The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 31

Table of Contents

• [0:00] Negative attributes – introduction
• [1:37] The Mu'tazilites and the mutakallimun – a theological debate
• [3:37] The Holy One, blessed be He, is Himself knowledge
• [5:35] The Nazir and the issue of essential attributes
• [14:20] Divine ability – logical limits
• [15:33] The ability to know the future – the paradox of time
• [19:41] The light of God – a clear form of the Shekhinah
• [28:58] Negation in the Creator’s attributes and its connection to His honor
• [30:44] Rabbi Yehuda Halevi: attributes, patterns, and secondary forms
• [32:41] The view of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi and Rav Saadia Gaon regarding negative attributes
• [33:57] The author of Emunah Ramah: negations and attributes of action
• [42:49] Maimonides and the solution of negative attributes for faith
• [52:27] Opposites in the Torah: light, darkness, cold, and heat
• [??:??] Knowledge versus choice – a logical contradiction (NONE)

Summary

General overview

The text presents the question of the attributes and qualities of divinity as a central axis in Jewish philosophical thought, against the background of the dispute between the mutakallimun, who believed in essential attributes, and the Mu'tazilites, who denied them and were considered “empty” because, in the eyes of their opponents, they were saying nothing when they settled for negative attributes. It cites sources from Rav Saadia Gaon, Rabbeinu Bahya, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Daud, and Maimonides, all of whom shape a position according to which positive attributes of the divine essence are impossible, and attributes of action or negative attributes are the safer option in avoiding anthropomorphism. But a problem remains: negation, seemingly, does not tell us what kind of God one believes in. Out of this difficulty, the discussion points toward a “special” path in which negation itself contains a kind of “positive negation” and inner hint, through concepts like holy and through the use of “honor and Shekhinah,” and from there it moves toward a “Hebrew Shemitic logic” whose aim is to make possible a kind of knowledge not based only on ordinary logic.

The purpose of examining negative attributes and the historical context

The text refuses to get into detailed specifics either within Rabbi Yehuda Halevi or within Rav Saadia Gaon, and instead sets as its goal understanding what exactly a “negative attribute” means and what is being said when people speak about negative attributes. It describes the dispute between the mutakallimun, who believed in essential attributes such as primordial, eternal, knowing, living, and willing, and the Mu'tazilites, who denied essential attributes, and it presents an interpretation according to which calling them “heretics” may also mean “empty people” who say nothing at all. It states that according to the mutakallimun’s claim, the Mu'tazilites add no real content, because settling for negative attributes leaves the discourse empty of substance, and it remarks that there are other interpretations of the name “Mu'tazilites,” and that the Kuzari alludes to this in that context.

Rav Saadia Gaon: one, living, able, wise, and He Himself is knowledge

The text quotes Rav Saadia Gaon in Emunot Ve-De'ot listing five matters: He is one, living, able, wise, and none is like Him. It argues that Rav Saadia says that living, able, and wise are grasped together as “one existence all at once,” and it is impossible for the intellect to grasp one of them before the others. It points to an ambiguity as to whether these are essential attributes, and cites the formulation at the end of the essay that “the Holy One, blessed be He, is Himself knowledge,” something paralleled also in Rabbi Yehuda Halevi. It quotes a list of thirteen “essential matters,” among them: primordial, one, living and enduring, able, knowing, creator, not chaos and void, not unjust, good, unchanging, His kingship will not end, His command is enduring, and it is obligatory to praise Him. It then raises a question about the relationship between “He is not unjust” and “He is good.” It adds an interpretive claim that “essential matters” there may be understood as paradoxical abilities, and places this against medieval authorities (Rishonim) who held that one should not say that the Holy One, blessed be He, can do logical contradictions, while distinguishing between a logical contradiction and a violation of the laws of nature.

Logical contradictions, knowledge and choice, and Rashba’s answer

The text formulates the problem of knowledge and choice as the question whether the contradiction between foreknowledge and free choice is a logical contradiction or a contradiction on the plane of the laws of nature and physics, and it argues that if it is a logical contradiction, then one cannot truly believe in both sides together. It distinguishes between the possibility that the Holy One, blessed be He, changes laws of nature, such as a stone not submitting to gravity, and the claim that He creates a “round triangle,” which is seen as merely a combination of words that does not point to a concept or reality. It brings Rashba’s responsum about the possibility that the Holy One, blessed be He, might grant prophecy to a person who does not meet the natural conditions for prophecy according to Maimonides, and presents this as an example that the Holy One, blessed be He, can change a law of nature but cannot create a logical contradiction. It argues that when a question is formulated as a logical contradiction, the fundamental answer is: “the question is not clear,” because the concept does not point to anything. It also brings in the example of “Puss in Boots” to sharpen the point that something subject to destruction in relation to divinity is perceived as contradicting His essence and therefore is impossible.

