Dogmatics – Lesson 13

Table of Contents

• The seventh principle: the prophecy of Moshe our teacher
• The four differences between Moshe’s prophecy and that of all the other prophets
• The question of why the seventh principle is a principle of faith, and the status of the Torah
• The sanctity of the wording versus the sanctity of the content, and the precision of a Torah scroll
• Thought, language, and the distinction between content and representation
• The Torah of the ministering angels and the garments of the Torah
• The eighth principle: Torah from Heaven and completing the picture
• Jewish law given to Moshe at Sinai, Rabbi Akiva, and the continuity of formulation
• Concluding remarks and an alternative interpretation of the seventh principle

Summary

General Overview

The text presents Maimonides’ seventh principle concerning the prophecy of Moshe our teacher, and explains its uniqueness through four differences from every other prophet, emphasizing that Moshe reached a superhuman level, up to the level of an angel. The speaker explains that Maimonides refrains from spelling out the full depth of these concepts because doing so would require extensive discussion of angels and the powers of the soul, and then asks why Moshe’s uniqueness is a separate principle of faith. He suggests that it is the basis for trust in the Torah and in the sanctity of its exact wording. From there he develops the claim that prophecy is the transmission of content that is then formulated in the prophet’s own language, and applies this to the Torah as well, distinguishing between the sanctity of the content and the sanctity of the wording. He connects this to the eighth principle, where Maimonides explicitly states that the entire Torah is from the mouth of the Almighty, but the nature of how it was received is known only to Moshe, and that Moshe stood at the level of a scribe.

The Seventh Principle: the Prophecy of Moshe Our Teacher

Maimonides states that the prophecy of Moshe our teacher requires belief that he is the father of all the prophets, that all the prophets are beneath him, and that he is God’s chosen one from among all humanity and attained more than any person who ever existed or ever will exist. Maimonides describes Moshe as having reached the ultimate height above ordinary humanity until he attained an angelic level and became like the angels, with no veil and no bodily impediment remaining before him, no deficiency left in him, and with the powers of imagination and the senses suspended, leaving only intellect. Maimonides attributes to this the statement that Moshe speaks with God without the mediation of angels, and says that he would like to explain the matter of “mouth to mouth,” but refrains because these are subtle matters that would require a hundred pages and many introductions about the existence of angels and the powers of the soul, and he postpones it to future writings.

The Four Differences Between Moshe’s Prophecy and That of the Other Prophets

Maimonides lists four differences: with every prophet, God speaks through an intermediary, but with Moshe, without an intermediary, as in the verse, “Mouth to mouth I speak with him.” Maimonides states that every prophet receives a vision during sleep or a trance, in which the senses cease and the soul is emptied as in sleep; this state is called “vision and appearance,” and of it it is said, “in visions of God,” whereas Moshe receives the word by day while standing between the two cherubim, as in the verses, “And I will meet with you there and speak with you,” and “If there be a prophet among you, I make Myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream; not so with My servant Moshe.” Maimonides adds that prophets are weakened during the vision, the body trembles, and overwhelming fear descends upon them, almost like death, and he brings proofs from Daniel’s words, “No strength remained in me,” “and I was in a deep sleep upon my face,” and “in the vision my pains turned upon me,” whereas Moshe receives the word with no trembling at all, as in the verse, “And the Lord spoke to Moshe face to face, as a man speaks to his fellow,” and he attributes this to the strength of Moshe’s attachment through intellect. Maimonides concludes that all prophets do not prophesy whenever they wish, but only by God’s will, and sometimes they wait days, months, or years, even after preparation through joy of heart and purification of thought, as in Elisha’s act, “Now bring me a musician,” whereas Moshe prophesies whenever he wishes and says, “Stand, and I will hear what the Lord commands concerning you.” This is derived from the verses, “Speak to Aaron your brother, that he not come at all times,” and the exposition, “Aaron may not enter at all times, but Moshe may enter at all times.”

The Question of Why the Seventh Principle Is a Principle of Faith, and the Status of the Torah

The speaker asks why a special principle of faith is needed regarding Moshe’s superiority, if even among prophets there are different levels. He suggests that Maimonides sees this as the basis for belief in the Torah, because the Torah obligates commandments and punishments in a way different from the status of the books of the Prophets and the Writings. The speaker argues that if prophecy were simply verbal dictation of a text, Moshe’s level would not matter, because such dictation could have been given to any prophet. He therefore suggests that Moshe was not a “hollow pipe,” but rather formulated the Torah in his own language on the basis of content he received. The speaker brings proof from Rabbi Yitzhak in tractate Sanhedrin: “One style may rise for several prophets, yet no two prophets prophesy in one style,” and illustrates this from Ovadiah and Jeremiah: prophets receive shared content but formulate it in different styles. From this he concludes that the same is true of Moshe.

The Sanctity of the Wording Versus the Sanctity of the Content, and the Precision of a Torah Scroll

The speaker distinguishes between the Oral Torah, where the sanctity belongs to the content and not to the wording, so that a translation or alternative formulation does not undermine it, and Scripture, especially a Torah scroll, where there is sanctity even to the wording, to the point that one missing letter invalidates it. The speaker says that if the wording is Moshe’s rather than God’s, the question arises how to understand the sacred status of the wording, and he suggests that the seventh principle is meant to ground trust that Moshe’s wording is not incidental but necessarily precise, and that another prophet would have worded it differently, in which case the same Torah would not have emerged. He adds that the exacting attention to interpretations based on letters and crowns exists mainly in the Torah and not generally in the books of the Prophets, from which it follows that the wording of the Torah is understood as exact and precise.

Thought, Language, and the Distinction Between Content and Representation

The speaker cites Rashba in Berakhot 15 regarding learning two laws from “Shema,” and explains Rashba’s interpretation that these are two aspects of one law, because only something that is said in speech is subject to a law of language. The speaker presents a reading that separates the content of thought from its linguistic representation, and brings a discussion of Tosafot in tractate Shabbat 40, along with the Rashash and the Chazon Ish, arguing that his conclusion is that the Torah is concerned with language mainly where there is a requirement of verbal utterance, and not where the main point is mental content. He illustrates the difference between thinking a sentence and grasping its content through the example, “Two plus three equals seventeen,” and develops the possibility that there are contents that can be thought even without verbal representation.

The Torah of the Ministering Angels and the Garments of the Torah

The speaker interprets the aggadah about Moshe ascending to Heaven and the angels asking that the Torah remain with them, while Moshe answered them about “Honor your father and your mother” and about the prohibitions of murder and theft, as describing the fact that the Torah has an abstract layer with which the angels engage, and a layer clothed in the human world. The speaker argues that the Torah Moshe received at Sinai was a collection of abstract contents, and when it descended to earth it took on concrete garments such as commandments, stories, and descriptions of the forty years in the wilderness. Therefore there is no necessity to say that the wording of the Torah existed in advance on Mount Sinai. The speaker compares this to the parable of Zen and the Art of Archery and to the idea of models in mathematics, in which the same abstract theory is realized in different contexts, and presents this as a process of two transitions: first, a transition from abstract contents to concrete contents suited to the human world, and then a transition to exact verbal formulation.

The Eighth Principle: Torah from Heaven and Completing the Picture

The speaker opens the eighth principle and says there is no difficulty understanding why it is a principle, bringing an example from Rabbi Amit Kula’s book Was or Was Not about an attempt to ground faith without facts. He argues that there is only one fact that cannot be given up: the very giving of the Torah as an interaction in which God conveyed what He wants from us. He quotes Maimonides that the belief is that the entire Torah in our hands is the one given to Moshe and that it is all “from the mouth of the Almighty,” but that this mode of reception is called “speech” only “by way of metaphor,” and that “no one knows the nature of that reception except he, peace be upon him, to whom it came,” and that Moshe is at the level of a scribe to whom people read and he writes down its dates, its stories, and its commandments. The speaker says these remarks confirm his earlier claim that the transmission is not necessarily verbal and that Moshe receives content and formulates it, and he suggests that without trust in Moshe’s level from the seventh principle, one cannot fully ground trust in the eighth principle.

