 So I thought a good thing to look at when it comes to Judaism is the famous creed of Maimonides. So Maimonides famous rabbi philosopher, he died in the early 13th century. He was buried in Fustath 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 inshallah. 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, which is oftentimes translated as the guide for the perplexed. It's called the Murem Nevukhim 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 Hira? 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 that the Tao comes from Torah. There's a noon in there, which is from Nibine, it means prophets. And then the calf, which is more guttural in Hebrew. So Tanakh comes from Qitubim, 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 comes from, 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 Dreschith, 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, is called Dreschith, because the book begins, Dreschith Barah Elohim et Hashemayim et 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 A.S., wrote these books. They are equivalent to our conception of the Qur'an as far as the Qur'an being a dictate from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. So Musa A.S. 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 Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, 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, the Sevidicist 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? So 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, aka Old Testament, as well as something called the talmud. The word talmud is related to the Arabic tilmeed, right? And tilmeed 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 Suyuti and Zarkashi and others, the term wahi is prophetic revelation. So Musa, in our tradition, Ibrahim, they received the wahi, right? But saints or non-profits, the Quran says that the Hawariyun, the disciples of Isa, 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, Jews, 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 receive the first five books and then Musa al-Islam, Moses, peace be upon him, according to Judaism, as he would live his life and situations would arise with the Israelites and 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 a common era. So it's kind of like the hadith of Musa al-Islam, 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 tanakh, right? The Old Testament, which is the Torah, the Khumash, in other words, the Nebim, 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 my monities then, the genius of my monities is that he's able to take this massive corpus of literature. I mean, you look at the the tanakh 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 kaffir, right, 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. My monities, he confused, which is essential with that, which is derivative. But generally, my monities, his articulation of the creed is accepted by my Jews, the world over, right. So he called these the Sholashah Ashar Iqarei Amunah, 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 my monities, inshallah. So now continuing to principle number one, Iqar number one, as articulated by my monities. He says, 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. And 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 that he frames it, using the asa, 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, 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. But now 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 of 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 of 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, that God, none, no one can create anything except for God, right? So if you examine the rationalists, the Mu'atezila claim, this controversial, the creation of that the rationalists were 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 Maimonides, a lot of these, or you can argue all of the 13 principles has a 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 Maimonides in his writings, as well as the theologians of Ahlu Sunnah and the Jama'a. 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. Maimonides 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 to the Jewish tradition, where he says, I make peace and me 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. Right? 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 Maimonides, God, the creator, is the only creator. He's the only creator. And he's a 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? So therefore they're good. This argument ultimately, ultimately, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, is the standard of good. Right? 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 subhanahu wa ta'ala. Allah subhanahu 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 that faith, iman, which they call imuna, it requires yadiyah or ilm, knowledge or ma'rifah. In other words, credulity, believing in something without evidence is actually blameworthy. 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 Qur'an says, know that there is no God but Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Right? So the aqal comes first. The aqal in Hebrew is called the sakhal 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? But it 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 subhanahu wa ta'ala. You might have two pens. Right? So a plural of numbers, this has nothing to do with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. You might have three similar pens. You might have three pens that, in essence, they're, they have pennness. 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 subhanahu 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 subhanahu wa ta'ala. So the rabbis say that Ammuna begins with the Sakhal An. So faith begins where the intellect stops. Right? But the Sakhal leads you to faith. The Akal, the intellect leads you to faith. They are not in conflict. Right? The Sakhal 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. It's Allah subhanahu 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 the guide for the perplexed. Why is it reasonable to believe in God? Right? How is belief consistent with reason? This goes all the way back to the pre-socratic, the pre-socratic. 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. 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 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 the 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 Azeenu, 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 Surah 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 subhanahu wa ta'ala guides me, I shall be of those who are lost. Then he saw the shams, the sun. Right? Haathihirab, 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 these celestial bodies. Right? This is his argument against his people. He's trying to demonstrate to them the futility and the worship of things that are mutable, things that change. 