people who had been schooled in these two traditions and he felt the need to deal with them. He addresses non-believers only holochically. There are certain things that you can and cannot do and can and cannot say and so on and so forth. I want to use the question also to say something about law since Professor Berger brought it up. I hope I did not say that Maimonides reinterpreted laws. Maimonides is very, very clear that Jewish law is binding, whether it's ritual law or civil or criminal or ethical law, whatever kind of law it is, it is binding. And if it doesn't have to have a philosophical underpinning, he spends a long time in the third part of the guide trying to establish philosophical underpinnings but he did not at any point try to reinterpret Jewish laws on the basis of philosophy. Certainly not in Jewish law in its holochic sense. Oranges, if you were going to bring in any of the sfirot or emanations of God into this hierarchy? The answer is yes. You would not have apples and oranges. You'd have a Dagwit Bumstead sandwich. That is, Maimonides wrote the guide in 1190 and the Zohar, the sort of height of the development of the whole sfirotic, Kabbalistic tradition is 1290 for all practical purposes. And in the hundred years after Maimonides, the folks who represented the Kabbalistic tradition set to themselves, what has he done to the depth of spiritual imagery and symbolism and so on and so forth and that whole sfirotic system developed afterwards? Basically, if you've got the diagram in front of you, the sfirot are inside the word God so that they're not part of the sfirot are intra-diacal or inside God. The intelligences are extra-diacal. It's interesting, Dr. Berger, that you take the position of Stephen J. Gould, who think they're different magistrates and there's a big gap, whereas Dennett has recently suggested that we use scientific methods to approach religious issues. I wonder how you or Dr. Blumenthal might respond to Dennett's approach. Andre, I'm not sure I understood the question. Would you repeat it for us, please? Instead of saying that there are great gaps as Dr. Berger or even Stephen J. Gould, the evolutionist, has said, Dennett from Tufts has recently written a book, Breaking the Spell, where he's strongly urging scientists and religious people to get together and approach religion from a scientific point of view. I'll just respond briefly that I don't think my monities would recoil from engaging in that effort, but I think when I was using Professor Blumenthal's remarks about religion and science as it's commonly understood, and I think that rehabilitating, if you will, that conversation and making it more productive and constructive would be a desideratum for my monities. I think as he walked around the halls of universities today, academics as well as students, I think he would be at least disheartened by what he saw first and heard first, and that, I think, is a fair description of the current state of events. I wasn't saying in principle that it was impossible, but I think he, I don't want to say simple, but when you read the guide as well as the early goings of the Mishneh Torah, it seems that he has more strategies open to him because they center on linguistic terms, whereas we have to really get into epistemology and philosophy of science and how we know things in order to reconcile the different disciplines nowadays. I don't think it's impossible, but I think there's not a lot of groundwork that's been laid to date to engage in that enterprise. I think that Professor Berger and I disagree here, and that is, first of all, I want to distinguish very clearly. Up till now we have talked about Maimonides, all right? If we're going to talk about 20th century, we're not talking about Maimonides anymore. We're talking about 20th century relationship between science or scientific culture and religion and religious culture, and we're going to try to answer that question in a way that Maimonides might have answered it if he were walking around today, but you understand that we're both speculating off the top of our heads and out of some education that we have behind us. I think, first, commenting about the past, I don't think that medieval science was quite as impregnated with religion and religious principles as Professor Berger is maintaining. Maimonides clearly understood that there was a possibility that the world was eternal, and he did have an answer for how you would interpret the doctrine of creation if you thought that the world was eternal, i.e. that it had no beginning. So he understood that there was a secular science which had to be dealt with, and he knew how to deal with it. In the modern period, I don't think if we're going to try to reconcile science and religion that we have to begin with biochemistry and physics, and not with astrophysics either. I think that if we're going to look for a science in which to start appreciating what religion is and trying to wrestle with it, we would probably begin in the lowly humanities, as you called us. We would have to begin with the sciences of history of religions. We'd have to begin with the sciences of anthropology. We'd have to begin with the sciences of