Jewish Law Given to Moshe at Sinai, Rabbi Akiva, and the Continuity of Formulation

The speaker explains the phrase “Jewish law given to Moshe at Sinai” as hinting that the halakhic formulation is attributed to Moshe even though the content is from God, and brings the aggadah about Moshe seeing Rabbi Akiva’s study hall and not understanding until he heard, “Jewish law given to Moshe at Sinai,” and then he was put at ease. The speaker explains that this calm comes from the fact that later generations also continue a process of conceptualization and formulation in which the Torah puts on new conceptual worlds, and therefore Moshe does not understand the later garb even though he is the root of the tradition. He sums up that the tradition is not a “hollow pipe” of words, but a process in which every generation formulates and defines.

Concluding Remarks and an Alternative Interpretation of the Seventh Principle

One of the participants suggests that the importance of the seventh principle is also that there will never be an alternative authority that can contradict the Torah, because no prophet will arise on Moshe’s level. Another participant adds in the name of Rabbi Sherki that the warning concerning one who says, “Moshe said this verse on his own,” was stated especially regarding Deuteronomy, and suggests that God gave a seal of approval to what Moshe wrote there. The speaker responds that he tends to apply the idea of Moshe’s formulation to all five books, even if there is a difference between Deuteronomy and the other four books, and he ends the lecture by announcing that the discussion of the eighth principle will continue in the next lecture.