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 worshipped in its right. It's not a ma'abood bi haqihi. Right? So this is, wallahu alam, this is the point. This is what we get from the argumentation. This is in imam atabbi says there's a bit of sarcasm here, that this is the argument he's presenting to his people, that you're worshiping these celestial bodies. Right? He's trying to understand her 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 alayhi salam 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 sapt 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 maturidi position of akal naqal, that the akal is, there's enough evidence for the akal to arrive at a creator God. Right? But the intellect must be aided with naqal to know the sharia, the sacred law, although the one could argue that there are ma'ruf, that there are things that are simply known through the intellect, through thing, through innate knowledge that's still given by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, that's given by the al wahhab, the one who bestows met 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, yahid, huwa wahid. I've heard Imam At-Tahawi's first statement, inl allaha wahidun la sharikala. All right, 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, and there is not a uniqueness or oneness like Him in any way, shape or form. All right, 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. Nalakai chapter 3 verse 6, I am the Lord and I change not. That Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala is As-Salam. 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. So the word for uniqueness or in Arabic, the Hebrew equivalent is in the great statement in the Torah, the great monotheistic statement of the Torah is Deuteronomy 6.4. So remember Deuteronomy Genesis, Exodus, 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. This is like their shahada. 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, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. 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 Ichad, Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ichad. The Hebrew word Ichad is spelled exactly the same as Ahad. And there's some interesting curious parallels to Plato and the Parmenides, for example, Plato refers to God as tahen the one. Of course, Platinus, who wrote Aeneides, who is the great formulator of Neoplatonism, 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. 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, one of his dialogues, he says that God looked around the world and he said it was good. 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, I am an 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. 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 timeus, 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 to Agathon is God. He's the form of the good for Plato. This idea would be borrowed by middle Platemists who are religious and they would say all of these forms God's mind. 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. He believed 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 the Shema, their shahada begins with here. Here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And to here doesn't just mean to hear, it means to receive, to accept. Really it means to obey. So the five senses, the five physical senses, they correlate to different spiritual senses, if you will. There's sort of a correlation dealing with spirituality. So in scripture, to give you an example, hearing something means to obey. They said we believe, we hear and we obey. So these are synonymous. This is a synonymic juxtaposition here. There's synonymous. To hear something means to obey. To see something means to understand. It's an interesting ayah in the Quran. When you call them to guidance, they don't hear. What does it mean? They don't hear. They didn't hear the words of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. Of course they heard him. They don't obey him. And you see them looking at you, but they didn't see. You see them looking at you, but they don't see. To see something means to understand something. You say that in English. Someone explained something to you. He said, ah, I see. And then you have three different degrees of experience. Smell, touch, and taste. Smell something. 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. You take it into your body. You accept it completely. It's a vok. Imam Ghazali talks about this. Vok, to taste one's faith. There's hadith that mentioned. The sweetness of faith, the taste, right? The sweetness of faith. So the Shema, here, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Doesn't just mean hear. It means to obey. Obey. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Right? So the rabbis say that Hashem, 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 mitzvot, 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, whatever your tribe, the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Levi, the tribe of Simeon, of Issachar, whoever it might be, the 12 tribes. But Jewishness is passed through the mother. But let's just say that you're an Iranian like me. 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'ruf, they're known, they're innate, they're axiomatic, 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, but God is one, not to steal, not to commit adultery, not to murder, 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. See if I can, I think I'm missing one here. Yeah. Oh, don't blaspheme God, right? So I 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 disrespectful 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 to come. This is the olam hazeh, this is this world, right? And then there's an olam haba, the coming world, right? One of the 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 prosolite, 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 olam haba and the world to come. I'm out of time. We'll continue talking about these principles next time, inshallah. So last time we ended by looking at the first and second principles of Jewish faith as articulated by Maimonides in his Mishnah Torah. So just to recap very quickly, he said the first one is that God alone is a Creator and the direct doer of all things. He's a primary cause and efficient cause of all things. And then number two, he said that God is unique and radically one and immutable, right? So just by way of commentary, we talked about the Shema is something equivalent in some respects to our Shahada. Deuteronomy 6-4, we mentioned that last time. Here, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, the