psychology. Now, let me say that the person who tried this best, in my personal opinion in the modern period, was Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his book, God in Search of Man, which is a take-off on Maimonides' God of the Perplex, that's divided into three parts, the way the guide is. The first part deals with words, and the second part deals with revelation, and the third part deals with deeds, and so on and so forth, the way Maimonides does. Maimonides Heschel says that what does humanistic science tell us? All right, humanistic science is not biochemistry. But so far as we can use the word humanistic science, what do we know about human society? And what do we know? And Heschel said, well, you know, there are words out there, and he begins with the word called wonder. That we stand in wonder, or we stand in awe of something as simple and as complex as a child learning language, or a phenomenon in nature, or an interaction between people. And Heschel says, well, what does this mean? What this means is, and if you sort of explore the meaning of the word awe and you explore the meaning of the word wonder, you reach the point where you realize that this whole set of words points to a kind of presence, a kind of reality, which is beyond our world, a presence that we would call God. And I don't want to get into another lecture on Heschel. I'll be glad to come back some other time and talk about Heschel. But I think if we're going to do science and religion in the 20th century, we can't start out of physics and biology and astrophysics. I think we need to start out of the humanistic sciences, which are going to be the history of religions. It's going to be phenomenology of what religion means and what is it that people mean. And they're a combination of social sciences and humanities, and there is a way to start that. And if you're interested in one way of doing that in the modern world, Heschel's probably the best way to begin. Two more questions, please. If God is perfect and takes up, and takes up no space, how exactly does He overflow and where exactly does that go? Overflow is itself a metaphor, right? It doesn't mean that God overflows like the champagne fountain that I referred to. And God, according to my monities, does not occupy space. Space would be inside of the material universe. And God overflows, according to my monities, by an act of permitting. This is sort of a very subtle definition of what will is. That God permits allows energy to radiate forth from Himself. And that's what overflow is. Did that answer your question? That's as close as I get to try to answering your question, which was an attempt to squeeze God into material space and my monities won't let you do that. One last short question. I'm talking to a rabbi. I want to not let either one of you off the hook on one matter, which is the idea that what my monities would do today is sort of just a matter of a speculation that really has nothing to do with the topic of the talk tonight. Whereas it seems to me that this is a fundamental question even of the medieval scholarship of my monities. In other words, do we view my monities as a philosopher who's a grudging halakhist or as a halakhist who's a grudging philosopher? And without asking you to defend positions at length, can you point us towards some methodological issues that we would use in determining how we feel about that question? I think it's a totally false question, which has been manufactured by modern scholarship. I don't think my monities distinguished between his honest intellectual attempts to grapple with science and medicine as he knew it, he was a doctor, and between grappling with law, ritual law as he knew it, or building the local synagogue, which he also did. Just as I don't think either you or Rabbi Breuder or Rabbi Berger or myself feels a contradiction between our personal commitments to the Jewish community and between our intellectual commitments to living as fully in the intellectual world as we can. I think it was a false dichotomy created by a bunch of secular Jewish scholars who wanted to separate my monities the halakhists from my monities the theologian. I just don't think it's a valid question. On behalf of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, I want to wish all of you a wonderful happy new year for those who are celebrating, and just as Professor Witte opened this event, he will close it. Well, thank you very much. We have heard two brilliant performances by two wonderful scholars and two wonderful friends of Emory University of the Atlanta Jewish community and of the world of scholarship, and I think they deserve a robust round of applause. This event was made possible by the generosity of Professor Marion Leathers-Kunz, who has graced us with her presence this evening, and I hope I won't embarrass you too much. Distinguished scholar and friend, if I ask you to stand to receive our applause of recognition and thanks. Marion, Paul would be very proud to have been sitting here today. I want to thank our friends at the Atlanta Jewish Times for their kindness and co-sponsoring this event with us. 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