We’ve reached the seventh foundation, or the seventh principle. Let’s share the screen. In the seventh foundation: the prophecy of Moshe our teacher. And that is, that we believe he is the father of all the prophets who preceded him and all who came after him. All of them are beneath him in rank, and he is the chosen one of God from among the entire human species, who attained from Him, may He be exalted, more than any person who existed or will exist attained or will attain—using the language of attainments. And that he, peace be upon him, reached the ultimate height above humanity, until he attained the angelic level and became of the rank of the angels. No veil remained before him that he did not tear through, no bodily impediment held him back, and nothing of deficiency remained in him, neither little nor much. And his imaginative faculties were silenced—in Maimonides, imaginative faculties are a drawback, a defect—and also the senses in all his attainments, and his arousing faculty was confounded, and only intellect remained. And about this they said of him that he speaks with God without the mediation of angels. And I wanted to explain here this wondrous matter, and to clarify the obscurities of the Torah’s verses, and explain the meaning of “mouth to mouth,” and this whole verse and others related to it. Were it not that I saw that these matters are extremely subtle and require great elaboration, introductions, and examples, and that one must first explain the existence of the angels and the differences in their ranks before the Creator, and likewise the explanation of the soul and all its faculties, and the scope would widen until we reached discussion of all the forms by which the prophets referred to the Creator and to His angels—and this matter alone would not suffice even for a hundred pages in the shortest possible treatment. Therefore I will leave it for its proper place, either in the book on explanations of the homilies that I promised, or in the book on prophecy that I began to compose, or in a book that I will compose explaining these foundations. Up to here, that’s the first part. He’s basically saying: Moshe our teacher has a very, very high rank, far above all the other prophets, and in fact he reached the level of an angel. Meaning, nothing material or human remained in him; rather, he nullified all the human shortcomings or defects, and in essence he is on the level of an angel. Now, to explain what the level of an angel is, and in what sense Moshe our teacher was on that level, and what exactly all these descriptions mean—he would have needed a whole book, so he says he won’t go into the details here. And I return to the matter of this seventh foundation and say that the prophecy of Moshe our teacher differs from the prophecy of all the other prophets in four ways. The first difference is that any prophet whatsoever—God speaks to him only through an intermediary, whereas Moshe was without an intermediary, as He said: “Mouth to mouth I speak with him.” In other words, there is no mediation; he speaks directly with the Holy One, blessed be He. And the second difference is that no prophet receives the vision except while asleep, as it says in several places, “in a dream of the night,” and “he dreamed, in a vision of the night,” and many things of this kind; or by day, after a deep sleep falls upon the prophet. And even if he is not asleep in bed, before the prophecy arrives, a deep sleep seizes him, even in the middle of the day. Without that he cannot prophesy. It is a state in which all his senses cease and his mind is emptied, somewhat like sleep. And this state is called a vision and an appearance. About it Scripture says, “in visions of God.” But with Moshe, speech came to him by day while he stood between the two cherubs, as God promised him: “There I will meet with you and speak with you,” yes, between the cherubs. The Exalted One said, “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord make Myself known to him in a vision, I speak with him in a dream; not so My servant Moshe.” So the second difference is that Moshe our teacher does not need to sleep or suspend his personality, his vitality, before receiving prophecy. That’s the second difference. And the third difference—again, his proofs here are somewhat debatable, because I think that with at least some of the prophets, the description does not really look as if sleep seized them before prophecy came to them. The Holy One, blessed be He, says things to them, speaks with them, and it is not described—at least not explicitly—that it was specifically in a dream. There are many places where it is, but Maimonides turns this into a general principle. I don’t know exactly how proven it is or how clear it is. And the third difference is that when the prophet receives the vision, even though it is in a vision and through an angel, his powers weaken and his body trembles, and a tremendous fear falls upon him as though he were going to die. As was explained with Daniel, when Gabriel spoke with him in a vision, he said, “No strength remained in me; my splendor was turned upon me into ruin, and I retained no strength.” And he said, “I was in a deep sleep on my face, with my face to the ground.” And he said, “At the vision my pains turned upon me.” But Moshe is not like this; speech comes to him and no trembling at all happens to him. This is the meaning of the verse, “And the Lord spoke to Moshe face to face, as a man speaks to his friend.” Meaning, just as a person experiences no fear from the words of his companion, so too he, peace be upon him, was not frightened by the speech, even though it was face to face—yes, face to face, as he said above, not through an intermediary. And this is because of the strength of his connection through intellect, as we said. And the fourth difference—yes, this reminds me that many times, you know, in philosophy there’s this remark about the argument usually attributed to the Kuzari, called the witness argument. Meaning, the testimony about the revelation passed from generation to generation, and a father doesn’t lie to his son, and so on and so forth—so, the witness argument. Now, I’ve seen in a few places people write that in fact the witness argument appears explicitly in the Torah. That the Torah itself says, “Has any nation ever heard God speaking from the midst of the fire and lived?” Meaning, this revelation happened to no one except us, only to the Jews. But I think when you read the verse, it seems to me that this is not what the verse says. What the verse says is: how could it be—yes, “ask now of earlier days,” and so on—but what the verse says is: how could it be that the nation experienced revelation and remained alive. Meaning, what distinguishes us is not that we had a revelation, but that we remained alive after we had a revelation. So you see here that if we are in, or if a person is in, interaction with the Holy One, blessed be He, then that apparently leaves such an impression on him that he dies or trembles; even if he is a prophet he trembles, and if he is not a prophet then he simply dies. We talked about the Rashba, if you remember from the previous lesson, who says that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot reveal Himself to an ordinary person; meaning, it is impossible. And then he discusses there whether this is a logical impossibility or a physical impossibility, what I called it. But there is some inability in an ordinary human vessel to absorb divine revelation and somehow remain alive. A prophet can remain alive, but he still trembles or something happens to him—meaning, he undergoes some trauma, even in the physical sense. And with Moshe our teacher, no. With Moshe our teacher, it goes through smoothly. And the fourth difference, the fourth difference, is that all prophets do not receive a vision when they want to, but only when God wants. A prophet may remain for years without receiving a vision. Yes, it may be that for several years the prophet lives and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not reveal Himself to him at all. And sometimes people ask the prophet to tell them something by prophecy, and he waits until the prophecy comes to him after days or after months, or it never comes at all. And we have already seen of one who prepared himself by joy of heart and purification of thought, as Elisha did when he said, “Now bring me a musician,” and then the vision came to him. And it is not necessary that he prophesy whenever he prepares himself. Meaning, without preparation he cannot prophesy, and even after the preparation it depends on whether the Holy One, blessed be He, decides to reveal Himself to him or not, and also when. But Moshe our teacher—whenever he wished, he said, “Stand, and I will hear what the Lord commands concerning you.” And it says, “Speak to Aharon your brother, that he not come at all times.” And they said, “Aharon may not come at all times, but Moshe is not included in ‘may not come at all times.’” Yes, “he shall not come at all times into the sanctuary”—Moshe can come at all times into the sanctuary. That is really the claim: that Moshe our teacher can speak with the Holy One, blessed be He, by appointment. Meaning, the moment he decides, he turns to the Holy One, blessed be He, and receives an answer. It does not depend on the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, to turn to him; rather, every time he wants, a conversation with the Holy One, blessed be He, can take place. That’s the fourth difference. Okay, so that is basically his seventh foundation. And now we need to ask, once again, the usual questions. So the proofs, where do we get from that Moshe our teacher is unique—that we’ve seen. For each of the differences Maimonides brings proofs, some more convincing, some less, but he does bring proofs. The second question that always accompanies us in all these principles is: why is this a principle? Why is this belief—that Moshe our teacher is a prophet on a higher level than every other prophet, that he is the chosen of humanity that was and will be, and all these exaggerated virtues of Moshe our teacher—why is that a principle of faith? Suppose someone doesn’t accept it—so what? Why—or even if we do accept it, in the previous principle we spoke about the belief in prophecy in general, and that human beings can attain prophecy—why do we need a separate principle about Moshe our teacher? You’re saying because he has a unique prophetic level? Okay, so what. The other prophets also had different levels of prophecy. The Ari, of blessed memory, draws distinctions—we talked about this, I think—and says that there are differences among the prophets; this one attained up to this level and that one attained up to that level, and each one according to his attainments. So Moshe our teacher attained even more—so what? Why does that require a separate foundation or a separate principle? What is special about this matter? It seems to me that Maimonides sees this as a principle because it is actually the basis of our belief in the Torah. We received the Torah from Moshe our teacher. The prophets, fine, gave us prophecies and so on, but the status of the Torah, as opposed to the status of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), of the prophets, is a completely different status. There are commandments there, and we are obligated to fulfill them, and there are punishments for one who does not fulfill them. With a prophet, you have to heed his voice when he says things, but that does not turn into an eternal, binding foundation like the commandments that appear in the Torah. The status of the Torah, of the scroll, the Torah scroll, is a totally different status from the Prophets and Writings, even though all of them are ostensibly from the mouth of divine power. But the status is different, and therefore it was probably important to Maimonides to say that the one who brought us this prophecy, the Five Books of the Torah, was Moshe our teacher, who was a prophet on