The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 21

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Plotinus and Don Yehuda Abravanel add another layer to this whole world, the aesthetic world, let’s call it, the world of aesthetic concepts, and that parallels exactly the addition of the Logos to the ideas, what we saw in section 8: that the Alexandrians, who mediate between the Platonic Academy and the Stoa, who compose the world of ideas with the Logos, introduce a Logos behind the world of ideas. So Don Yehuda Abravanel does exactly the same thing in the aesthetic realm, and what he introduces is the beautifying beautiful. In Don Yehuda Abravanel there are three concepts in beauty. Again, that’s how the Nazir describes him. In other descriptions I’ve seen there’s the beautifying beautiful and the beautified beautiful; they don’t speak there of three things. But here it’s essential that with the Nazir there are three things. I don’t know what really goes on there. I don’t know whether there’s a Hebrew translation of this. If there is, that would actually interest me. Of what? Of Don Yehuda Abravanel.

[Speaker B] The Power of Love has two editions. Does everyone in the yeshivah have it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] There’s an old edition, off to the side, called The Dialogue, that’s—

[Speaker B] It’s called The Dialogue, and it’s in the yeshivah, and there’s a newer one, Dialogues on Love, published by the Bialik Institute.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Where is it in there? In the south room too?

[Speaker B] In that room.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In any case, so we really need to look at it. But the Nazir’s claim is that there are three concepts: there is beauty, the beautified beautiful, and the beautifying beautiful. So section 15 begins with the fact that Don Yehuda Abravanel brings the Platonic or Neoplatonic concept of the idea into the Torah and makes Plato a disciple of our elders in divine matters, trying somehow to bring him into the Torah framework. And down here in the notes—I don’t remember if we mentioned this last time—he brings from Rabbi Azariah dei Rossi that matter, yes, I think we did mention this, that prime matter according to Plato is also newly created, in order to integrate him with the Torah conception of a created world. We said that in practice this stands against everything the Nazir is trying to say here, that Plato too is basically a holder of a Greek conception, meaning a static conception, where the ideas are some fixed world, a static world. And we said that within a framework of such a static conception there are no forces acting in creation. Creation is some thing that just stands there existing. And once that’s the conception, there’s no room for creation, and it’s no accident that the Greeks didn’t believe in creation. They didn’t believe in creation because of that same static visual conception of the world of ideas, where nothing changes. It’s a thing that has existed from time immemorial. The world is eternal. And that is true of Plato too, because Plato too, for our purposes, falls into the Greek framework, and we’ve already discussed that several times. Here they’re trying to bring Plato into the Torah framework and say, for example, that primordial matter is newly created. So that already means there is a creator, and that means there is in fact some force behind all these static ideas. That’s basically introducing a Logos behind the ideas, which Plato does not do, at least according to the Nazir. And Don Yehuda Abravanel does do this, and says as follows: There are three levels in beauty—this is the middle of the section—“that which brings it forth, it itself, and that which is affected by it. That is to say, the beautifying beautiful, beauty, and the beautified beautiful. The beautifying beautiful, father to beauty, is the supreme God; and beauty is the supreme wisdom and the first intellectual paradigm, the mother; and the beautified beautiful, son of beauty, is created reality.” By the way, the terminology here is very interesting: father, mother, and son. Could this already be under the shadow of Christianity?

[Speaker B] Yes, it appears that Don Yehuda Abravanel converted at the end of his life.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But—

[Speaker B] Many claim that apparently that’s not true, but there’s a problem with it, because he was the son of Don Yitzhak Abravanel, and he grew up—the king of Portugal captured him and he grew up at first with him. In short, there was a whole mess there. There’s an opinion that he converted at the end? No, no, sorry, he was the son of Don Yitzhak Abravanel. He wasn’t—the son went with his father; the king of Portugal captured his son and called him—he composed Complaint Against Time, a very long poem. Really, you have to know—that is, I mentioned last time the Agnon story.