great testification of the oneness of God. So the rabbis say that one should say the Shema with Kavanah. Kavanah is a very important concept in Judaism. It means something like focus or humility or devotion, kind of similar to what we would say is khushur or echlas. It's very difficult to translate. Rabbi Akiva, according to the Gamara, remember Gamara now is the rabbinical commentaries on the Mishnah, the oral law, or the second half of the Talmud. Rabbi Akiva, he is famous for reciting the Shema at his death. He was actually killed by the Romans during the failed Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 of the Common Era. He actually endorsed this man, Simon Bar Kokhba, as being the true Jewish Messiah. And Bar Kokhba actually was able to defeat the Roman legions at Fort Antonia in Jerusalem. He was actually able to seize the temple at some point, but he was killed thereafter in battle. But according to the Gamara, Akiva, its final words were the Shema. According to many eyewitnesses, many of the Jews that were going to a gas chambers during the Holocaust, they were heard reciting the Shema. Again, that's Deuteronomy 6.4. So the Emunah of El-Akhad, the faith or the belief in one God, this is, according to Jews, the Jewish contribution to the world, that they brought the light of Tawheed to all the nations, to the Goyim. So we would have issues, a very problematic statement. We would say, for example, that, I mean, the term Judaism, as we said, it's an acronistic to use at the time of Abraham or Noah. There was no such thing as Judaism at the time of Abraham, alaihi salam, the term Judaism. The eponym of Judaism is Judah, or Yahuda, who's one of the older sons of Jacob. Of course, Jacob is the grandson of Abraham of Abraham. So in the Quran makes this clear, it doesn't make sense to call him a Jew. It's an acronistic. It's kind of like saying George Washington was a fan of the Washington Nationals. There was no such thing as Major League Baseball at the time. It's an acronistic. It's a bit ridiculous to say that. So we would say that all of these prophets, Abraham, Noah, Adam, all of them were Muslim. They were submitters unto God. But this is Jewish theology. So the Jews believe that El Echad, monotheism, Yahydus monotheism, is the Jewish contribution into the world, and that the Jews were chosen to bring the light of the one God to the world. So this is the essence. This is the definition of their chosenness. We hear this phrase, the chosen people. Why are they chosen? They're chosen to bring Tohid to the nations, to the world. This is the nature of their chosenness. So it's really seen now as a burden and something that is a major responsibility. That's how they actually look at it. The poet said how odd of God to choose the Jews, just two lines of poetry, quick poetry. This is mentioned in the Quran, where Allah speaks in the first person, and I chose you, ya Bani Israel, as the context, and I chose you above all of the nations. Why were they chosen? What's the nature of this chosenness? They were chosen to bring the light of monotheism to the nations. But certainly monotheism existed in our conception of sacred history way before Bani Israel, way before Musa alaihi salam, even before Abraham, Abraham alaihi salam. So the rabbis go on to say that physicality has nothing to do with God. Physicality implies limitation. God is not physical, he's not corporeal. So there may be one U.S. president, but he is not unique. There's one Wahid U.S. president, but he's not Ahad, he's not unique. So he's flesh and blood, like all other mammals, he is in space-time. So again, getting to this differentiation between, or distinction between Wahid and Ahad. And again, many of our theologians say that they're absolutely synonymous. But others would say no, God is, for example, Wahid and his Sifat, his attributes, but Ahad in his essence. We mentioned last time, probably the Hebrew equivalent to Wahid is Yahid, which is a term that's used by Maimonides. It's from the same exact root. And it can denote this type of eternal oneness with God, that he's one person, meaning one consciousness, that there's no multiplicity in the so-called Godhead, a simple unity. And of course by simple we don't mean unintelligent, we mean indivisible, radically one. Whereas Ahad, which the equivalent is in Deuteronomy 6.4 in the Shema, Ahad, again the same exact word from the same root, denotes his external oneness, that his utter uniqueness, right, that nothing in creation resembles him whatsoever, right, utter dissimilarity to creation. Now the rabbis go on to say that it is permissible for Jews to pray in a mosque as long as they face al-Qutz, Yerushalayim, Jerusalem. It is not considered idolatry because Muslims worship el-Ekhad, Muslims worship the one true God, right? So for the most part our theology is correct. They have issues with our prophetology, right, and our Akhida with respect to sacred texts, and we'll talk about that. But our theology really, I would say that the differences are are minor. However, they mentioned that the Shilush, that's the Hebrew term, Shilush, Arabic is a, what is the Arabic term? Tathlith, right? Tathlith, Trinity, Shilush, the Trinity is considered idolatry according to almost all the consensus of at least the classical Jewish authorities. They call this Avudah Zaraa, Avudah Zaraa, Avudah is ibadah, Zaraa means false, right, so false worship or idolatry because the Trinity, and we'll talk about the Trinity next week, inshallah, and the week after that, the Trinity involves what's known as hypostatic multiplicity, this idea that there are multiple persons of God, that there are three separate indistinct persons of God, and that all three are co-eternal and co-substantial, co-equal. This is highly problematic for Maimonides, so he doesn't consider this to be correct theology by any means. So all of the major rabbis, they say that the leaf in the Tathlith or the Shilush is Avudah Zaraa, is Shirk. The rabbis are famous for saying We would rather live under Ishmael, meaning the Arabs or Muslims, rather than under Edom or Rome or the Christians. If you look throughout Jewish history, the Jews really flourished under Muslim caliphates, especially when we look at Muslim Spain, Muslim North Africa. Jewish systematic theology was born in Muslim Spain. Maimonides, Joseph Alba, Judah Hallavi, Saadia Gayon, these are the great Jewish thinkers and philosophers, systematic theologians. Most of them actually wrote in Arabic, that was their primary language. Maimonides wrote the guide for the perplex, the Dalalatul Ha'ireen. He wrote it actually in Arabic, it was translated later into Hebrew. But if you look at Jewish communities living in Christendom or Christian Europe, it was very precarious. And oftentimes, there