 Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. Wa sallallahu ala Sayyidina Muhammadin wa la alihi wa sahbihi ajma'in. Subhanaka la ilmah lana ila ma alam tana inna ka alim al hakeem. Wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billahi al ali al-adheem. As-salamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh. This is our third class. Insha'Allah, covering the basic concepts of the world major religions. So the first week we spoke of our tradition of Islam as well as the second week. So today, insha'Allah, tonight insha'Allah ta'ala, we're going to begin the first part of the religion of Judaism. So it's difficult to distill a religion down to a couple of sessions, but I'll do my best insha'Allah ta'ala. Also at 8.20 or so we'll take a break, maybe seven or eight minutes. So we can pray Maghrib insha'Allah ta'ala for those of us on West Coast time. So I thought a good thing to look at when it comes to Judaism is the famous creed of Maimonides. So Maimonides, famous rabbi and philosopher, he died in the early 13th century. He was buried in Fustat in Egypt. Moshe bin Maimon is his name, and Jews refer to him as the rambam. That's the sort of acronym, means rabbi Moshe bin Maimon. He was an incredible scholar. He was a great scholastic. He was a great synthesizer of Jewish thought as well as Aristotelian ethics. And we'll talk a little bit about that as well. He believed that revelation and reason go hand in hand. He was a natural theologian, meaning that he believed that one could engage in reason and philosophy. As evidence of God. He was a champion of what's known as negative theology. And we'll explain that as well insha'Allah. He wrote quite extensively. Probably his two greatest works are the, and he wrote them in Arabic. At least the first one was in Arabic. The lalat al-haireen, which is oftentimes translated as the guide for the perplexed. It's called the Mure'in Avukhim in Hebrew. Three volumes. And basically the aim of the guide for the perplexed. Who are the perplexed? Who are these people in the state of Ha'ira? These are people that cannot reconcile naqal with aqal. They can't reconcile the revelation with reason. So again, that's sort of the job as it were. As we said last week of the dialectic theologian to reconcile the two. So that's what he attempts to do in the famous guide for the perplexed. His second famous text is called the Mishnah Torah. Which is a commentary on the Torah, Jewish law, and scripture. And in his Mishnah Torah Maimonides articulated basic creed. So his creed is 13 principles. That's all it is. 13 lines. And it's taken from the Tanakh and the Talmud. So we sort of have to get familiar again with our terminology. What are we talking about when we say Tanakh is another acronym. The Tao comes from Torah. There's a noon in there, which is from Nibin, it means prophets. And then the calf, which is more guttural in Hebrew. So Tanakh comes from Kitubim, the writings. So it's basically the Hebrew Bible. Tanakh and Hebrew Bible are synonymous. Of course Christians would call this the Old Testament. So the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, these are all synonymous. Of course the term Old Testament is Christian terminology. Jews, at least Orthodox Jews, would find the term Old Testament to be a bit offensive. Which implies that the covenant that God made with Moses and the Israelites on Sinai has been abrogated. So that's the Tanakh. So you have the Torah. So what do we mean by Torah? What do they mean by Torah? They mean the five books of Moses. This is also called in Hebrew the Chumash. Because the term Torah is a bit ambiguous. Sometimes when Jews use the word Torah they're talking about the five books of Moses. Sometimes they're talking about the entire Old Testament, the entire Tanakh. Sometimes they're talking about all of the sacred literature including the Talmud and we'll talk about that. So the term Torah is a bit ambiguous. But when we say Chumash, which is related to the Arabic word Chamsa, right? Pentateuch in Greek. Here we're talking about the first five books of the Tanakh, right? The books that are traditionally ascribed to Musa A.S. and Orthodox Jews believe in fact that Musa A.S. wrote these five books on Mount Sinai. Some 3,500 years ago he wrote them over 40 nights. He was in sort of a trance. He did not sleep. He did not eat. He did not drink. He was simply receiving these five books. What are these five books called? Well in Hebrew the first book is called Dere Sheth, which comes from the very first word. And that's how they're all called in Hebrew. It's the first word or so. A word in the first verse of the first chapter of that book. In this case, Genesis, right? It's called Dere Sheth because the book begins. Dere Sheth Barah Elohim et Hashemayim vehet aharetz. That in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, right? However, it's called Genesis in English, which is taken from Greek. So the titles of the books that we know are taken from Latin and Greek. And of course they're taken into the English language. So Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These are the five books of Moses. This is the Khumash, right? This is the first five books of the Tanakh, the Old Testament. The Orthodox believe, again, that Moses himself, Musa alaih salam, wrote these books. They are equivalent to