[Speaker C] There’s some Agnon story, I think I mentioned—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] this, and someone just brought me that story because he’s dealing a bit with it, there’s some university paper analyzing the story. What was it called? What’s it called? War of People? Something like that?

[Speaker C] No, no, that’s another story.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, I looked at that too, it’s something else. So someone doing work on it at the university brought it to me because he wanted to think a bit about that story. In any case, the story tells of some man who closes his shop toward the Sabbath—a Jew closes his shop toward the Sabbath and goes back to his parents’ house—and just before he closes, three Christian priests come to him. And while discussing this it suddenly struck me: three Christian priests who came to visit him. He starts talking with them, and they come to his house, and he sits them down. They want to talk to him. So he hurries to the synagogue, and they say to him, no problem, the sun hasn’t set yet, you still have time. And he’s surprised that they know something of Jewish customs and so on. He seats them there by the table, and then they ask him, tell us, why two candles? Where’s the candle for the son? Why are you lighting two candles? So of course there’s a double meaning: the son is actually him, which is also true. That is, when they light candles, he has two parents in the house; it’s a son living with his parents. So true, sometimes they also light three candles corresponding to the members of the household, and of course there’s some double meaning here, that they also mean the candle for the son. And afterward, at some point, I think they disappear, and then two more come, or two of them remain—I don’t remember exactly whether that’s it—or one disappears and one remains, and in the end that one turns out to be a woman Jew in disguise. It reminds me of Yentl. But it turns out to be a woman Jew in disguise. I think what’s in that story—even I don’t remember all the aspects—I think it was very prominent there, and Agnon didn’t include it in all his writings, and I understood from that student that there was great resentment here around that story. Various rabbinic circles were very angry with Agnon for writing that story and for dealing with things like that. At first I didn’t understand why, but I think I do understand why. That is, maybe I don’t know whether they thought of it this way, but I understand why one could resent such a thing. It seems to me there is some claim here—and I’m coming to this with trembling lips—that this notion of the Christian Trinity is not as foreign to the Jewish spirit as it appears at first glance. In the world of Kabbalah, the Shekhinah is of course the female, and she is the consort of the Holy One, blessed be He, what is often called Knesset Yisrael. Knesset Yisrael and the Shekhinah are in many contexts basically synonymous terms, and this is called something like a mother, really. In that kabbalistic world too there are configurations called father, mother, and Ze’ir Anpin—that’s the son. But even in our own concepts, the Shekhinah or Knesset Yisrael serves many times as the consort, as it were, of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the concrete Jewish people here in our world is basically some son that nurses from them. And more than that, it says that the Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one. Meaning, there are ideas in the kabbalistic world that require only a very small midrashic translation to turn them into outright Christian ideas. And I’m not sure there isn’t some shared root here. We’d have to know what exactly the differences are, but Christians, after all, drew from some kind of Gnosticism, which I assume was not disconnected from kabbalistic ideas. And it seems to me that this Agnon story is basically making the claim: you also use the same thing. You too have three. Even the candles you light are two—remember and observe, by the way, that’s male and female. Remember and observe. And they only ask him, where is the candle for the son? So he says, you too are really making three things. And indeed these three priests come as three, but in the end one remains. Because in fact the three are one, exactly as with us the three are one. And the one that remains at the end also, in some sense, turns out to be a woman Jew. So this already—you understand—the story gets to a point where there is really some claim here, it seems to me, if I’m reading the story correctly. And even if I’m not reading the story correctly, I think that’s a claim one has to address independently of the story: that in fact, if you looked at it more sympathetically, you would be much softer toward such ideas. From the outset we don’t want to understand Christian ideas. What?

[Speaker B] They inject us with fear of Christianity from age zero. Exactly. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] And perhaps, it seems to me—or, if they hadn’t emerged from us in such a rebellious way, even aside from the killing—so of course there is a basic antipathy to Christianity, and therefore every Christian idea gets painted as a ridiculous folly, or at best a novella.