were pogroms set against them, that sort of state-sponsored terrorism or persecution. They were exiled several times, twice from England, twice from France, a couple of times, they think also from Austria. The plague was blamed on them because Jewish communities that were actually living in their own cloistered communities at the time. They did not mix with the Goyim until much, much later. We're talking maybe 17th, 18th centuries, 17th or 18th century when they actually started to intermix and live among the Gentiles. But in the Middle Ages, you have the Christians dying, something like 40% of Christendom was decimated by the black plague, the Bubonic plague. But the Jewish communities relatively unaffected. So of course, they were scapegoated, this is because of you, you're killers of Christ, this type of thing, you've cursed us. And the reason why the Jews weren't dying from the plague is because there's a Seder, there's a chapter in the Mishnah, which is called Tohorot, which is the Bab of Tahara. So the Jews had these ideas of cleanliness, of hosul, of wudu, of najasa. And that's where the disease from fleas and from rats and things like that. So there's that famous statement, we'd rather live under Ishmael, Ismael alaihi salam. Arabs are usually the Muslims are referred to in rabbinical literature as Ishmaelites. Imonides refers to the prophet as that Ishmaelite, for example, in the Mishnah Torah. The rabbis say something interesting, they say Christianity is like a pig, the pig appears to be kosher. So what is kosher according to, you know, we say kosher, cash root, what is halal for a Jew to eat, at least for the Orthodox and conservative, animals that have a cloven hoof and chew the cud, right? So like an animal that can eat food, it's called a ruminant, it can bring it back up and chew it later, like a cow or a goat, a sheep can do that, a giraffe can do that, giraffe is actually kosher, but camels don't, camel is not kosher. So they're saying Christianity is like a pig, you know, the pig has a split hoof, but it does not chew the cud. So in other words, we're saying Christianity looks great, it sounds great on the outside, right? It looks good on the outside, but it's a deceptive, right? Christianity, you know, if you if you talk to Christians, there's a strong emphasis on relationship and love of God, which is great, you know, we believe in those things as well. But when the Sharia is is not emphasized, there's nothing to ground you, then you start saying deviant things, right? So there's that famous statement of Imam Malik Ibn Anas, the Imam of Medina, who said that whoever studies Tasawuf, when they use that term, right, we say Sufism, I don't necessarily like that, Tasawuf al-Ihsan, al-Mussuluk, right, al-Muttazkia, it has different asma, according to the Mabadi al-Ashar, for the science of Tasawuf, he said whoever studies Tasawuf but did not engage in fiqh in Sharia, faqad tzendaka, right, that he will become a zindiq, that he will become a heretic, that's what the word zindiq means, or an unbeliever, right, so it's a very dangerous state, but whoever studies fiqh, sharia, but did not study Tasawuf, faqad tfasaka will become a fasq, which is not as bad as a zindiq, right, it's better to err on the side of the sharia, right, he says whoever, wa man jama'a baynahuma, faqad thaqqaqa, and whoever joins the two will actualize the truth, right, so the rabbis also mentioned, for example, you shouldn't walk next to a church, right, I mean it's not an official mitzvah, right, the 613 mitzvot are in the Torah, and the Talmud, really in the Torah, they're all there, according to Maimonides, is an enumeration of the 613 commandments, but this is a strong recommendation given by the rabbis that if you're walking down the street and you see a church, you should cross the street because it's good to keep a safe distance from all idolatry, so it's actually prohibited for a Jew to walk into a church, and the Orthodox would even say it's prohibited to go for an Orthodox rabbi or an Orthodox Jew to go into a Reformed synagogue because there isn't a total commitment to all of the mitzvot in the Reformed synagogue, Reformed Temple. Questions about the kippah, the kippah is the small skull cap that Jewish men tend to wear, and this is a mitzvah, it is a commandment, it's called the kippah in Hebrew which means to cover, it's called a yarmulka in Yiddish, which is a sort of kind of a dead language, but it was spoken by Jews in Eastern Europe in the second century. The purpose of it is to remind the Jewish man that there's something above him at all times, and Jewish women are also supposed to wear a something to cover their head, something like a hejab. Sometimes, I mean, if you go to an Orthodox community on the east coast, the cultural practice is that girls would get married and then they would shave their heads and wear a wig, right? So it's kind of a... So the point is not to show your real hair. Okay, so that's the second principle then. God is unique and radically one and immutable. Before we move on, a couple more things I want to say about that that's more focused on the theology rather than the practice. We mentioned last week that Maimonides was a negative theologian, right? He was a negative theologian, and many of the great systematic theologians of Judaism, Joseph Albow and others, Bahia ibn Pakuda, they tended to be a negative theologians, apophatic theologians, right? So they would engage the theological approach of negation, and this is called the lahut salbi in Arabic, and it's generally considered to be a safer way to theologize. What does it mean to theologize, right? Theos means God, lagas means many things, word or reason, so to speak reasonably, so to speak about God. It's better to talk about, in other words, it's better to talk about who or what God is not rather than who or what God is, right? So even Hinduism has a theological approach that is akin to negative theology. It's called nirguna Brahmanism, and we'll talk about that, inshallah, when we get to Hinduism. Adi Shankara calls it neti neti theology. He's sort of a champion of what's called transpersonalism, or nirguna Brahmanism, which means not this, not this, nothing in, nothing that you see in the so-called creation is, and I said so-called creation, we'll talk about what that means in Judaism, sorry, in Hinduism, because everything is ultimately an illusion in Hinduism. Nothing is actually God that you see, right? He is utterly transcendent. So why theologize like this, again, to uphold God's radical uniqueness, right? His yakhiduth, his wahdaniyah, because God's nature is wholly other. So if you look at the first two commandments, right? So we talk about, you know, the Ten Commandments, famous movie made in the 19, I guess it was