our conception of the Quran, as far as the Quran being a dictate from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So Musa alaih salam is not being inspired. These are not his words. He's not receiving some sort of inspiration or ihah. And then he's articulating the wording himself. The loft is not his, right? Just like with the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alaihi wa salam, is receiving the words either through exterior or interior locution. And he's simply repeating those words that he's hearing from outside of himself or that he's perceiving within himself. So that is the status of the Khumash, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Right? And then we have the Nabeem, the prophets. Now, so there's another set of books in the Old Testament that are called after certain prophets, right? So you have books like Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Isaiah and Amos, and Zephaniah, etc. Micah, right? So these books are believed by Jews to be inspired by God, right? So it's not a ipsisma verbah, you know, word for word dictate. It's more like hadith if there's something comparable in our tradition, inspired words of God where a prophet would receive inspiration, but that prophet would use his own words. He would articulate that inspiration. And then you have a third class of revelation, right? Or degree of revelation in the Old Testament, which is called the kitobim, the writings or hagiography. And these are books that are authored by nonprofits, for example, proverbs. So Jews don't believe that David and Solomon are prophets. This is a difference of opinion that we have with them. So the Psalms, for example, is kitobim. So a lower degree of revelation, still sacred writings, canonical and sacred, but not as high, right? Not as great as the writings of Isaiah. And Isaiah is not as great as exalted as the writings of Moses, which are not even the words of Moses. They are the words of God spoken by Moses. So Maimonides Creed is taken from the Tanakh, a.k.a. Old Testament, as well as something called the talmud. The word talmud is related to the Arabic tilmid, right? And tilmid means like a pupil, right? So the talmud is sort of the pupil or the little student of the Torah. The Orthodox believe the talmud is also sacred writing, right? So it has a status that we would, the equivalent in our tradition would be something like ilham, right? Or iha, which is non-prophetic revelation. So not wahi. Wahi according to our scholars, like Imam al-Suyuti and Zarqah and others, the term wahi is prophetic revelation. So Musa, alaihi salam, in our tradition, Ibrahim alaihi salam, Isa alaihi salam, they receive the wahi, right? But saints or non-profits, the Quran says that the hawariyun, the disciples of Isa alaihi salam received iha, non-prophetic revelation, inspiration, inspired revelation, right? So the talmud then has two parts. The talmud is made up of the mishnah and gamara, right? Mishnah and gamara. So the mishnah, according to Judaism, is the oral law of Moses that was finally reduced to writing. So here's something interesting that a lot of people don't know. Even a lot of secular Jews don't know is that in the Orthodox tradition, Orthodox Jews believe that Moses received two Torahs on Mount Sinai. He received the first five books, which is the very words of God, but he also received inspiration that he eventually would articulate piecemeal over his life in his own words. So essentially a commentary of the written Torah, right? So he received the first five books and then Moses, peace be upon him, according to Judaism, as he would live his life and situations would arise with the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, he would commentate or interpret what was written in the first five books with his own words, and those words were eventually written down in the first century of the common era. So it's kind of like the hadith of Musa A.S., his tafsir, if you will, of the khumash. So it was written down and called the mishnah, right? And then between the second and seventh centuries of the common era, second and seventh century, second and eighth century, rabbis began to write commentaries on the mishnah, right? And that was called the gamara, so gamara means completion. So you have the tanach, right? The Old Testament, which is the Torah, the khumash in other words, then the beam, the prophets, the kitubim, the writings. And then you have the talmud, which is made up of the mishnah, the oral law that Moses received that was eventually reduced to writing in the first century because the temple had been destroyed and now the religion was in danger, so the rabbis decided to write it down. And then you have rabbinical commentaries written on the mishnah that occurred primarily in two locations at the rabbinical academy in Babylon or Iraq and as well as the rabbinical academy in Palestine. So you really have two versions then of the talmud. You have the Babylonian talmud and you have the Palestinian talmud. Okay. So Maimonides then, the genius of Maimonides is that he's able to take this massive corpus of literature. I mean, you look at the tanach and the talmud, I mean, millions of words, and he's able to distill it and give us the bare bones of Jewish theology. And that's what he does here with his 13 articles of Jewish faith, 13 principles