[Speaker B] It could be that here they perhaps paralleled Abravanel’s method on the intellectual plane to Maimonides’ famous “He is the knower, the known, and knowledge,” I don’t remember the details exactly.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s what I thought at first glance when I read it, but it seems to me—at least from what I see here, I haven’t read it inside—that that’s not right. At first, when I read it here, it seemed completely parallel to me, but it seems to me that it isn’t the same parallel.

[Speaker B] It’s not parallel because it’s not on the same plane, or—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] because it’s not the same logical structure, it seems to me there. Fine. Yes. The point is that even within the Jewish world, at least in the kabbalistic world, the kabbalistic world certainly thinks this way: there are three that are one, and these three are also structured as father, mother, and son. It’s not all that foreign. And in fact his terminology here—that the beautifying beautiful is the father, that’s the Holy One, blessed be He, of course, the Most High God, he says that explicitly. And beauty is the supreme wisdom—let’s call it Knesset Yisrael for the sake of discussion, or the Shekhinah—that is the mother, the female. And the son is the thing beautified, yes, the Jewish people, who receive the emanation through the Shekhinah, who beautifies them from above, because she passes the emanation on to them. The Jewish people receive the emanation from the divine, and that is the son. And this is a general mechanism of beauty altogether, but it is also a metaphysical mechanism of drawing down emanation from above. In other words, we already said—I think—that Don Yehuda Abravanel, a lot of his ideas, if you look at them from this angle, seem to me to be some kind of garment for kabbalistic ideas. So he isn’t talking only about aesthetics. He is talking about aesthetics too, but for him aesthetics draws from deeper processes, and I think those processes have significance beyond aesthetics. Aesthetics too is built in the same way. When we talk about beauty, how beauty is bestowed upon a thing, that basically means there is a beautifying beautiful, there is that one who is father to beauty, as he calls it here, “the one that brings it forth,” father to beauty, Most High God. There is beauty itself, which is the supreme wisdom, which perhaps parallel to Plato would be the ideas. The ideas are beauty itself, the beautiful model itself. And the beautified thing is the object itself, about which I judge how much beauty there is in it. Basically what Don Yehuda Abravanel added here is the beautifying beautiful.

[Speaker B] Meaning, in the Plotinian—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] or Neoplatonic world, there are ideas, which are beauty, and there is the beautified beautiful, which is the concrete objects, this world. And in the static language there is seal and imprint; there are ideas and there are objects in this world, and I compare them in order to know how beautiful this object is. What Don Yehuda Abravanel added is that there is also a beautifying beautiful. Meaning, there is some force that moves this whole process of beautification, this power of beauty. There is also an owner of the power of beauty. Okay? “It is created reality”—that’s the son. I think that’s very clear. Now he says—I’ll keep reading—“Beauty is something seen either by the eyes of the body or by the eyes of the intellect, and therefore it is said: ‘And God saw all that He had made, and behold it was very good.’ And good means beautiful, for visible good is always beauty. But intellectual sight cannot apprehend except in the divine wisdom.” What is the divine wisdom? That is the supreme wisdom above; that is beauty, not the beautifying beautiful, but beauty. But not its first beginning, which is the beautifying beautiful. That cannot be apprehended. “The beginning, the simple and exalted source”—that is hidden. That cannot be apprehended. How can’t it be apprehended? It can’t be apprehended by the eyes—not by the sight of the intellect and not by the sight of the eyes. By sight it cannot be apprehended. Meaning, the visible good is beauty. What is that? That’s the world of ideas, that’s beauty basically in its embodiment, beauty as such—

[Speaker C] You can’t apprehend it by the eyes—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] by intellectual sight, not by the eyes. He says that here explicitly: “But intellectual sight cannot apprehend except in the divine wisdom.” He isn’t talking about physical sight. Now these are basically criteria for the good. We talked about concepts, right? Concepts have matter and form—we talked about that, right? More than once, actually. Concepts have matter and form, right? There is the concept itself, and there is how it appears. Now, it doesn’t appear to the eyes; it appears to the eyes of the intellect. The idea is how the concept appears. What Don Yehuda Abravanel added is that there is also the concept itself, whereas at the highest level, the thing in itself is God. At that point we’ve already reached another heretic, Spinoza. But that is basically the claim. The claim is that the thing itself, the beautified beautiful, is the source of beauty—what he calls, yes, “the beginning, the simple and hidden source”—that is the Most High God. That is the beautifying beautiful. Plato’s ideas are the form of beauty; they are not beauty itself, they are the form of beauty. The criteria of beauty, or the perfect horse that we’ll relate to in the beautified thing—that is the idea. Yes, certainly. That is the thing itself, the thing about which we judge whether it is beautiful or not beautiful.