in the late 50s, Charlton Heston as Moses, the Ten Commandments, I think they made another, a couple more Moses movies after that, they weren't very good. And that movie's not very good, it's not very accurate according to the Bible anyway, but everyone has heard of the Ten Commandments, but that's only ten of them. Those are the ten main commandments, but as we said, Jews believe that they're 613 commandments. But let's look at the first two commandments. So we'll find this in the book of Exodus chapter 20, right at the beginning of chapter 20. Remember Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Five Books, the Pentateuch, the Chumash, right, the Five Scrolls of Moses, this is the second book, Moses is on the mountain, and God says to him that I am the Lord thy God, right, who brought you out of the house of bondage out of Egypt, out of Mitzrayim, then he says, lo yehyeh laka ilohim al-panaih, you shall not have any other gods before me, right, so this is the first commandment, that the God that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, he's the only God, right, and when it says you shall have no other gods, that doesn't mean that there are other gods, right, what that means is that you shall have no other so-called gods, you shall not worship anything else other than me, because the God that is bringing you out of Egypt is the only true God, right, we find that term aliha in the Qur'an also, like the people of Ibrahim al-Salam, they were devoted to their aliha, their gods, those aren't really gods, they're so-called gods, right, so that's the first commandment, and then he says, lo ta'asil laka fassil ve kultamouna ashir, bishmai min ma'al, so now we're getting into the second commandment, it's kind of a long one, he says, God again, speaking directly to Moses and by extension, so laka, so this is the capital khitab, so speaking second person masculine singular to Moses, but as we, as Imam al-Syafiri says about the Qur'an, whenever Allah speaks to the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in the Qur'an directly, it is also by extension to the ummah unless it's very obvious that it's only speaking to him, right, so in this case, the rabbis would say to Moses and by extension, the am Yisrael or the bani Israel, right, the children of Israel, so he says, you shall not make unto yourself the likeness of any image which is in the heavens above you, min ma'al, the asher, the aritz mittakhat, or the likeness or the image of anything which is in the earth or on the earth below you, the asher, the mayim mittakhat la aritz, or the likeness or the image of anything that is in the water beneath the earth, right, that covers everything, that covers the universe, everything above the earth, on or in the earth and below the earth, right, nothing like God, those are the first two commandments of Exodus, right, we talked about numbers 2319, we talked about that, lo yishe'el, God is not a man that he should lie, and we mentioned that Rabbi Abahuh of Caesarea who died in 320 of the common era, who was actually a brilliant orator and a defender of Jewish faith in the face of the Christians, he was a sort of anti-Christian polemicist or apologist, Jewish apologist, he said the meaning of that is that whoever claims to be God is a liar, that's what the Hebrew actually means according to Rabbi Abahuh of Caesarea, right, we talked about Hosea 119, I am God and not a man, mutually exclusive God and man, right, Isaiah 558 is a very famous verse of transcendence, all of Dutero Isaiah, so according to historians of the Old Testament, the book of Isaiah actually has three authors, it was authored at three different times, so you have Proto-Isaiah from chapter one to chapter 39, and then chapters 40 to 66 is called Dutero Isaiah, and it's really in Dutero Isaiah where you get a strong teaching of God's transcendence, and then after that you have Trito-Isaiah, third Isaiah until the end of the book, but in Dutero Isaiah basically if you believe that God exists literally within the four elements, then you're a mushrik, then you're an idolater, God is transcendent, so 558 of Isaiah is right there, my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways, right, or Isaiah 40, chapter 20, sorry, chapter 40 verse 25, to whom will you liken me, right, it's a rhetorical question, nothing is like God, in fact the name Michael in Arabic, sorry the name Michael in Hebrew, it's Hebrew in origin, it's also, you know, Mika'el or Mika'el, it's in the Quran, the name of one of the archangels, but its origin is Hebrew, Mika'el, me, it means man, who in Arabic, and then Ka is the Ka'f, Ka'f tashbih, like we say, Laysa Ka, Mithlihi Shaitwan, right, so man Ka'el Allah or Illa, who is like God, it's a rhetorical question, it doesn't mean a man whose name is Michael is like God, it doesn't mean that, it's his name is a rhetorical question, who is like God, nobody is the answer, it's already understood that you know the answer, that's the point of a isthifam taqir, you already know the answer to the question, it's really just a reminder, right, okay, so negative theology, so according to Maimonides, right, when referring to God's nature or essence, right, so according to Maimonides the name of God's essence is the tetragrammaton, the four letter word or the four letters that you find all throughout the Hebrew Bible, right, it's the sort of initials of God's name, right, yod hay vav hay, yod hay vav hay, right, so you'll see that in the Hebrew you'll see it, usually in English it's just translated as Lord with a capital L or Lord all letters in caps, but that's actually the four letter name of God or the initials of God, now how do you articulate yod hay vav hay, the articulation is not known for sure, once a year on Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the high priest of the temple who was called the haqquhen al-gadol, he would go into the qadosh ha-tashim, the holy of holies inside the temple, right, the bait, what's called the bait mikdash, baitul makdis in Jerusalem, he would go into the innermost chamber on Yom Kippur and he would pronounce the holy name of God, the actual ismul'avam of God, right, the initials of which are yod hay vav hay, Y-H-W-H, so the high priest knew the name and he would make a toba on behalf of all of Israel by calling on God's most sacred name, tshuva, toba, repentance, and then he would pass knowledge of the name to his successor and he would pass it to his successor and so on and so forth, but since the temple is destroyed in 70 by the Romans, general Titus, the priesthood is gone, no more sacrifices, all right, the name has become lost to my monities, the yod hay vav hay, the tetragrammaton, the shem ha-ma-forosh as it's called in Hebrew, this is the name of God's essence, all