of Jewish faith. And he says very clearly that if you don't believe in any one of these, you are a cofer, a kathir in his opinion. Now there's some difference of opinion amongst Jewish theologians. Joseph Alba, for example, a 15th century Spanish rabbi said that only three of the 13 are essential. Maimonides, he confused, which is essential with that which is derivative. But generally Maimonides' articulation of the creed is accepted by Jews the world over. Right? So he called these the Sholoshah Ashar Iqarei Emuna, which literally means the 13 principles of Jewish faith. So at this point we're going to take maybe a seven minute break, inshallah, and we're going to pray the Maghrib and then we'll come back and we'll begin with the first couple of principles as articulated by Maimonides, inshallah. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem. As-salallahu alayhi wa s-salam. So now continuing to principle number one, Iqar number one as articulated by Maimonides. He says, I believe with full faith, with perfect faith or sound faith, that the creator, lest it be his name, and the Hebrew here is, if you know Arabic, you could pick up Hebrew quite easily. He says, I believe with sound faith that the creator, lest it be his name. He creates, he says, and he guides all of creation. And he by himself did and is doing and will do all actions. And it's very poetic here, the way that he frames it, using the A'sa, the A'sa. So he uses the perfect tense verb, then he uses the active participle, and then he uses the imperfect tense verb. So basically what he's saying in this principle, the first principle of the 13, is that God alone is the creator and direct doer of all things. That God is the primary cause, he's the efficient cause of all things. Which is contra Aristotle, right, for Aristotle, God is not the efficient cause, because Aristotle believed that the universe is pre-eternal, right? So for Aristotle, God, the unmoved mover, is kind of like a giant cosmic magnet that who draws all things unto himself. So it's sort of an unconscious pull towards God. And God did not create ex nihilo, according to Aristotle's metaphysics. So God is only the final cause for Aristotle. In Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition, God is ultimately the final cause, but he's also the efficient cause, meaning that there was a sort of conscious push that he is the beginning, the ontological origin of all things. The universe is not pre-eternal in the past. The universe was created from nothing, ex nihilo. The universe was created from nothing by God, right? God is the efficient cause, the primary cause. So he says that God by himself, right, he did and is doing, and will do all actions, right? So you can think about here, no one does God's actions except God. None, no one can create anything except for God, right? So if you examine the rationalist, the Mu'atezila claim, this controversial, the khalq al-af'al, the creation of the nations, that the rationalists who are highly influenced by Greek philosophy, they said that due to our absolutely free will, we create our own actions. We are the creators of our own actions that our actions, in effect, inform God himself. So God only knows what we decided to do, so things are not pre-determined. So you have rationalist elements in the Jewish world as well. And it seems that Mu'atezila, a lot of these, or you can argue all of the 13 principles, that are in the polemical aspect to them. In other words, he is trying to argue against a position that he believes to be heretical, this idea that God does not create everything, that we create some of our actions, that God does not know everything. He doesn't know particulars. He only knows, you know, essences. So this is soundly refuted by Mu'atezila in his writings. They also had to deal with this idea. And our theologians, they would quote from the Quran, that God created you and your actions. Allah is the only real creator. Allah is the creator of everything. So these are some of the proof texts that our theologians would use. They would quote from the book of Isaiah, for example, which is in the Nabeem, the prophets, that middle section of the Chumash. So Isaiah chapter 45 verse 6 and 7, where God is the speaker. And Isaiah is speaking the words of God, although Isaiah is choosing the wording, according again to the Jewish tradition. Where he says, I make peace. And I create evil. God says, I make peace, but I create evil. He creates everything, even evil. But notice how he says it, I make peace, I'm the doer of peace, and I create evil. So even though God is the creator of evil, and ultimately he is the doer of every action, the way that it's worded in scripture, is a way that we should think about it. And then he says, I am the Lord, and I do all of these things. I do all of these things. So God, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, for my monities, God, Habvore, the creator, is the only creator. He's the only creator. And he's the doer of all actions. So God's omnipotence includes the power to will that which is evil, from our perspective. Right, so this is an important concept. God's omnipotence, his kodra, includes the power to will that which is evil, at least from our perspective. So the rationalists, they denied this, and they said things like good and evil have intrinsic properties, and