[Speaker B] That’s what he says.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The reality of beauty is the created reality. “Goodness,” as he calls it here, is the idea of the good, right? That’s still a Platonic concept. Don Yehuda Abravanel’s claim is that there is something beyond that. There is a Logos within the world of ideas. There is God—or God’s utterance, not God Himself, but God’s utterance—which is the force that activates the world of ideas. There is a force that stands behind it, and that cannot be apprehended at all. “That beginning, the simple and hidden source” cannot be apprehended. Why can’t it be apprehended? Exactly in the same way that I cannot apprehend the substance in itself through the senses, through the eyes, right? All I can apprehend through the senses from an object standing before me is the form of the object, right? The substance in itself cannot be apprehended. Apprehension always operates on the form of a thing, not on the matter of a thing. In the same way, the source of all forms, all properties, the owner of all the properties, let’s call it—that cannot be apprehended by means of sensation. Right? All you can see is the color of the table, its shape, how it looks. The table itself, as such, before stripping away all its properties, is not something that can be apprehended through the senses. That is the hidden source of the table. So too the world of ideas has a hidden source; there is some thing that is their source, the thing of which they are merely descriptions or properties. Okay? According to Plotinus, according to Don Yehuda Abravanel—I’m going back for a moment to the second paragraph of this section—“In The Dialogue on Love he elevates above all the senses the sense of sight.” In that sense, Don Yehuda Abravanel still hasn’t reached the Nazir’s full conception, the full auditory conception, right? We need now to understand what still remains. Meaning, Don Yehuda Abravanel apparently has already gone beyond Platonism, beyond Plotinus, and seemingly has already arrived completely at the Semitic conception. He has already added the Logos behind the world of ideas, like the Alexandrians did, and there too we had the same dilemma. I didn’t understand—I still didn’t know exactly—whether there’s criticism of them there, or whether he claims that actually within their words there really is the true conception. Because it seems there’s some note of criticism there. Meaning, they introduce it, true, they’re somehow mediating between Plato and the Semitic world, but they did not grasp the world in a fully Semitic way. So what is still missing? That’s the question. After all, he already understood that there is a beautifying beautiful, and also a thing, a force, that stands behind the ideas, behind beauty as such. So what is missing now? What’s the problem? Meaning, why isn’t he already a perfect Jew in the perfect Semitic conception? Right? And it’s clear that he isn’t, because that’s what he says: “In The Dialogue on Love he elevates above all the senses the sense of sight.” Meaning, even Don Yehuda Abravanel still hasn’t completed the whole path to the full Semitic conception. So what is missing? It seems to me that what’s missing here is the ability to create contact with that Logos of the world of ideas. Don Yehuda Abravanel has already reached the conclusion that such a thing exists. There is something that moves the ideas, that is inside them. A divine utterance, yes, that is inside them and continues to animate them. But according to Don Yehuda Abravanel, that beginning, the simple and hidden source, cannot be apprehended. It is a hidden source from his point of view. And why? Exactly because for him everything is grasped through sight—even intellectual sight, but sight. What is sight? It is the imaginative faculty, meaning an attempt to grasp the thing through its properties. And therefore he is forced to arrive at the conclusion that we have no access whatsoever to the thing itself. True, it exists—he has already reached the conclusion that it