a higher level than the prophets who brought us the other books. Why is that important? Again, usually we understand that when the Holy One, blessed be He, prophesies something to a prophet, He dictates prophecy to him, dictates some text, and sends him to say that text to the addressee of the prophecy—the Jewish people, or Nineveh in the case of Jonah, it doesn’t matter, to the addressee of the prophecy. But if that were the case, then there would be no importance whatsoever to the prophetic level of Moshe our teacher. He also would not need attainments. All in all, the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated the text of the Torah to him, that’s all. What’s the problem? He could have dictated it to any other prophet as well. So He chose him—the other prophet would tremble, okay, so what. And true, He turned to him because it was the initiative of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the prophet cannot turn to the Holy One, blessed be He, on his own initiative and automatically expect an answer. All true—so what? Can’t I dictate a text to a prophet on a lower level than Moshe our teacher? Therefore it seems to me that what lies behind this—and this is, I think, a more interesting conclusion than the principle itself—the question why the principle is a principle leads us, I think, to more interesting insights than the content of the principle. Because if what I’m suggesting here is really true—that the importance of the prophetic level of Moshe our teacher is because of our relation to the Torah—then that means that apparently Moshe our teacher was not a hollow conduit. Not that the Holy One, blessed be He, came to Moshe, dictated the text of the Torah to him, and Moshe our teacher wrote what the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated to him. That could be done with any prophet. Also, when Moshe our teacher teaches the Torah to the Jewish people—yes, all these midrashim that say he taught it, and he taught Yehoshua, and then the elders, and then yes, all of Israel entered in four stages like that—yes, that’s also described in Maimonides, and it begins in the midrashim—what did he teach there? Did he simply read them the text and teach them the text by heart? Moshe our teacher was not a hollow conduit transmitting a text he received from the Holy One, blessed be He. Moshe our teacher wrote the Torah—that’s what I want to claim. And there are those who would treat such a claim as heresy, but it seems to me that this is what should actually emerge from this principle of Maimonides. Moshe our teacher wrote the Torah in his own language, not in the language of the Holy One, blessed be He. At least regarding the book of Deuteronomy, this is more widely accepted, that it is Moshe’s book. Regarding the first four books, I don’t know. It could be that Maimonides’ principle was said only in order to establish the status of Deuteronomy, which is certainly a text spoken by Moshe our teacher. But I think it is definitely possible that the other four books as well were spoken in a similar way. There too, it’s not that the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated a text to Moshe our teacher. The Holy One, blessed be He, dictated some content to Moshe our teacher, and Moshe our teacher was the one who formulated it. I’ll maybe bring a Talmudic passage that describes a similar idea, a passage in tractate Sanhedrin, again in the chapter Chelek. The Talmud says there on page 89: Rabbi Yitzchak said, Rabbi Yitzchak said, “One style rises to several prophets, but no two prophets prophesy in one style.” Ovadiah said, “The arrogance of your heart has deceived you”; Yirmiyahu said, “Your terror has deceived you, the arrogance of your heart.” What does that mean? He says, the same prophecy can be given to several prophets, but the wording in which the prophets say it is unique to them. Meaning, every prophet has his own wording. No two prophets prophesy in one style. Here, Ovadiah said the same thing as Yirmiyahu, and yet he formulated it differently. Ovadiah phrased it as “The arrogance of your heart has deceived you,” and Yirmiyahu phrased it as “Your terror has deceived you, the arrogance of your heart.” So we see that the very same content, in the mouths of different prophets, is formulated differently, in a different style. And that means that sometimes the Holy One, blessed be He, gives the same prophecy to several prophets, but what we hear from each prophet is in his own style. Or in other words, when the Holy One, blessed be He, gives prophecy to a prophet, He is not dictating a text to him, but rather telling him the content, and the prophet is the one who formulates that content and says the prophecy in his own words. And if so, then each prophet has his own style. And therefore I want to claim that if this is true with regard to a prophet—and it’s very explicit in the Talmud—then I want to claim that the same is true of Moshe our teacher. But if that is really the case, then when the Holy One, blessed be He, gives Moshe our teacher the content of the Torah, and Moshe our teacher formulates the text—that is, the wording of the Torah—that raises questions about how exactly we are supposed to relate to this text. Because after all, this text is not the Holy One’s, blessed be He, but Moshe our teacher’s. So true, the content is from the Holy One, blessed be He, but the formulation is from Moshe our teacher. And yet we know that the sanctity of the Torah scroll—as opposed, say, to the Talmud—for example, in the Talmud, the question is: in what sense is this text holy? On the face of it, it is not holy. The content is holy, the Jewish law is holy, but the text written in Aramaic there in the Talmud contains nothing holy in itself. If I translate the Talmud into English, is the result less holy than the Talmud we know in Aramaic or in Hebrew? No. If I translate it into another language, Kehati versus the Mishnah—is the Mishnah holier than Kehati? No. It’s just saying the same wording—sorry, the same content—in different phrasing. In the case of a commentator, in clearer phrasing. There is no sanctity to the wording in the Oral Torah. The Oral Torah is a collection of ideas. There is no sanctity to the wording—sorry, there is sanctity to the content. Meaning, in the Oral Torah, what is sanctified is the content, the Jewish laws, the contents we received from the Holy One, blessed be He. The exact wording in which the Mishnah phrased it, or the Talmud, or the medieval authorities (Rishonim), or whoever—it is wording they chose; they could have chosen other wording. There is nothing sanctified in it. And that is unlike the biblical text. In the biblical text, as we have received it, you cannot change a single letter. You have to be careful when reading to pronounce every letter, not to change anything. Meaning, we know that one differing letter invalidates the Torah scroll—even though the content does not change. Why? Because in the Torah scroll the sanctity is the sanctity of the wording, not just of the content. The wording is exact. Now this is interesting, because in the Talmud there really is the description I gave earlier about how prophecy works. In the Talmud this is certainly the case, right? Meaning, there is some kind of Oral Torah that is transmitted, created over the generations, and so on, and the wording that this Oral Torah takes on is a decision of the sages. The sages formulate these ideas of the Oral Torah in their own language. Therefore the necessary conclusion is that there is really no sanctity to the wording. The wording only conveys content to me. What matters here is the content that was transmitted to me. The wording is not—there is nothing sanctified in it. I would have expected the same thing also with prophetic text. If indeed, as the Talmud in Sanhedrin says, prophecy too is basically just content transmitted to the prophet, but the one who formulates that content is the prophet, not the Holy One, blessed be He, then there too I would have expected the sanctity to belong to the content, and the wording only to convey the content to me, with no sanctity in itself; one could formulate it differently and it would be the same. But no—we know that is not so. In Scripture, in the books of the Bible, the sanctity is the sanctity of the wording, not of the content. Therefore the question is: if that is really so, then in the Torah scroll, whose wording is considered perhaps the holiest and most exact, and we expound crowns on letters and every extra letter here or there—meaning, we see that we relate to the wording in a very, very—I’ll call it respectful—way, yes? Meaning, this wording is wording from which we must understand every tiny detail. And if the wording is Moshe our teacher’s and not the Holy One’s, blessed be He, if I’m right in what I said earlier—then I think this is why it was important to Maimonides to say that our attitude toward Moshe our teacher, his spiritual level, the rank of Moshe our teacher, is a principle of faith. It is a principle of faith because it must be clear to us that the formulation Moshe our teacher chose for the content he received from the Holy One, blessed be He, was not arbitrary wording. It could not have been otherwise. This wording is exact. The Torah could not have been formulated—say, if the Holy One, blessed be He, had given the Torah to another prophet, then he would have said it in his own style. Because we saw that every prophet formulates the prophecy he receives in his own style. But then it would not have come out as the Torah. Sorry, Rabbi, sorry Rabbi, isn’t this exactly what Maimonides already prefaced when he said that Moshe our teacher’s prophecy was different from the others, including in that He speaks face to face, “mouth to mouth I speak with him”? So why would he change what he heard in such a direct way, as it were? The other prophets, that’s in a trance, in a dream, so it’s more… Who said he changes? No, why would he change the words he heard from the Holy One, blessed be He, if this was through direct speech between them? He gave it its—he cast the content into words. Who said he heard it as words? “Face to face I speak with him,” “mouth to mouth I speak with him,” I don’t know. “I speak,” because those are the concepts we are used to—that’s how interaction is created, by speaking. But when the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks with Moshe, it could very well be that He is indeed giving him an infusion of ideas. He is not necessarily speaking with him in words. Certainly—I have no idea, I haven’t experienced it, but… gladly. I’m saying: if I’m right in this suggestion of mine—it’s all conjecture, I… Yes yes, I hear, I’m just saying that what he says about the other prophets—that it is in a vision—it’s more symbolic, allegorical things. So necessarily each one will formulate it according to his own style, but he doesn’t say that about Moshe our teacher, so it sounds a bit different—maybe also the wording of the thing. No, I don’t think so. I think there is nothing preventing us from saying that the prophecy delivered to Moshe our teacher was prophecy mouth to mouth, meaning directly, but that does not have to be verbal. It may be that the text passed to him, the ideas passed to him, the ideas were injected into him, and now he had to formulate it and write from it a Torah scroll. By the way, this is very interesting, because in the Torah scroll there appear events that occurred after the giving of the Torah, right? In the forty years in the wilderness. Now, how was that written? So it certainly sounds plausible that Moshe our teacher wrote these things in real time; it wasn’t written in advance. What, he knew in advance there would be this sin and that sin—so why is he surprised? Everything had already been given to him at Mount Sinai. He already knew everything that was going to happen in the next forty years already at Mount Sinai, since the Torah had been given to him. The claim is probably that no—meaning, what was given to him