right, and generally the Orthodox agree with him, the kabbalah, a text of Jewish mysticism, it disagrees with this and says that the actual name of God's essence is e'en-sulf, which means the one who is without limit, the limitless, that's the name of God's essence. Other rabbis, they use the name ma-hut, ma-hut, so right in the middle of ma-hut, you have the hua, the letters in Hebrew, hay and vav or ha and waw in Arabic, also if you look at that tetragrammaton again, yod hay vav hay, right in the middle again you have the hua, right, so these are the prominent letters of the sacred name of God and oftentimes in the Hebrew Bible, the tetragrammaton is shortened by just hu, right, for example the name Elijah, in Elijah in Hebrew is Eliyahu, Eliy means my God, Yahu is Yahu, right, which is again a shortened way of articulating the yod hay vav hay, but how to actually articulate all four letters is not decisively known, of course, and it's actually impermissible and a mortal sin for Jews to try to articulate that tetragrammaton. The Christians, of course, they don't have these religious scruples, so you'll find, for example, Jehovah witnesses, their claim to fame is that the yod hay vav hay is pronounced Jehovah, right, so they'll come to your door and they say, do you know the name of God? And, you know, they come to a Muslim house and the Muslims say Allah and they say, no, that's not a name, that's a title. Of course we say no, it's actually a name and there's a debate, but they're trained that no, Allah is a title, it's from the God, that's a minority opinion. Anyhow, so we can ask them, how do you get Jehovah? And they say, well, from the tetragrammaton, yod hay vav hay, y, h, w, h, so we ask them then, okay, those are four consonants, how do you know how to vowel it? And 100% of the time, 100% of the time, the Jehovah's witness will have no answer for you. And then you say, okay, fine, that's how you vowel it, so Jehovah, so Jehovah with a J, and they say, yes, but this is a yod in Hebrew, how do you go from a yod to a J? And again, 90% of the time, they won't have an answer for you, so it's conjecture, they really don't know, right, others would say Yahweh, but you hear that a lot too, Yahweh, right, that just seems to roll off the tongue, so that might be what it is. My opinion is, it's probably Yihda, Yihda is a fi'al mudarir, it's a present tense verb in perfect tense, which means he is, right? So verb meaning he is and continues to be, and then the shortened form of it, hu or hua, is the third person masculine pronoun, which again means he is, but it's a pronoun this time, it's not an actual verb, right? Ibn Arabi, he says ha-hut, as a possible name of the essence of God, ha-hut, so again that hua is in the middle, Imam Al-Razi suggested hua is al-ismul-a'lam, Allahu la ilaha illa hua, there's no God but hua, call hua Allahu ahad, say hua is Allah ahad, hua, that's the ismul-a'lam, Allahu alam, there's difference of opinion. Nonetheless, according to Maimonides, when referring to God's essence or nature, there are three main attributes, existing theologians would agree with that, the sifatunafsiyah, sort of the core attribute of God is existence, and it's not an accident, the attributes and accidents are different, God doesn't have accidents, he has an essence and attributes, the attributes are necessary, accidents are not necessary, so it was an accident that I was born Iranian and have a white beard now, that's an accident, if I was not born Iranian and my beard was black, I would still be me, it's not essential to my nature, that's an accident, but the fact that I have an intellect, that is an attribute of me, if I did not have intellect, then I wouldn't be classified as the rational animal, as the human being, the homo sapiens, the homo sapiens means the rational human being, so intellect is an attribute of the human being, whereas skin color, eye color, so on and so forth, all of these things are accidents, they're only possible, they're not necessary, it could have been different, if I had different color eyes, if I had no eyes, I would still be a human being, I was blind, I'd still be a human being, okay, so existence, unity, and eternity, three main attributes according to Maimonides, and even these, he says, we should understand them negatively, so it's better to say God is not non-existent, it's better to put things negatively, it's better to say that God, that with God, there is no plurality or multiplicity associated with him whatsoever, we talked about kathara and adad and so on and so forth, it's better to say that God is not bound by time, so even these core attributes, as articulated by Maimonides, are better to put them negatively, however, he says, we may speak of God positively, so in other words, kathaphatically, so we have apophatic negatively, kathaphatic, positively for the note takers, you can make kathaphatic expressions, positive expressions of God, but only in reference to a divine action in scripture, so for Maimonides, one cannot speak positively about God in any way, shape, or form, unless one relates it to an action that was done in scripture, I'll give you an example, so if you say for example, God is good in any language, so in Hebrew, you would say adonai tov, or tov elohim, right, so in English, God is good, so God there is the subject, the muptada is, is called the copulative verb, the linking verb, and then good is the predicate, or the khaba, this is a kathaphatic expression, Maimonides would say that expression is shirk, it is idolatry to make that statement, God is good, period, idolatry, because we did not relate it to an action, and also you can say moshay tov in Hebrew, Moses, shalom alayhi salam, peace be upon him, Moses is good, so good, the predicate good, the word good, the noun good can be predicated of many things, right, so how can you possibly use the same predicate for God and Moses, right, so for Maimonides, that's a big problem to do, from an aqi to standpoint, you're qualifying God with the same noun that you're qualifying Moses, you're saying using the same noun, so that's problematic, so for Maimonides, you have to say something like God is good or he is all good because he led the Jews out of Egypt and defeated the Pharaoh or something like that, so you can make a kathaphatic expression, you can make a positive statement about God as long as you use it in sort of the superlative and then relate it to something that God actually did in Scripture, so the divine names for Maimonides are simply and strictly descriptions of God's actions, that's all they are, the divine names of God in the Tanakh in the Hebrew Bible are simply and strictly descriptions of God's actions, so referring to God as king like melech, right, while not referencing an action in