exists—but we have no way to create contact with it. I think that is the point missing from Don Yehuda Abravanel’s teaching in order to really arrive at a Semitic conception. The Semitic conception wants to claim that I do have some way—and we’ve already talked about this more than once—it wants to claim that I have some way of creating contact with the thing itself, not just. Hearing is, as we said, hearing things behind the wall—not only guessing that they exist, but actually making contact with them, right? Someone could come and say, look, inside that room behind the wall there is something. Fine. But still, with my eyes I have no way to get to it. What I see are only the outer walls. So you’ve advanced already—you understand that there is something behind that—but you still don’t think it’s possible to make contact with it, because the tool through which you make contact is only the eyes, or only the senses, if we use the ordinary language now. Right, for him eyes symbolize the senses, sensory perception in general, or the imaginative faculty. And what is missing from that conception is the Semitic ability, my ability to listen. And that ability is what Don Yehuda Abravanel lacks. This simple and hidden source—one can still listen to it. That’s what listening is: listening to that divine utterance behind the ideas, the Logos. One can listen to it too, not only infer that it is there. That is what Don Yehuda Abravanel lacks. Meaning, there is some ability to create contact with the thing not through its properties. And it seems to me we already mentioned that it’s simply obvious that this is so. Yes, like we talked about with the concept of Jew—that was the example we discussed, I think, right? The concept of good—those were the examples we brought. The fact is that I can try to think whether these are the correct characteristics of the concept, or whether these are good definitions of the concept, or propose alternative definitions or alternative characteristics. If one can do that, it’s a sign that I can make contact with the thing itself before I know what its characteristics are, right? Otherwise, in what sense am I asking whether these are the correct characteristics? I see these, so these are what they are—what is there to discuss? Meaning, what I see is what I see, right? There’s nothing to argue about—whether this wall is white or not white. I see that it’s white, so it’s white. If I’m now discussing the question of what the proper characteristics of the concept Jew are, the meaning is that I can make contact with the concept Jew even before I know what its characteristics are. I can try to listen to what the concept Jew is saying to me, and from that understand how its characteristics ought to appear in the world. Only one born to a Jewish mother, or one who converted according to Jewish law, for example. Or the characteristics of the concept good—that it’s forbidden to murder old people in the snow. Right, all those things we discussed with the Eskimos. So that—that’s the proof I meant to bring there for the point that not only—maybe I didn’t emphasize it enough there, so I’m emphasizing it now. There I brought only a proof that there is such a thing as the concept in itself, the matter of the concept before its characteristics. But actually what we saw there is more than that. Not only that such a thing exists, but also that one can make contact with it. That one can, as it were, listen to it or contemplate it—let’s call it listening, because contemplation belongs to the world of sight—and out of that contemplation or listening try to understand what characteristics really ought to be attached to that thing. Because that is basically what we can infer from there: not only the very existence of the matter of the concept, but also that I can derive things from the concept about its characteristics, right? If I say the concept Jew must be someone born to a Jewish mother or one who converted according to Jewish law. Or I say the concept good must be, I don’t know, helping the poor.