was something abstract, and Moshe our teacher put it into a verbal mold, which among other things was a description of the events that happened there during those forty years, but that description apparently expresses certain abstract ideas he receives from the Holy One, blessed be He; it is not just a historical description. And therefore it really unfolded over those forty years after the giving of the Torah. It is not that the wording of the Torah already existed at Mount Sinai. Maybe the Ten Commandments did, I don’t know, but the wording of the Torah did not necessarily exist at the Sinai revelation. The content of the Torah was given at the Sinai revelation. Therefore it seems to me that when the Talmud says—the Talmud at the end of tractate Makkot—that “Torah Moshe commanded us,” it says there that we received six hundred and eleven commandments from Moshe our teacher, and “I am the Lord” and “You shall have no other gods” we heard from the mouth of divine power—the first two commandments we heard from the Holy One, blessed be He. Why indeed? Because when the Holy One, blessed be He, gave Moshe the Torah, He did not give him the text; He gave him the ideas. Now when the children of Israel heard—aside from the first two commandments—the whole rest of the Torah, they heard it from Moshe our teacher, they heard it in words. Meaning, it was not injected into them as content inserted directly into them; they learned the Torah verbally. This wording, this is Moshe our teacher’s wording. This they did not hear from the mouth of divine power; they could not hear it from the mouth of divine power, because divine power itself did not say it. Moshe our teacher also did not hear the text from the mouth of divine power. Moshe our teacher received the content from divine power; the text he himself wrote. And therefore the claim—what I want to claim—is that the importance Maimonides sees, why this level of Moshe our teacher’s spiritual rank is a principle, is because it dictates to us how we are supposed to relate to the text that Moshe our teacher wrote and not the Holy One, blessed be He. But when Moshe our teacher is the greatest of the prophets and speaks with the Holy One, blessed be He, mouth to mouth, then the wording is wording as precise as wording we would have received from the Holy One, blessed be He. This wording cannot be formulated in another way. Had it been given to another prophet, then seemingly he would have written the same thing in his own style—not so. This wording can be received only by Moshe our teacher, because this wording has only one correct verbal formulation, that’s it. All the other prophecies given in the Prophets—the content is conveyed and can be formulated in various styles, and each prophet who conveys this content to the Jewish people formulates it in his own style, since what matters there is the content. Here the wording matters too. But the fact that it matters does not mean it came from the Holy One, blessed be He. The wording is Moshe our teacher’s. And I think that is the reason it was so important for Maimonides to exalt the rank of Moshe our teacher so much and to see this as a principle. Because this is the basis of our trust in the Torah; this is the basis of our ability to expound letters and words and crowns on letters in the Torah, because we relate to the wording of the Torah in a very, very meticulous way. In the books of prophecy we do not make expositions of this kind. Even when expositions are made, we do not derive things from crowns on letters in the book of Yirmiyahu, okay? Or from an extra vav in the book of Yirmiyahu—we don’t expound that. Sometimes expositions are made on verses from the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), but these are not expositions that depend on textual exactitude, like an extra vav here or a crown on letters or something like that. Expositions like that exist only in the Torah. And that means that the wording of the Torah is exact wording. So if Moshe our teacher wrote it, then clearly we must have some kind of trust that Moshe our teacher is like a text written by the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He Himself. Meaning, he is on such a level that he is directly connected to the Holy One, blessed be He; he receives the matter from Him directly, as if by infusion. Therefore it may be that this is why Maimonides treats this as a principle—he sees in it something important beyond the prophecy of all the other prophets. Maybe I’ll say a few more sentences on this matter. In another series we spoke about this, this whole matter of the giving of the Torah and the forms the Torah takes. There is—maybe before I move to the form of the Torah—there is a Rashba in tractate Berakhot, page 15. The Mishnah there says that the Shema may be said in any language and one must articulate it with one’s mouth. And all this is learned from the word “hear.” “Hear”—in any language that you hear. And “hear” means make your ears hear what your mouth utters. So the Rashba asks: how do we learn two different laws from the same word? Usually each word teaches one law, and if that word is already occupied with one law, then immediately the Talmud asks: so where do we get the second law from? But here both laws are derived from the same word. So the Rashba says: these are not two laws; it is one law. If the Shema could be fulfilled merely by thinking it and not articulating it verbally, then there would be no need to tell me that the Shema may be said in any language. Only something that I need to say can have reference to the language in which I say it. And the Torah comes and innovates: in any language. But basically—in other words—the Rashba says like this: from “hear” we learn “hear in any language that you hear.” From the fact that a verse was needed to tell me I may say it in any language, it is obvious—and this is not another derivation, but from here it is obvious—that one must also make it heard to one’s ear, that one must actually say it; it is not enough merely to think it. Because if merely thinking it were enough, there would be no need for a verse to tell me it is in any language. Now usually there is—maybe I’ll say one more thing—there is Tosafot in tractate Shabbat, page 40 I think, or Berakhot—Shabbat, I think, page 40—where it discusses thinking words of Torah or thinking in filthy alleyways, like in a bathroom. Tosafot there says that it is forbidden to think in the holy tongue in filthy alleyways, but in another language one may think in filthy alleyways. So the Rasha”sh there comments that this Tosafot disagrees with the Rashba I mentioned before, that Rashba in Berakhot. Why? Because the Rashba—as he understood him—the Rashba understands that when we think, we do not think in words. And therefore the Rashba says that if the Torah refers to the question of what language I am supposed to say it in, it is obvious I must say it, because if it were enough to think it and not say it, thought has no language. So there is no point in speaking of the holy tongue or any language—it is irrelevant. Thought has no language; thought is an abstract thing. Speech has words; thought has no words. That is how the Rasha”sh reads the Rashba. Then he says that in Tosafot there in Shabbat, page 40, you see otherwise. Because Tosafot says that it is forbidden to think in the holy tongue but permitted to think in another language, so you see that thought is indeed carried out verbally. And so too the Chazon Ish in one place wants to say that this is the dispute here, that there is such a disagreement between the Rashba and Tosafot. But to my mind this is absurd, and indeed most later authorities (Acharonim) did not understand it that way. It’s absurd. Clearly we think in words. I don’t think one can dispute the fact that I think in words. The Rashba does not dispute that. What the Rashba wants to say is that if there is a certain law that I fulfill in thought and not in speech, then the Torah does not care what language I do it in—not that it is done nonverbally. Rather, there will not be laws telling me what language to do it in. Because what language I do it in matters only if I speak. With thought, the Torah is not interested in what language you think. Not because one does not think in languages or words—one does think in words—but because according to the Rashba, the law to do it in this language or that language is said only about things that are spoken and not about things that are thought. It seems to me that this is more what the Rashba means. But in truth this leads us into the interesting question written about also by various brain researchers in the modern era, yes, in recent years or the last few decades. Damasio wrote about this, for example—yes, that couple where both of them are brain researchers. So he really discusses the question whether we think in words or whether one can think without words. That is basically his question, and the claim is apparently yes. And I think that basically when we look at verbal thinking—say I think a certain sentence. So I thought the sentence. Does that just mean that inside my head a collection of words passed by? Clearly not. After all, that collection of words expresses content, right? When I think that sentence, clearly in some sense I am also thinking the content. It may be that I represent it by means of words. But clearly I am not just thinking words; I am thinking the content, which may be represented by words. But at the basis, thought is thought of content. It may be that the representation is through words. Okay? Therefore the Rashba probably says that if there is a law fulfilled in thought, then the Torah does not care in what language you do it, because laws of thought are laws about content. Therefore it does not matter in what language you do it. When you speak, then you are required to say a certain text. Here it may be that the text must be said only in a certain language, because now we are entering the realm of the text and not only the content the text represents. Therefore there it may indeed matter in what language you say it. In chapter 7 of Sotah, the first Mishnah—yes, “these are said in any language and these are said only in the holy tongue.” So there are things said in any language and things said only in the holy tongue, but all of this concerns things that are said. The Rashba says: things that are thought—meaning, things where all I need to do is think—the Torah does not care in what language I do it. Not because one does not think verbally, but because what matters is that I think the content. The fact that I think the content when it is represented in words—whether in words, whether in English, Hebrew, Turkish—it does not matter. Because what matters is that the content is inside me. Okay, that is basically the point. For example, think about a case where, say, I think a sentence that I believe is false. Ah, now I remember—I talked about this yesterday in the lesson on faith. Say I think the sentence “two plus three equals seventeen.” So I thought the sentence, right? But clearly I am not thinking that content, because that content is false. I understand what the sentence says—two plus three equals seventeen—but clearly I do not think that two plus three equals seventeen. Do you understand? There is a difference between thinking the sentence “two plus three equals seventeen” and thinking that two plus three equals seventeen. I can think that sentence, but I cannot think that content, because that content is false. I know it is false. Okay? So even when I think content that is true, I can think it on two levels. I can think the text that represents it, and I can think the thing itself, except that the text represents the content. The interesting question is whether I can think it without verbal representation. The opposite question, yes? The claim is that the Rashba says one thinks without words, so I said that can’t be, clearly one thinks in words. I’m asking the opposite question: does one think only in words? Can