that the intellect knows, and that God is bound to act within. Right, so good and evil exist outside of God as absolute things. They have intrinsic properties, and so God is bound to be good according to what is good. So this whole idea is a philosophical argument that is brought out by Plato. The Euthyphro dilemma, right, are things good because God says they're good, or does God say they're good, this argument, ultimately, Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala is the standard of good. Good and evil do not exist as, they don't have any type of sort of ontological existence up there in the ether somewhere, distinct from Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala is the one to determine what is good and what is evil. So this is what he's heading at here. Just to give some more notes here, from the Orthodox tradition of Judaism, the rabbis say that faith, iman, which they call imuna, it requires yadi'a, or ilm, knowledge, or ma'rifah. In other words, credulity, believing in something without evidence is actually blame-worthy, right? So you must know that God exists, you must know that within yourself, right? You have to prove it to yourself that God exists, you have to find evidence of God's existence. Fa'alam annahu la ilaha illallah, as the Quran says, know that there is no God but Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So the aqal, the aqal comes first. The aqal in Hebrew is called the sechel, and it is a necessary condition of naqal, and we would concur with this, right? In order for you to be tasked to believe in the revelation of God, the naqal, you have to have intellect. It's a necessary condition. It's not a sufficient condition because there are other conditions, right? There certainly is necessary. So it's necessary for you to be able to understand at least, like what is the difference if we say, for example, God has neither kathra or adad, right? God has no multiplicity whatsoever with respect to kathra or adad, right? To understand what that means, you know, like this is one pen, right? But this pen is composed of multiple things. That's called kathra. So this has nothing to do with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. You might have two pens, right? So a plural of numbers. This has nothing to do with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. You might have three similar pens. You might have three pens that, in essence, they have pennice, right? But one's blue, one is red, and one is black. So different attributes of one essence. That has nothing to do with Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So that's important. We'll get back to that idea as well, when we talk about the rigid oneness of Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala. So the rabbis say that Ammuna begins with the sekhal end. So faith begins where the intellect stops, right? But the sekhal leads you to faith. The aqal, the intellect leads you to faith. They are not in conflict, right? The sekhal is not a hindrance to God. It can be trusted to a certain degree. We use logic. At some point logic will break down, especially when we talk about God, we talk about metaphysics. Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala, God is greater than human logic. But we still use logic. So it's really a faith based on evidence, right? It's reasonable faith, right? Like Richard Dawkins is incorrect when he says that faith is belief without evidence. That's not what it is at all, right? You believe because it is reasonable to believe. It's reasonable to believe in God. Again, that's the task of the dialectical theologian. That's the task of Maimonides in the Dala Latul Haireen, the guide for the perplexed. Why is it reasonable to believe in God? How is belief consistent with reason? This goes all the way back to the pre-socratics. Someone like Heraclitus, who just looked at nature and in the Quran, we are encouraged to look at nature. Look at what Heraclitus called logos. We talked about this last week as well. There's an ordering principle in nature. Things are ordered. Things are predictable in nature, right? He called that logos or logos. The Quran says, They not look at the camels and how they're created, right? Look at the creation of the camel. It's incredible, right? Look at the heavens, how we raise them high, how we made the earth to appear like a carpet. These are great signs. Look at nature's evidence of God. The Alam, right? That's what the world is called. The Alam is related to Alama. It's a great sign of Allah SWT. So that's important. So Heraclitus, he looked around and he saw logos. Now, later on, another philosopher that's still pre-socratic, Anaxagoras, I believe, he said, look, if there's logos in nature, if there's order in nature, then someone must have ordered it, right? There must be some grand intellect and he called it the noose, the intellect. The noose is the one who ordered the universe. So that's what his intellect, that's what his reason compelled him to admit that there's order in the universe and someone must have put it there. There must be some intelligence that has ordered the universe, right? So the rabbis, they speak of Ibrahim A.S. and they call him Avraham Avino, our father Abraham, that he looked at creation and he came to know that God exists, right? So Abraham, according to the