Scripture is shirk, is idolatry according to Maimonides because king can be predicated of many different human beings, right, David HaMelech, King David, Shlomo HaMelech, King Solomon, right, so it's God's action that makes him unique, not his names, no one can do God's actions, Solomon and David, not even Moses has the power intrinsically to bring anyone out of Egypt and defeat the Pharaoh, Moses didn't do that, Moses was a vehicle through which God actually did it, remember God is the doer of all actions, he's al-fa'il, free agent, as Maimonides articulated in his first principle, okay Maimonides says something interesting, he says, if you praise a king who possesses millions of gold pieces for possessing millions of silver pieces then you're actually disparaging and insulting the king, even though your intention is to praise the king, look at this king, he has so many millions of silver pieces, while he actually has gold pieces, your intention is to praise him but you're actually insulting and disparaging him, Aquinas said, even the praise of God is extremely remote from his reality and praising God actually requires a repentance, the praise of God, forget about the cursing of God, disbelief in God, the praising of God because you're using language and language is created, God is uncreated. So positive attributes may not be assigned to God unless these refer to God's actions and scripture, God is powerful because he did this, he saved us from the Pharaoh, so all divine names are derived from God's actions and scripture according to Maimonides, in other words, Jews cannot say that these names of God, and this is Maimonides' opinion, these names of God had no reality until after the creation of the world, according to Maimonides, the God is king like Melech and Shepard, Dura'i and Selah, God is the rock, you know, the exception to that is the tetragrammaton, because Maimonides said that actually refers to God's essence and God's essence was existent, it's a necessary existent obviously before creation, but if you say before creation that God was Melech Ha'olam, he's the king of Rabbul Alameen, Melekul Alameen for example, then that is too speculative for Maimonides, it's, you know, it's true in principle, but Maimonides just does not want to go there, it's too conjectural because these names are describing God's actions, that's what they're doing, so we cannot talk about God's essence by using these names before he actually did the action, of course, Imam At-Tahawi says something very interesting in his creed, he says that God can be, he's mousufun bi jami'i sifatihi min azaliya, that that that God, Allah swt, is can be described by all of his attributes from pre-eternality, because the capacity to create is always with God, is always with Allah, right, so, so he says istahaqa, ismal khalq, qabla l-khalq, he merits, he deserves the name, the creator even before creation, he merits the name Rabb even before Marbub, he merits the name Lord even before anything to Lord over, any creation he means, because the divine omnipotence, the potential, the full potential and capacity is there to create, so I'm sitting right now, this wa lillahi al-mathil al-a'la, this is just an example to sort of maybe bring our understandings, I'm sitting right now, but you can still describe me as al-qa'im, the standard, because I have an ability to stand, now that ability could be taken away from me, right, because Allah swt, God is in control of all things, he can incapacitate me, but the fact that I'm sitting now doesn't mean that I can't stand, that you can't describe me as a standard, you can describe me as a standard, because I have that ability, so with God, just because he did not create, he merits the name Khaliq, and nothing can incapacitate him, he makes a decision out of his absolute volition within his nature to create, nothing can stop his ira'dah, right, he is intrinsically independent, right, so Maimonides would disagree with that and say that's just too speculative, don't talk about God's essence before creation, that's conjecture, don't go there, the names of God are describing his actions and scriptures full stop, okay, now returning now, so that was, now we can go to the third principle where he begins by saying the same way, I believe with complete faith that the Creator blessed be his name, he says that he's not a body, a jisum, and there is not for him any likeness whatsoever, right, he's not a body, he's not matter, like a jisum murekab, a compounded body, he's not composed of anything, there's nothing like him whatsoever, alaysa kamithlihi sheywan, and what's interesting is that this statement was actually a bit controversial in 12th century Judaism, because many rabbis tended to be literalists, they were dahriyah when it came to the Tanakh, right, they were mujesimah, they were anthropomorphists, so they actually denied that the Bible has, the Hebrew Bible had a majaz meaning, didn't have a figurative meaning, everything was haqiqi, everything was literal, it's very problematic, Moses Ben Taku for example, was one of the famous anthropomorphists rabbis, he died in 1290, a few decades after the death of Maimonides, where he said the Tanakh is haqiqi, it's absolutely literal, it's like in Psalm 18 it says God has ears, he says yeah he has ears, and you know they're physical ears, and he has, you know, it says smoke exuded from the nostrils of God in the Psalms, right, he says yeah, that's exactly literally what happened, and how does Maimonides deal with passages like this, well the Tanakh has what we would call muhkamat and mutashabiha, and these terms are Quranic, right, muhkamat or verses, so ayat, muhkamat, wa uhkharu mutashabiha, right, so an aya mutashabiha is a verse in the Quran that is on the face very clearly understood, kind of one-dimensional, even in translation very clearly understood, muhkamat, you know, the name suggests that there's there's a verse of legal import, right, or what we would say in Jews would say in Judaism, it's halakik, it relates to the halak'a, right, there's a juristic aspect to that, and then you have mutashabiha, which are obscure verses or polyvalent verses that are not easily grasped, they require some study, they require commentary, they may be theological, they may be anthropomorphic, right, yadullahi fawqa adim, the yad of God is above their hands, and yad is usually translated as hand, so what does it mean, God has a hand, God's hand is above their hand, what does that mean, God has a physical hand, right, no it doesn't mean that, lesa kamitha lihi sheywan, so the best example, the quintessential example of an aya mutashabiha, right, of a pesuch, which is the word for aya in Hebrew, that is anthropomorphic in the Torah is Exodus 33-23, right, the quintessential anthropomorphic