one think contents that are not represented by words? I don’t know, interesting question; I tend to think yes. I tend to think yes, okay? So I think yes, that one can think contents nonverbally, but it’s an interesting question, I don’t know. Rabbi, it’s pretty simple that yes, for example what happens when you try to formulate a sentence in a language you don’t know well enough? You have some representation in your head of what you want to say, but you don’t have the sentence. But then you represent it in Hebrew. It seems to me intuitively that… you try to find its formulation in English. Maybe. You could say that, but it seems to me simply that what all of us have in our head is the picture, and you’re just looking for the representation in the second language. If it’s a picture then that’s true, but a great many contents are not pictures. Rabbi, what about animals? What? Animals. What about animals? They have processes of thought but no language. I don’t know if they have processes of thought. Who says they have processes of thought? You sometimes see some sort of strategy of… No, they calculate. They calculate, but that’s a mechanical matter; it is not certain that there is awareness accompanying the neural activity. Thought is not neural activity. Neural activity is an electrical representation of thought. Thought is what the intellect does, not what the brain does. So to say that intuition says yes, and also to say that intuition can think without words. What? I didn’t understand. That intuition says one can think without words, but you could also say that thinking intuitive thoughts is possible without words, but thoughts that already become something logical and ordered—that already needs words, needs language. Maybe, I don’t know. Not sure. Maybe. As if, if everything starts from words, then the words don’t describe anything. There must be something prior. What? I didn’t understand. If all meaning and all our understanding begins only from words, then it can’t be called that we understand. No, simply, clearly we think content represented in words. The only question is whether we have some basic content that is represented in words. That’s it—there is something prior, but it just doesn’t become thought. It is some kind of intuition maybe. Maybe yes and maybe no, I don’t know. I also tend to think yes, but I’m not sure—I mean, I don’t have any argument that forces the issue. A comment and also a question regarding babies. They have no language. Yes. And they definitely think. Yes—why? Because they respond, you can teach them, it can be proven that babies understand mathematical failures. It could be that you teach them with words; only then do they grasp the contents represented by those words. You assume they understand it beforehand, and you only teach them how to represent what they understand by means of words. But it could be that you teach them the content itself when you teach them the words. No, even without words. I encountered—I heard of an experiment, for example, where they show babies a mathematical failure. They put two balls, cover them with a jug, and somehow lift the jug and there are five balls. And the babies react, they are surprised, and they don’t understand what’s going on here. Fine, could be, I don’t know. I’m remembering now—I think I once wrote about this. There is a famous language researcher named Whorf. A kind of autodidact, but a well-known researcher; he wrote various books. An interesting man. In any case, there I saw some discussion of the relation between content and words. And now I suddenly remember that it connected for me to an article I once read in Nature, I think, or in Science—I don’t remember which one—about a tribe in Brazil called the Pirahã tribe, whose numerical world consists of three elements: one, two, and many. That’s what they have. So the researcher came there and started trying to test what they know how to do with numbers. So he showed them, say, two batteries and three batteries and asked them where there are more. They didn’t know how to answer. But two and a hundred—they did know how to answer. Meaning, they knew that a hundred is more than two. But three and two was already a resolution too fine for them, or beyond them. Meaning, they couldn’t reach the conclusion that three is greater than two, because they weren’t equipped with the concepts two and three. Or three and four. Because two and three is basically two and many. That they do distinguish. But three and four they didn’t know. Even three and five, I think, they had great difficulty. But when the gap is large, they knew. Now this is interesting, because here we really see: they have no words representing a hundred, right? A hundred is “many,” just like three. But when you compare three and a hundred, they still know how to say that a hundred is more than three. They tell you, here there is more—even though they have no word for it. The examples people always bring are the Eskimos and snow—that Eskimos have some thirty different words for different kinds of snow. When I look at it, as far as I’m concerned it’s all the same thing; I won’t see different kinds at all. But for the Eskimos, they live this world of snow so intensely that they distinguish among very fine resolutions of different kinds of snow. And for each kind they have a word characterizing it. Now it’s not clear what comes first: the distinction among the kinds of snow, or the words. Often perhaps they come together. The moment we conceptualize the different kinds of snow in different words, it is also clear to us that—the different kinds. Let’s put it this way: the first intuition says that we know the difference first and afterwards assign the word. But it seems to me that in any case it is also true that after we assign different words, we also understand the difference better. Clearly it sharpens our thought very much. Meaning, conceptualization is not merely representation of content; conceptualization comes back and influences the understanding of the content. Therefore formulating ideas often helps a person sharpen them for himself. Even though ostensibly you are only formulating things you already understood beforehand, all of us know that when you sit and formulate the thing, it becomes sharper for you, you understand it better. So it’s not such a simple matter that first there is understanding and then we generate its verbal representation. Okay, basically what I want to say is that if this is really so—I’m returning to the Holy One, blessed be He, and to Moshe our teacher and the giving of the Torah—then the Holy One, blessed be He, actually gave Moshe our teacher the contents. The verbal representation of the contents was done by Moshe our teacher. That is basically the claim. If I assume there is such a thing as content without verbal representation, then the Holy One, blessed be He, conveys the contents to Moshe our teacher, and Moshe our teacher creates the representation. This reminds me that I once spoke about the transformations the Torah undergoes. There is the midrash that says that when Moshe our teacher ascends on high—yes exactly, there are people here who know the material—when Moshe our teacher ascends on high, the angels argue with the Holy One, blessed be He, why He is bringing the Torah down, why He is giving the Torah to human beings. They want Him to leave it up there. So the Holy One, blessed be He, says to Moshe our teacher: hold on to My throne of glory and answer them. Explain it to them. So Moshe our teacher answers them: it is written in the Torah, “Honor your father and your mother”—do you have a father and mother? It is written in the Torah, “Six days shall you labor and on the seventh you shall rest”—do you labor for six days? Do you have theft and murder and all the things the Torah talks about? It is not relevant, and therefore clearly the Torah needs to come down to earth. Fine, this is of course a parable, aggadic literature, but what is this aggadah saying? This aggadah, in my view, the lesson it wants to teach lies in the angels’ initial assumption, not in Moshe’s answer. The angels’ initial assumption is much more interesting than Moshe’s answer. Moshe’s answer is trivial. I really ask myself: what did the angels think? What did they do with the Torah before it was given to human beings? “Do not murder,” “do not steal,” “honor your father and your mother”—what exactly did they do with that? Meaning, Moshe’s answer is so good that it is not clear what the angels’ question even was—what did they think from the outset? And what I wanted to claim is that the angels studied the Torah before it received its garments, the garments of “honor your father and your mother,” “do not murder,” “do not steal,” and so on. There is apparently some collection of abstract ideas that is relevant also to angels in their world. When the Torah comes down to earth, it receives the garment relevant to human beings on earth, and then suddenly it becomes “do not murder” and “do not steal” and “honor your father and your mother” and everything we know, food prohibitions and impurity and purity and various things like that. All of that was not in the Torah of the angels, but it was the same Torah, exactly the same Torah, the very same thing. But then it’s a dialogue of the deaf. What do you mean? What they asked him, he didn’t answer. They meant before it got clothed in the Torah of now. That’s what I want to claim. In a moment I’ll return to Moshe’s answer and explain it. The claim I want to make is that the angels were basically occupied with certain abstract ideas—not totally abstract, rather clothed in a language and conceptual world belonging to the world of the angels, the world of formation. Okay? And there they have—I don’t know if these were commandments or not commandments—but it wore garments relevant to that world there. This very same Torah, exactly the same thing, when it comes down here, receives the garments we know here, and then it becomes all the commandments and the descriptions and the stories and what I said earlier about Moshe our teacher who wrote the Torah over the course of forty years, even though the contents he already received at Sinai. Now it is much more understandable why. He did not receive at Sinai that the children of Israel would complain and there would be the sin of the complainers, and afterward there would be the sin of striking the rock and all those things. What, Moshe our teacher knew in advance that he was going to sin by striking the rock? So why did he do it? Was he an idiot? Clearly he did not know that in advance. So how? But that is part of the Torah, and he received the Torah at Mount Sinai. How did he not know it in advance? The answer is that these are garments the Torah received as it rolled through the world. The Torah that Moshe our teacher received was some Torah of a collection of abstract contents. These were not events that happened in the wilderness, nor such-and-such commandments, but abstract things. In a certain sense this is the Torah of the angels. That is what he received. And when he came down to earth, he formulated it—but this was not merely wording the ideas you received. Now it becomes much more far-reaching. Now you are already clothing it; the contents themselves also change. It is not just wording, choosing words. There is honoring parents and you choose the formulation “Honor your father and your mother.” No. The very fact that the Torah commands honoring parents is Moshe our teacher and not the Holy One, blessed be He. That is what I want to claim. Because the abstract Torah Moshe our teacher received did not talk about honoring parents. That is a Torah the angels also studied; they don’t have parents. And it is not “do not murder” and “do not steal.” All this is wording formulated by Moshe our teacher. The Torah he received was not only ideas not embodied in words; they were not even embodied in the contents we know. It was content at an even more abstract level, relevant also to the angels. And