Jewish tradition, was a type of evidentialist, right? That you look at evidence to arrive at faith in God. And there's something of this in the Quran as well. We find in Surat Al-An'am, Ibrahim A.S., looking at a star and Najam, Haatharabbi, this is my Lord. Falamma afala, and then it's set. This is not my Lord, right? And then he saw the moon, this is my Lord, Haatharabbi. And then it's set, unless Allah SWT guides me, I shall be of those who are lost. Then he saw the shams, the sun, right? Haathihirabbi, this is my Lord. Falamma afala, and then it's set, right? So don't get the wrong idea here. There's no question of Ibrahim A.S. even entertaining the thought of worshiping the celestial bodies, right? This is his argument against his people. He's trying to demonstrate to them the futility in the worship of things that are mutable, things that change. If something is changing, it's constantly changing, even if it's predictable. If it's changing, then it's not eternal. If it's not eternal, then it cannot be worshiped in its right. It's not a معبود بحقه. Right? So this is Wallahu Alaam. This is the point. This is what we get from the argumentation. This is in Imam At-Tabari says there's a bit of sarcasm here that this is the argument he's presenting to his people, that you're worshiping the celestial bodies, right? He's trying to understand or thought process, explain it to them and try to drive home the futility of worship, of creation. Right? God cannot change because God is perfect and you can't improve on perfection. Right? So the anthropic principle, right? The teleological argument. Some people call this the argument for intelligent design or fine-tuning, the great watchmaker analogy going back to William Paley. So the Midrash, which is the word for tafsir in Hebrew, the Midrash says that Ibrahim Alaam as a child, he figured this out by listening to his Neishama. This is a term in Hebrew, Neishama, which is translated as mind. It's more like fitrah, right? I would say kind of a theological or moral compass, the level of the soul that sort of pulls you towards a greater understanding of the divine. And this is the purpose of the Shabbat, Yom Shabbat, Yom Asapt according to Judaism, is that when the body is not working, you can listen to your Neishama, you can listen to your moral compass, if you will. And you reflect upon God and His greatness, you listen to your soul without any type of worldly distractions. So this is a bit akin to the maturity position of Aqal Maqal, that the Aqal is, there's enough evidence for the Aqal to arrive at a creator God, right? But the intellect must be aided with Naqal to know the Shari'a, the sacred law, although the one could argue that there are ma'ruf, there are things that are simply known through the intellect, through innate knowledge that's still given by Allah SWT, that's given by the Al Wahhab, the one who bestows, that's a long argument about whether we have innate knowledge or whether we don't. Okay, so that's basically the first point here. The first principle, just to recap it again, God alone is a creator, it's only one creator, He is the direct doer of all things, the primary cause, the efficient cause. That's principle number one. Principle number two for Maimonides, he says, the same beginning, he says, I believe with sound faith that the Creator blessed be His name. He says, who, yahdi, huwa wahid. Remember Imam At-Tahawi's first statement, Inlallahah wahidun la shariqala. Alright, so here Maimonides says, God is yahid which is wahid, that's the cognate. He is one, he is uniquely one. And then he continues, Zain yahidoth kamohu besumpanim and there is not a uniqueness or oneness like him in any way, shape or form. Alright, any way, shape or form. So a lot of emphasis, he continues to say, and he by himself is our God who was, is and will be. Or that he was our God and is our God and always will be our God. Again, very poetic here, using the perfect tense and then immediately the active participle then the imperfect tense. So basically here then, with this principle, God is unique and he's radically one and immutable. He doesn't change. Malakai chapter 3 verse 6, I am the Lord and I change not. That Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is assalam. And this is one of the words, this is one of the names of God according to the rabbinical tradition as well. It doesn't mean the peace, it means the perfect. But God is perfect. He doesn't change because he is perfect and you cannot improve on perfection. So the commentators also go to say here that God does not incarnate into human flesh. He doesn't become a human being. This would compromise his radical uniqueness and his immutability. He is also transcendent of space, time and matter. Right? So the word for uniqueness are once in Arabic, wahdaniyah. The Hebrew equivalent is yakhiduth, yakhiduth wahdaniyah. Right? And the great statement in the Torah, the great monotheistic statement of the Torah is Deuteronomy 6.4. So remember Deuteronomy, Genesis, the Leviticus, numbers Deuteronomy. The fifth book of the khumash, the fifth book of the five books of Moses is called Deuteronomy. That's the English name taken from the Latin or Greek, meaning second law. 6.4 of Deuteronomy, shma'islael adonai ilohinu adonai ikhad. This is like their shahada. Right? So when one enters into Judaism and one