[Speaker B] And how do you decide the characteristics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] From the seeing—I mean, from the hearing in that case.

[Speaker B] The concept “born to a Jewish mother” and so on—I don’t derive that from the concept; I derive it because it’s written.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, okay, specifically in that concept. But whoever first formulated that criterion, for example—assuming it’s not an explicit verse, and it seems to me that even the homilies are not an explicit verse—and we’ll get to that, that’s the next article, which I don’t know when we’ll reach at our current pace, but there he speaks precisely about the thirteen hermeneutic principles by which the Torah is expounded. He claims those are Semitic tools. And that is the way of listening. The homiletic interpretations of the verses are basically the way to listen to what they are saying to us, to what is behind them.

[Speaker B] Some sort of listening to the Torah—there’s listening to the world too, right?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listening to the world is like listening to the Torah. There’s no difference. It’s the same thing, yes.

[Speaker D] It seems to me the description was that there’s some beauty that doesn’t have the power to be imprinted like a seal upon the witness that would stamp beauty into beauty existing on its own, and therefore you need some beautifying beauty that gives the power.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know whether it’s because it doesn’t have the power, I don’t know. Meaning, Plato thought that there is such a process of imprinting, right? Seal and imprint. I don’t know whether it comes from some necessity that it can’t be that way, as opposed to a conception that I know there is such a thing. I believe in God—not that this is my proof for His existence. It could be—maybe Plato’s is also a consistent conception. But I don’t reject it because it’s inconsistent; I reject it because I know there is a beautifying beautiful. I’m not sure that what’s written here is that such a conception is impossible, a conception that could not be. But I know that the source of everything is God, so to me it’s obvious that there is also some beautifier.

[Speaker D] Meaning, the beautifier also created ideal beauty?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume so. He created the world of ideas, and through it—and the ideas themselves also come to expression in our world. In kabbalistic terms, He created the spiritual worlds, and ultimately He created the world of action, right? So there is some—someone who created this. It is not some process that just runs by itself, where each world creates the one below it. That is what happens, but in truth the owner of this world is the one who, as it were, is the matter of which this world is the form. He is the one who performs the actions. Right? Even when my hands do things, you don’t say that my hand did something. I did something, even though it was done by my hand grasping something and moving it here. So in the same way, the Holy One, blessed be He, acts in the world through all kinds of spiritual powers or spiritual worlds, but it is the Holy One, blessed be He, who acts in the world, not the powers, not the powers themselves. He is the owner of the powers, He is the actor, not the powers.

[Speaker D] He Himself is the beautifier. Right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Through beauty, right. Beauty is Plato’s world of ideas, basically in the Neoplatonic teachings. And he’s not alone in that. Maimonides and all the Jewish Neoplatonists conceive of the world this way, that Plato’s world of ideas is basically the spiritual worlds of Kabbalah, more or less. He isn’t focusing on a specific world right now; I don’t know whether there is an explicit parallel, but it is clear that it plays the same role. And these worlds too, in the kabbalistic conception, that really is what happens: world creates world, each world creates the world beneath it. But it’s clear that the one really performing the actions is the power that moves all these worlds; it’s not the worlds themselves. The worlds themselves are forms of revelation of the owner of the powers, but the owner of the powers is the one who does everything. Without Him there is nothing. Everything is basically some sort of attributes of His, or powers of His, or something like that. In Kabbalah these are positive attributes, not negative ones.

[Speaker D] So these things are positive attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He. According to that, then it ought to be some kind of chain, a column of three, one under another—or is it more like two?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, right, so I want to stress that. That’s exactly right. There are not three here one under another, because if—let’s look at this in terms of—no, no, exactly, that’s the point. Let’s think for a moment about an onion, the layers of an onion. We talked about this in the classes on repentance, right? I think—the onion structure of—

[Speaker C] the onion-like structure of the person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But in fact everything is built like some kind of onion that has layers, more inner and more outer. Right? Each such layer of the onion defines the layer that wraps around it, the more external one, and so on. Right? Now the onion itself, the onion as such, is not the innermost layer. It is not located on that same chain in first place. It is the whole business—it stands to the side, you understand what I mean? There is the thing itself, which is the matter of the thing, and the form itself is indeed composed of some worlds, one inside another or one above another, it doesn’t matter how you look at it. More internal and more external. Those are relations between things of the same type. Meaning, even in the world of a person’s values—we talked about this there, the human will and values, how exactly a person’s will operates and how he behaves according to his values. So we said there are higher values: to be moral, to be—I don’t know—various things like that, to help the poor, and so on. And above all of them there is yet another value: to obey the voice of the Holy One, blessed be He, to serve God, from which the values are derived—the 613 values, let’s say, of the commandments of the Written Torah. Within those commandments further values are derived that are in a more external layer. So these really do stand one above another; that is indeed a hierarchical structure. Right? But the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself—or the person himself, not the Holy One, blessed be He—the person himself who decides to act according to those values, is not the point that stands at the top of the pyramid. He doesn’t belong to that pyramid at all. That whole pyramid is some form that expresses the person. It’s not that the person is the highest point in the pyramid. The person is the whole pyramid. Do you understand what I mean?

[Speaker B] He’s also not only the whole pyramid.