now I return to the exchange between Moshe and the angels. So what does Moshe answer them? Moshe answers them exactly this. He says to them: what do you want? They aren’t bringing the Torah down to earth. What they are bringing down to earth is merely a collection of contents that will take on a form relevant only to human beings on earth. It isn’t relevant to you. You will continue to deal with your own abstract things. No one is talking to you—what do you want? What is your complaint? You didn’t understand. You think your Torah is being brought down to earth. No. What is brought down to earth is a Torah that will put on garments suited to what happens on earth. This really—yes, now you reminded me, Ido—of Zen in the Art of Archery. There, a German philosophy professor comes—I think this was at the beginning of the twentieth century—he comes to Japan on sabbatical. And there he had a friend who was a professor of law in Tokyo. And he asks his friend to connect him with some Zen master, because he wants to study Zen. Fine, so he comes to this master, and the master says to him: what do you want to study? Do you want archery, fencing, flower arranging, and I don’t know what else. I don’t remember—maybe dance? I don’t remember, there were a few options he offered him. He says to him: no, I don’t want any of those. I want to study Zen. He says to him: yes yes, but what do you want to study? Fencing, archery, flower arranging. He didn’t understand what he wanted from him. And in the end it becomes clear to him—and the book Zen in the Art of Archery, by the way, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig, I think is a paraphrase of that book, because that book preceded it, I think. So that book is dedicated to introducing this whole world of Zen to a Western ear, to a Western person. So among other things, if I remember correctly, it opens with this description. He tries to show people that you can learn the very same thing itself, what is called Zen, whether you study flower arranging, or hitting a target, or fencing. You learned the same thing. It does not matter at all through what medium you do it. In the end you learned the same thing. You learned some abstract thing, some abstract attitude, that can be conveyed through fencing, through dancing, through flower arranging, through target practice, all kinds of things like that—but it doesn’t matter; it’s only mediation. Think of mathematics, for example. In mathematics one can study group theory. Okay? But group theory itself can be studied through groups of rotations or through groups of operators on Hilbert spaces or—it doesn’t matter, just words. These are completely different subjects, but they have the same mathematical structure. That is why these things are called models. Yes? Each such subject is a model for the theory called group theory. A theory is something abstract, and a model is a concrete context whose logic is the logic of the theory, the mathematical theory. Okay? That’s what it’s called in mathematics, in model theory. Model theory investigates the relationship between the theory and its models. Okay? What the relations are between them. Therefore, also in the context of Zen, the theory—yes, Zen is something… you learned the same thing, because it is the same form of relation, the same thought structures or spiritual structures, I don’t know what to call them, that pass through all these ways. And I think this is a parable, a good parable, for what I’m trying to say here. The same abstract spiritual content itself wears one garment in the world of the angels, and another garment in our world. But it is exactly the same content; only once it is fencing and once it is flower arranging. The angels have flowers; for us there are swords, so for us it will be through fencing and for them through flower arranging, but it is the very same thing. And that abstract thing shared by all these appearances is basically the Torah that was given to Moshe our teacher—that abstract thing. And then it must move into contents that are concrete to our world: “do not steal,” “do not murder,” “honor your father and your mother,” Sabbath observance, pork, impurity, purity, and the like. And the third stage is to transfer this into verbal wording. First of all I have contents, but “Honor your father and your mother” could also have been said as “Honor your parents”; that too is a way of saying it. Now one must choose by what words I represent the content. So it went through two transitions. One transition was from abstract ideas to more concrete contents, and after that to represent the concrete contents in a particular wording. Now the claim I want to make here in this principle of Maimonides is that the wording of the Torah is exact. It could not have been worded otherwise, even though it is not the Torah itself; the Torah itself is what this wording describes. But still, the wording is exact wording, it could not have been worded otherwise. And in order for me to have trust in this wording, I need to have trust in the one who worded it, in Moshe our teacher. And therefore the rank and greatness of Moshe our teacher is, for Maimonides, a principle of faith. Because without that, our whole attitude toward the Torah is different. This, I think—again, I’m not sure Maimonides made the whole move I’ve made here, but never mind, I’m just spelling it out more. On the principled level, I do think that what lay behind this idea of Maimonides was that Maimonides understood that Moshe our teacher was the one who formulated it. And I must have great trust in the formulator in order to give the proper status to the text he formulated, because we did not receive that from the Holy One, blessed be He; we received it from Moshe our teacher. Rabbi, why not say the opposite and give up the principle, and say that if the Holy One, blessed be He, had given the Torah—I don’t know—to Aharon, then simply the hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded would have been different? Instead of deriving from an extra vav we would derive from an extra yod, but the Holy One, blessed be He, would have already arranged that everything works out and that the Torah reaches the goals it wants to reach. Look, in principle you can say that, but then you still need to have complete trust in Aharon. Or in the Holy One, blessed be He, who would arrange it. Of course, yes. If the claim is that you want maximum safety that it reaches the right goals, you need the ideal formulator. Also the wording itself apparently cannot—it’s not that the hermeneutical principles by which the Torah is expounded were formulated by the Holy One, blessed be He, and given to Moshe our teacher as-is—even they were formulated by Moshe our teacher, or not even by Moshe our teacher but in later generations, but they too are later formulations. Also the corrections the Holy One, blessed be He, would give if the Torah were worded differently—those corrections too someone would have to formulate. Nothing comes as-is from the Holy One, blessed be He, through hollow conduits, so you must have trust in the formulator. There’s no getting around that. Yes, it seems to me the distinction here is whether you view Moshe our teacher as an ideal formulator, meaning that everything he formulated is perfect, or whether he was simply the solution to an optimization problem—one could also have chosen a slightly less good solution with different principles and gotten a result maybe slightly less good. I don’t know, I don’t know, but I’m saying that even if there were another solution, it would still depend on the formulator, and the formulator would have to be perfect, because otherwise that other solution would not just be less good, it simply would not be correct. Because the wording would not be precise and the interpretive principles he would formulate would not bring us to the right result, and the whole story would go off the rails. Yes, Rabbi is implicitly assuming that Moshe our teacher is ideal—that everything he formulated is perfect. Maimonides assumes that. I’m only explaining; I would not say this on my own. I’m trying to explain what underlies this thesis of Maimonides, why it was so important for him to define this matter as a principle. Where did he get it from? Good question, I don’t know. The importance, it seems to me, comes from the weight that emerges from all these fine distinctions—you ultimately expound from extras, and that needs to have weight. Exactly, that’s what I’m explaining, I’m just saying. But you need to have trust that these fine distinctions are really correct. And for that you need to have trust in Moshe our teacher, in the formulator. Actually here I would say otherwise. Rabbi also says many times that the Torah was not given to ministering angels. The fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, decided to bring the Torah down to human beings who have limitations and deficiencies—so He gave it to Moshe our teacher, and Moshe our teacher is not necessarily the ideal formulator but the optimal one, the best there was. Again, if you ask my personal opinion, I would not say what Maimonides says. And even after he said it, I’m not sure I agree. I’m explaining what he says. If he demands a perfect attitude toward Moshe our teacher—that he is an angel, that he cannot err, that that’s it, no, perfect—why is that? Apparently because he understands that the whole story depends on him. Meaning, if it were not so, then we would miss it. We all know that these things pass through interpretations over the generations. Still, apparently the initial conditions or the starting point of this whole story must be some text in which no errors fell in the text itself. Afterwards, in interpretations here and there, one can always make mistakes. But the text itself has to be some complete text. And the sanctity status we give this text is certainly of that sort—that every missing letter, an absent vav, big deal, so write it with a deficient vowelization, what difference does it make? Why is that important? Meaning, the sanctity status given to the text points to this. It points to the fact that with this text we are not willing to accept that errors might have crept in, and that this wording or that wording is not exacting. Okay? So I think this fits very well with this assumption I am suggesting lies at the base of Maimonides’ principle. Okay, come on, this took a bit longer than I thought. Let’s start the next principle. The eighth principle. The eighth principle is Torah from Heaven. Here there’s no question why this is a principle, right? Or why it is a foundation? That’s obvious. Meaning, if one does not believe this, you can close up shop. This reminds me that the rabbi of Kibbutz Alumim, Rabbi Amit Kula, once wrote a book called Was Being or Was It Not. In that book he makes a move trying to empty our entire faith of facts. Leibowitz’s dream life. Meaning, trying to establish a faith that is completely legitimate, completely faithful, completely committed, without a drop of fact. No factual assumption is needed. So he goes very far. Never mind, I have all kinds of arguments with him. We spoke a bit afterward, and I also wrote some kind of review of the book. But I won’t go into those other details right now. One point here is important to me. I told him: look, I’m willing to accept anything. Meaning, suppose Avraham and Sarah are matter and form, as there were allegorical commentators who explained that all the figures in Genesis are ideas—they are not really historical figures who existed and were created, but rather some ideas; it comes to teach me various ideas. Could be. Yedaya ha-Penini and the allegorists and Philo and people like that. But then all the events in the Torah—I’m willing to say that there is no factual thing that is indispensable. Meaning, I can give up all the facts except one fact: except the giving of the Torah. If you tell me that the giving of the Torah did not happen, that it was some kind of parable or I don’t know exactly