can convert into Judaism, there's some sort of misunderstanding, popular misunderstanding that Judaism does not allow proselytes or converts. That's not true at all. You can convert to Judaism. And when one does convert to Judaism, one will recite the shema. The shema, Deuteronomy 6.4. Here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Right? And devout Jews, they try to recite this as much as they can. They want it to be the last words on their tongue before they die. That God is ikhad adonai ilohinu adonai ikhad. The word, the Hebrew word ikhad is spelled exactly the same as ahad. Kulhu Allahu ahad. God is one. Right? And there's some interesting curious parallels to Plato in the Parmenides, for example. Plato refers to God as tahen the one. Right? Of course, Platinus, who wrote Aeneides, who is the great formulator of Neoplatinism, which is a third century religious interpretation of Plato. We have this whole system. He's a system builder, the hierarchy of being and so on and so forth. And the Godhead, consisting of the one that he said, tahen, then you have the logos, then you have the suke, the spirit. Right? We'll talk more about that when we get to Christianity because Christians borrowed from this idea. But even if we go back to Plato again, in the Timaeus, right, one of his dialogues, he says that God looked around the world and he said it was good. Right? And that is very curious parallel to something we find in Genesis 1, when God is creating in stages, on these different, what is the plural of yom in Hebrew. I think it's yomim. I think it's a sound plural. We'd say ayam in Arabic. When God is creating different things on these yomim, after each day he says, it is good. It is good. And this is something that Plato says in the Timaeus. There's this legend, right? This is sort of ad hoc. There's no strong evidence of this, but there's this legend, very interesting, that Plato was captured at Syracuse and he was enslaved and he was brought to Egypt. And Egypt at the time of Plato had a pretty sizable Jewish population. I mean Alexandria in Egypt would be one of the great Jewish capitals of the world. The first place where the Torah was translated into Greek, into any other language, the first language was Greek, was in Alexandria Egypt in 250 before the Common Era. So there's a sizable population of Jews living in Egypt. And the legend is that Plato in Egypt read the books of Moses and he was highly influenced in his metaphysics. Again, there's no evidence of this as conjecture, but it's an interesting theory. Of course, Plato is much more metaphysical than someone like Aristotle, even though Aristotle studied under Plato. If you've ever seen that great painting of Raphael, it's called The Academy, where you have all these philosophers and then right in the middle, on the left side I believe you have Plato who's holding the Timaeus, his most metaphysical work, and he's pointing up like this because for Plato, reality, the real essences of things are found in the celestial realm. What we have here are just shadows on the wall, if you will. So here the famous theory of ideal forms in the celestial realm, the essences of things. And of course the essence or the form of the good is God. He's the form of the good for Plato. This idea would be bothered, would be borrowed by middle Platonists who were religious and they would say all of these forms God's mind, right? But Aristotle in that painting is to the right and he's holding his ethics and he's got his hand over the earth like this. He's not pointing up, he's pointing parallel to the earth because Aristotle is an empiricist and a hylomorphist and I believe that the essences or forms of things are in matter itself. Form or essence and matter are not separate as Plato taught. So that was a major difference of opinion that Aristotle had with his teacher Plato. But nonetheless, whatever happened here, it's an interesting, curious parallel between Genesis and some of the Platonic dialogues. So Shema, right? So the Shema, right, their shahada begins with here. Here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And to hear doesn't just mean to hear, it means to receive, to accept. Really it means to obey, right? So the five senses, the five physical senses, they correlate to different spiritual senses, if you will, right? There's sort of a correlation dealing with spirituality. So in scripture, to give you an example, hearing something means to obey, right? And they said, we believe, we hear, and we obey. So these are synonymous. This is a synonymic juxtaposition here, right? There's synonyms. To hear something means to obey. To see something means to understand. It's an interesting ayah in the Qur'an. وَإِنْ تَدْعُوْهُمْ إِلَا الْهُدَاءَ لَا يَسْمَعُواْ Allah SWT speaking to the Prophet SAW, when you call them to guidance, right, they don't hear. What does it mean? They don't hear. They didn't hear the words of the Prophet SAW. When they heard him, they don't obey him. وَتَرَاهُمْ يَنْدُرُونَ إِلَيْكَ وَلَا يُبْسِرُونَ And you see them looking at you, but they didn't see. You see them looking at you, but they don't see, right? To see something means to understand something, right? You say that in English. So I'm going to explain something to you. You say, ah, I see, right? And then you have three different degrees of experience. You smell, touch, and taste. You smell something, right? You don't quite touch it, but you get something of it. And you touch something that's a deeper level of experience. And then you taste it. That's the deepest, right? You take it into your body, you accept it completely. It's a vok, right? Imam Rosali talks about this. The tastewon's faith, there's Haditha mentioned. The sweetness of faith, right? The sweetness of faith. So the Shema, here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It doesn't just mean here. It means to obey. Obey. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Right? So the rabbis say that Hashem, Echad, God is one. Yes. It's not enough to just accept the rational proposition that God is one. Just to give it some ear service. One must prove one's faith, they say, by following the commandments. The mitzvot, this is the Hebrew term that's used in the Bible, mitzvot are commandments. Right? So there are three requirements for the new convert. Right? And I think the misunderstanding comes from the idea that in Orthodox Judaism, as well as conservative Judaism, it is not necessary for one to convert to Judaism in order to be successful in both worlds. This is very interesting. Right? So Jews in the Orthodox tradition, and the conservative tradition, and other reform as well. Although when we get to reform Judaism, many of them don't even believe in God, so we'll just talk about the Orthodox tradition. There are seven laws that they call the Noah Hiddic laws. The Noah Hiddic laws, the Noah Hyde laws, they're called the the the seven laws of the children of Noah for non-Jews. So if you're born outside of the Jewish faith, or your mother is not Jewish, if your mother is Jewish, then you have to follow all 613 of the commandments. There's no way out of it. You can't say, I converted to Islam, therefore I'm just going to follow the seven Noah Hiddic laws, and I'll be fine. That conversion is not acceptable. If your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish. So in Judaism the Jewish faith is passed matrilineally. The tribe comes from the father, you know, whatever your tribe, the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Levi, right? The tribe of Isacar, whoever it might be, the 12 tribes. But Jewishness is passed through the mother, right? But let's just say that you're an Iranian like me, right? My mother is not Jewish. So, if I believed, and I kept the seven Noah Hiddic laws, and these seven Noah Hiddic laws, Jews would argue are ma'aruf, they're known, they're innate, they're axiomatic, right? Everybody knows them. They are, God is one, or sometimes they explain it by saying that people know innately the futility of worshiping idols, the futility of worshiping material things, they know innately that's wrong even though a lot of people do that. It goes against the fitra, and of course the fitra can be or God is one, not to steal, not to commit adultery, right? Not to murder, right? Not to while it's still alive. Basically what that means is respect creation, respect animals, respect all of creation. Set up courts of justice is one of them as well. Let's see if I can I think I'm missing one here. Yeah. Oh, don't blaspheme God, right? So, you know, recognize there's a single creator, God, that's the first one, and then not to blaspheme God or curse God. So if one recognizes that God is a creator and he's all powerful and he's the creator of us, he's the creator of everything, then one knows not to be respectful towards God. So those are the seven. So according to Judaism, if one, if a gentile, that's the word for non-Jew, goi in Hebrew, if a goi follows these seven Noahidic laws, they will be successful in this life and the next, and the next life is what takes precedence. They call it the olam haba, the world that come. This is the olam hazeh, this is this world, right? And then there's an olam haba, the coming world, right? The one who follows these seven Noahidic laws. So, rabbis are trained, if someone comes to them, if a goi comes to them and says, I want to convert to Judaism, the rabbis are trained to turn that person away three times, because for them there's no need to convert to Judaism. If you follow the seven Noahidic laws, you'll be successful, right? But they say, if you become a Jew, then the burden of spreading the light of el echad falls down on your shoulders. Now you have a great responsibility to spread the light of monotheism to all the nations. And you're going to fall short of that. And oftentimes in Jewish history you have what's known as collective punishment. You have the Jewish nation being punished as a whole. So the rabbis would tell the proselyte, if you want to convert, get ready for a lot of trials and tribulations and musibat and so on and so forth. It's not going to be easy. Or you can remain a non-Jew, follow the seven Noahidic laws and you'll go to the next life and you'll be in a good state. So what's then the incentive for becoming a Jew then? Why would anyone convert to Judaism? Well, if you convert to Judaism and you keep all 613 commandments, right? And you do them and you suffer in this world you will have the highest of stations in the next life. That's the incentive. So there's degrees in the Ulam Haba in the world to come. I'm out of time. We'll continue talking about these principles next time. Insha'Allah.