Investigating God in Rabbinic and Later Jewish Literature I I Find No Evidence in Rabbinic Literature That Investigating God Co

Chapter Three

Investigating God in Rabbinic and Later Jewish Literature

I find no evidence in Rabbinic literature that investigating God con- stitutes a religiously crucial value—certainly not one that forms the backbone of an ethos that defines religious life. By Rabbinic literature, I mean the vast literary corpus that came to define normative Juda- ism through the centuries. It includes those works whose actual (or, in some cases, purported) speakers are traditionally known as Tan- naim and Amoraim, sages who lived from the first century to the end of the sixth century and formulated Rabbinic Judaism. These works were compiled and edited in various locales, well beyond the confines of Palestine and Babylonia, where these sages thrived, and in various time periods, stretching into the High Middle Ages, well beyond the historical period in which they were active. This state of affairs makes it apparent that the various works of Rabbinic literature are quite dis- parate and certainly do not share a single worldview. Nor is it possible to speak of a single ethos that permeates these works. None of them, however, reflect what I have termed the philosophic ethos. The difference betweenR abbinic and philosophic literature emerges in a compelling fashion through an examination of treatments, in the former, of those Biblical verses that, as we have seen, are used in the latter, time and again, as prooftexts for the philosophic ethos. In the opening section of this chapter, therefore, I examine Rabbinic explanations of these verses with an eye towards contrasting them with philosophic explanations. I then turn to examine Rabbinic passages that were explicitly employed by philosophers and Kabbalists in support of the philosophic ethos and demonstrate that, when viewed in their original context, these passages know nothing of a value to investigate God. At the end of this chapter, I will also examine the role of the philosophic ethos in types of non-Rabbinic literature, other than philosophic and Kabbalistic, which either were known to the first Kabbalists or 98 chapter three contained parallel teachings. These include the esoteric corpus known as hekhalot literature, the writings of German Pietists, and Sefer ha- Kuzari, by R. Judah ha-Levi.

In the previous chapter, I noted that the newly available philosophic literature employs three Biblical verses as the primary prooftexts for the philosophic ethos: Deut. 4:39, Jer. 9:22–23, and 1 Chron. 28:9. In this section, I will consider Rabbinic treatments of these verses. It will be recalled that Deut. 4:39 (“Know therefore this day and lay it to your heart that the Lord alone is God in heaven above and on earth below; there is no other”) is often read in the newly available philosophic literature as stating the imperative—according to some positions, a halakhic one—to investigate God. In Rabbinic literature, in contrast, the sense that this verse contains any sort of imperative is absent. In the philosophic literature, the opening of the verse, “Know therefore this day and lay it to your heart,” might be paraphrased as “investigate intellectually,” such that the first part of the verse is seen as enjoining the active attempt to demonstrate the truth and understand the precise meaning of the second part of the verse, “that the Lord alone is God in heaven above and on earth below; there is no other.” In Rabbinic literature, however, the verse is read as a proclamation that there is only one God, which demands no particular action, save accepting its truth. From the Rabbinic perspective, accordingly, the verse might be paraphrased, “Let it be known that there is only one God.” Furthermore, as already noted in the previous chapter, according to philosophic literature, the task of understanding the precise meaning of the second part of the verse requires investigating the nature of what Harry Wolfson referred to as the “internal unity” of God, which necessitates inquiring about the metaphysical meaning of divine unity and raises such questions as how divine attributes may be reconciled with this unity. In Rabbinic literature, on the other hand, the proclamation made by the verse pertains to what Wolfson called God’s “numerical or external unity”—the main meaning of Divine oneness in this literature—that there are no other gods besides Him.1

1 see Wolfson, Repercussions of the Kalam in Jewish Philosophy, 2–3.