what, nothing remains. Then why should I do this? If this Torah was not given from the Holy One, blessed be He—again, I’m not talking right now about when it was given and where it was given and with what pyrotechnics happened there around it. I’m talking about the very claim that there was an interaction with the Holy One, blessed be He, in which He conveyed to us what He wants from us. I’m talking about that minimum. Does it include all the verses of the Torah, all the words, all the letters? That can be debated. But I’m saying: at least that minimum—if you empty this factual detail from the picture, you have left nothing; everything collapses. He tried to say there is a giving of the Torah trickling through all sorts of charismatic people perhaps, or things like that. Why should I trust charismatic people? Meaning, I think I would do nothing if that were the picture. Therefore I say that Torah from Heaven is obvious, like the first principle; so too the eighth principle—for it I have no question why it is a principle. Yes, that the Torah was given to us from Heaven—there is no question why that is a principle. That is the basis of the whole story. Meaning, and that is, that we believe that this entire Torah in our hands today is the Torah given to Moshe, and that all of it is from the mouth of divine power. Meaning that it all came to him from God, by a mode of arrival that is metaphorically called speech. I hadn’t even noticed, you see? And no one knows the nature of that arrival except he, peace be upon him, to whom it came. And that he was like a scribe before whom one reads and he writes the whole of it—its dates, its stories, and its commandments—and therefore he is called lawgiver. Yes, Moshe our teacher is called lawgiver. So I didn’t even remember that—you see what he writes here? Exactly what I said in the previous principle. He is basically saying that when the Torah came to Moshe our teacher, it is metaphorically called speech, but it is not that the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke with Moshe our teacher. “And no one knows the nature of that arrival except he, peace be upon him, to whom it came.” So this is basically not really speech or transfer of content through verbal representation. Exactly what I said before; I had not even remembered this appears here. And this is the basis for the previous principle. And the wording—and this is what Maimonides writes here explicitly afterward—that how did the wording we have reach Moshe our teacher? It reached him in a way metaphorically called speech, and no one knows the nature of that arrival except him, and that he—that’s the continuation—“was like a scribe before whom one reads and he writes the whole of it, its dates, its stories, and its commandments, and therefore he is called lawgiver.” What does that mean? After all, if it was not speech, then plainly if it was not speech, then probably words did not reach him either, but rather some contents reached him. And he is the scribe—scribe is also a metaphor. He is not a scribe to whom someone dictates and he writes; rather he is a scribe who receives contents, but he is the one who formulates them. And the wording of the Torah, the dates and the stories and the commandments and everything—basically this is Moshe our teacher’s writing. He translated that angelic Torah, that abstract Torah, into dates and stories and commandments and everything. And Moshe our teacher wrote that, not the Holy One, blessed be He. And we have to believe that the Torah is Torah from Heaven in that sense. If I’m right, then this is basically the continuation of the previous principle. The belief that Moshe our teacher was a faithful conduit is actually the condition for us to be able to believe that the Torah was given to us from the Holy One, blessed be He, at Sinai. Since clearly it was not given to us as-is in words. It passed through Moshe our teacher. If we did not have complete trust in Moshe our teacher from the previous principle, we could not have complete trust in the Torah as Torah from Heaven. It would not be Torah from Heaven; it would be Torah from Moshe, not Torah from the Holy One, blessed be He. Interesting expression: a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai. Why do they always include Moshe? A Jewish law from Sinai. What is “a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai”? Maybe the intention is—I don’t know—maybe the intention is that indeed Moshe formulated this Jewish law, not the Holy One, blessed be He. Only he formulated something he received from the Holy One, blessed be He. But the Jewish law we are talking about is Moshe’s law, not the Holy One’s. This also reminds me of the Talmudic passage where Moshe our teacher ascends on high. Then the Holy One, blessed be He, shows him every generation and its expounders, every generation and its sages, and he sees Rabbi Akiva’s study hall. Then he asks what is to become of this one, and He showed him that he would be combed with iron combs, and so on. But at the beginning there, he sees Rabbi Akiva’s study hall, where he was expounding crowns on letters and so on, and Moshe our teacher sat there at the end of twenty rows and understood nothing. That’s what the Talmud says. Then he became distressed, and at some stage someone there asked another question, and the answer came: this is a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai. Then Moshe was reassured. What does it mean that he was reassured? Until now he understood nothing, and they tell him: what you didn’t understand is a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai. How is it a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai if he understands nothing? They received it from him—how does he not understand? And why does that reassure him? It reassures him because he understands that the later generations are doing more or less the same work that he did. They too conceptualize and formulate and pour it into conceptual worlds belonging to their world, and that is no longer the world of Moshe our teacher. Therefore Moshe our teacher can no longer understand the formulations the Torah takes on when it reaches Rabbi Akiva. But they tell him: look, this is a Jewish law to Moshe from Sinai. It is that same Torah that you brought down to us; just as the Torah of the angels passed through translation by you, the generations after you—that same Torah itself. And this process of translation and conceptualization and formulation continues all the time. In this case it is the Oral Torah. But still, it is a process that constantly continues. We formulate and conceptualize and define and formulate again and then at some stage write it down—Rabbi, “it is a time to act for the Lord,” and so on. And you see that this process is basically not a hollow conduit. It is not some passage of Torah from the Holy One, blessed be He, through Moshe our teacher, prophets, elders, Men of the Great Assembly, and down to us, some hollow conduit like that. No—every generation formulates, defines, and so on. Therefore tradition is something much more complex than that simplistic picture of hollow conduits, as though it is all basically words spoken by the Holy One, blessed be He. Okay, at this stage let’s stop here. It’s actually good that we started the eighth principle because it completed the seventh principle for us, but next time we’ll continue it. Any comments or questions? Rabbi, I wanted to say regarding the principle of the importance of Moshe our teacher: I always interpreted it as bound up with the next principle, but in the sense that it emphasizes that there was no one like Moshe our teacher and there never will be one like him, and therefore there will never be an authority alternative to Moshe our teacher or to the Torah—meaning, that no decree can ever emerge that could contradict the Torah. And why can that be? Only because there will never again be someone at such a level as Moshe our teacher, and then he could in effect contradict the Written Torah. Okay, that is simply the other side of the same coin I was talking about. Your trust in the rank of Moshe our teacher is what enables you to treat what he said as absolute, as something with no alternative—it cannot be that there was a mistake there, it cannot be—meaning, it’s the same thing. It basically means that no sage or future prophet can come and change it. I also wanted to say: there is that statement in the Talmud that whoever says a verse—this Moshe said on his own—is an apikorus or something like that. So I heard from Rabbi Cherki that he says this specifically about Mishneh Torah, about Deuteronomy, where it is more explicit that Moshe our teacher wrote it on his own—that Moshe our teacher wrote it and the Holy One, blessed be He, agreed to it, meaning what Moshe our teacher wrote, the Holy One, blessed be He, gave it the stamp of approval, yes, include this in the overall wording of the Torah. Yes, but I want to claim that this is true of all the books. The difference between Deuteronomy and the other books is that Deuteronomy is probably—or let’s say in the simplest way—only retrospective approval. It did not begin from content that Moshe our teacher formulated. Whereas the other books are content that Moshe our teacher only formulated: he received it and formulated it. But Deuteronomy is Moshe our teacher’s own book; the Holy One, blessed be He, agreed with him afterward, or he received it from the Holy One, blessed be He, in a more indirect way—you can formulate this in various ways. But there is still a difference between the books, even though I claim with regard to all of them that the wording is Moshe our teacher’s, not only Deuteronomy. Maybe precisely here, if I may comment, I have a tendency to say that Moshe our teacher really was freer in the actual writing of all the books—meaning, not that the Holy One, blessed be He, dictated to him the exact wording not only in words but also in contents. Because really all the talk about the Sinai revelation and the authority of Jewish law—if you classify that only under the Oral Torah, and you also see this basis in the Written Torah, because in the Written Torah there is not really a code of Jewish laws, law law law, but you see a description that the Lord says to Moshe, speak to the children of Israel, tell them this, as though the halakhic basis is ultimately the speech. And as if the Written Torah was written—you don’t really see testimony to an instruction to write the Torah inside the Written Torah. In the Written Torah you only see testimony to the fact that the Lord spoke with Moshe and told him to speak the things, but not to write them or transmit them as some written basis. Why? Why, when He tells him to speak, does he write them? I didn’t understand. Because Rabbi spoke about that place where the Lord instructed Moshe to write, but we don’t see that. Where? Who said He instructed Moshe to write? He instructed Moshe to formulate. Whether in writing or orally? It could be in writing, it could be orally. It sounds from you as though the Written Torah itself isn’t important here. I’m talking about the question whether the text is a sacred text. Whether one says it orally or writes it down—that’s another whole issue; I didn’t get into that. No, but if the Lord says to Moshe, speak to the children of Israel and say to them that they should make themselves fringes, then it is not necessarily that Moshe said it to them exactly as he wrote it in the Torah, but rather he simply taught them the laws of fringes. Okay, true. Yes, I wanted to say that I do not see some instruction anywhere to write the Written Torah. The instruction was apparently at the giving of the Torah. When He gave it to him, He said: formulate and write. I don’t know. The Torah itself does not contain an instruction to write, fine, because the Torah itself is the product of that instruction. Okay, I have something to say, but I don’t want to go on now. Fine. Okay, anyone else? Good, so Sabbath peace, goodbye. Sabbath peace, good night.