verse, this is when Moses asks to see God's face, he says let me see your panim, your face, and God says you'll see my ahor, you'll see my back, so what does this mean, so my mononies engages in ta'uil, esoteric exegesis of the Torah's mutashabiha, in other words he interprets these verses in light of God's transcendence, right, and this is the whole project of the guide of his magnum opus, the guide for the perplexed, what is he trying to do, he's trying to bring together naqal and aqal, revelation and reason, right, and preserve tanzi, preserve transcendence of God, so this is what he says, now before we get to my mononies, there was a another theologian that preceded my mononies, he died in the 10th century, his name was Saadia Gayon, he was probably the very first Jewish systematic theologian, very very famous, wrote in Arabic also, his book is called Beliefs and Opinions, Kitabu l-Amanat wa l-I'atikadat, I believe is the actual title, and then it was later translated as Safer Amunat or something like that, I don't remember exactly the Hebrew title, but Saadia Gayon, he lived in Iraq, he also did an incredible translation of the entire Hebrew Bible into Arabic, and Hebrew and Arabic are very close, it is by far the best translation of the Hebrew ever done, so how does Saadia Gayon, how does he deal with this, you know, you'll see, you won't see my face, you'll see my back, so he says, seeing the back of God means seeing, it means seeing a created light, right, which he calls the shekhina, which is related to the Arabic sakina, the shekhina represents God's presence on earth, it's a symbol of God's presence, it doesn't mean it's not God's presence literally, it symbolizes God's presence or tofu, right, this created light that Moses would see when he would go into the Mishkan, the Tabernacle of Meeting, the sort of portable temple, the prefigurement of the actual temple in Jerusalem, right, a temple that Moses would go into in the Sinai Peninsula and he would speak with God, Saadia says when God wanted to speak to Moses, he would create a light in front of Moses, telling Moses, getting his attention essentially, right, and this light is called the shekhina and this light was so brilliant that Moses could not look at it, he could only look at it when the light was sort of leaving and he would sort of see the tail end of it and Saadia says that sort of tail end of the light, that's the akhor adonai, that's the back of God, so he takes the passage as total majads, it's a figurative expression, seeing the back of God for Moses means that he saw a created light that God would manifest in the Tabernacle of Meeting and after some point it actually says in Exodus that Moses had to wear a veil over his face because the light was beginning to shine off his own face and it was a blinding light, so he would wear a veil, right, so the shekhina act is an intermediary between God and human beings during prophetic encounters, now Maimonides, he agrees with Saadia with respect to the shekhina but he adds an interesting esoteric dimension, by the way the rabbis quote from the Talmud that says the sages, meaning the rabbinical sages, they teach that the Torah speaks in the language of man, right, so this is why there's mutashabi hat in the Hebrew Bible, this is why there's anthropomorphic verses in the Bible, right, because it's trying to communicate something true that you can understand but it's not literally true, it's rhetoric, it's very effective form of rhetoric, right, God has to in a sense condescend as it were to speak to us, as one of my teachers said, like a mother has to sort of condescend to speak to her young child, like a mother wants a toddler to, you know, finish his meal, you know, you can't sit down and reason with a toddler, you have to eat this because it's nutritious and, you know, so on and so on, you can't do that, you have to sort of make a game out of it or you have to sort of use different intonations and things like that, so in order for us to understand, right, theology and understand the will of God, God has to use expressions that we can relate to and that's the purpose of these anthropomorphic verses, but they have to be interpreted in the light of transcendence, I'll be done in five minutes, inshallah, so then Maimonidesa, he adds an interesting esoteric dimension, so he says yes, the back of the sheikhina, that's true, but what is the panay adonai, what is the face of, what is the face of God? Maimonidesa says the face of God refers to an intense, clear knowledge or a complete apprehension or comprehension of God, so a comprehension of God is impossible for any human being. No one really comprehends, has idrak of Allah, other than God himself, so it's impossible, you know, Moses says, can I comprehend you as you comprehend yourself, right, and of course from an Islamic standpoint, that's a problematic request according to many of the theologians, the prophet would not ask for something that's impossible, inconceivable, considered bad adab, but this is the opinion of Maimonides, whereas the back of God, the akhor adonai is a reference to the knowledge of God which man can know, the man's capacity is to only know the quote back of God, to have ma'rifah of God, right, so in other words, Moses seeing the back of God means that Moses had the most ma'rifah of God, the most gnosis, the most intimate knowledge of God that is possible for a human being to have, so none of the rules of physics apply to God, certainly not Newtonian physics, he transcends physicality completely, getting into a little bit of the halakah, Jewish law, no iconography of God, or even human beings, or even celestial bodies are allowed in Orthodox halakah, or even like painting pictures of planets or human beings, animals are okay, it seems, as long as there's something sort of left off, like an eye is left off, or there's some deformity given, most rabbis are against tasweer photography, even with the dolls, you know, to cut the nose off or something, or missing finger, no complete image is allowed, that's the halakah, the Hashem, the God, right, God is not the four elements, fire, water, earth, and wind, so the rabbis say, you know, it says in the Psalms, God is outstretched to arm, right, virah is you, like arm, virah, in the Hebrew, zorah, and the meaning of this means that he's the savior, not that he's a physical arm, right, he lends a hand, as it were, right, so the Torah speaks to us in the language of human beings, I think that's a good place to stop, so I'm almost, so yeah, I mean, we're done with Judaism, we have to move on, there's a lot more to say, obviously, that's only the third out of 13 principles, maybe we can do a second part of this course later, but we are going to move, I gave you the basics of Jewish theology.