The light of glory, Shekhinah, and names in the world of emanation

The text states that “the light of God is the light of glory, a clear form, Shekhinah,” and interprets “a clear form” as a created likeness that one can “look at” and attribute a collection of qualities to, without this being a form in the sense of the form of a table grasped in the thing itself. It describes the names in the world of emanation as created entities that represent the Holy One, blessed be He, and His mode of action in the world, and states that positive attributes of divinity can appear in this way, but “only by shared naming,” because these are “entities” and not attributes in the usual sense. It describes a state in which the Infinite “stands within it in some way,” but this is not an ordinary attribute; it is an intermediate kind of reality.

Rabbeinu Bahya: essential and active qualities, and existent-one-primordial

The text cites Rabbeinu Bahya in Duties of the Hearts, Gate of Unity, who divides qualities into essential and active ones, and defines the essential ones as qualities “that exist for God before the creatures and after them,” accompanying the essence of His glory. It notes three essential qualities: existent, one, and primordial, and argues that each one requires the others because “the three are one matter.” It interprets “existent” and “one” as statements about the essence and not about form, and raises a difficulty about “primordial,” because it seems dependent on the axis of time, while introducing a Kantian framework according to which time is a human category. It then suggests an opposite halakhic-Talmudic possibility to Kant through the example of “the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam was killed,” as grasping time in the object itself, teaching that “time is an object,” and from there it becomes possible to understand “primordial” as a statement about the essence. It also offers another interpretation of “primordial”: not that it is “always on the timeline,” but that it does not belong to the timeline at all and is not subject to the rule of time.

The Kuzari: division of the attributes and negation of affirmation

The text quotes Rabbi Yehuda Halevi at the beginning of Part II, saying that opposite attributes do not require change in the essence of the Creator’s glory and are said “in order to distance their opposites from Him,” such as: “for the Creator of the world is not multiple, does not cease to be, and is not originated.” It cites Aristotle’s statement that “negative descriptions regarding the Creator’s attributes are truer than affirmative ones,” and adds sayings of the sages according to which one who adds knowledge about the Creator “becomes more confused about the matter,” and one who builds himself up in knowledge of the Creator “is more foolish regarding the true essence of His glorious being,” because knowledge is focused on what He is not. It quotes the Kuzari’s claim that all the Creator’s names except the explicit one are “secondary attributes and patterns,” meaning relative or composite descriptions, and it brings the threefold division: active, secondary, and negative, such as “living” and “one,” stating that all of them “do not adhere to the essence of His glory.” It notes that the Kuzari also uses language such as: “and we call Him wise of heart because He is the essence of wisdom, and wisdom is not an attribute in Him,” and presents this as similar to Rav Saadia’s “He Himself is knowledge,” and thus as seeming to allow some positive essential dimension.

Rabbi Moshe Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Yosef Ibn Tzaddik, and Ibn Daud: the superiority of negation

The text cites Rabbi Moshe Ibn Ezra in Arugat HaBosem, where he formulates the idea that “the wisest among human beings in the secret of the Creator is the most ignorant of all,” and one who is ignorant regarding Him is wise in the secret of the Creator. It cites from Olam Katan by Rabbi Yosef Ibn Tzaddik the philosopher’s statement that “it is truer to remove affirmation from the Creator than to affirm anything of Him.” It cites from Emunah Ramah by Rabbi Abraham Ibn Daud that the “truest attributes” concerning God are negations, and that “essential or accidental attributes are not possible in Him, only relational ones,” and places this alongside the Maimonidean position that God cannot be defined or described by any quality, and that it is proper to describe Him through His actions—“the Torah speaks in human language.” It adds the claim that negation is the true description, one that does not fall into anthropomorphism, and that “negative attributes do not inform us in any way whatsoever about the essence that is sought to be known, what it is,” and in this way a tension is created between the value of negation and its inability to convey substantive content.

The problem of the content of faith and the negation of attributes

The text argues that one cannot say, “I believe in God,” without knowing something about that X, because a statement of existence without content regarding its essence becomes meaningless. It presents Maimonides as one who suggests that negative attributes are a kind of knowledge, and that “the more you add in negation concerning Him, may He be blessed, the closer you come to apprehension,” but then presents the Nazir’s claim that “in the negation of attributes there is nothing at all,” and that even if they remove doubts, they “do not communicate anything.” It concludes this section by weaving together the verses: “For it is no empty thing for you; it is your life and the length of your days,” “And you who cleave to the Lord your God are all alive today,” “For with You is the source of life; in Your light we see light,” and “But as for me, nearness to God is my good,” in order to stress that even though negation appears empty, the bond with God is not empty.

Positive negation: holy, glory and Shekhinah, and Hebrew Shemitic logic

The text states that there is “a middle ground between negation and affirmation” and calls it “positive negation,” in which there is “transition, continuation, a hint toward what is above it.” It gives the example of “holy, separated, distinct, exalted above all,” while arguing that “holy contains affirmation in it—holiness, from essential holiness, the being of holiness.” It presents a move in which after the attributes are negated “in their external meaning,” they “rise in their higher inner meaning,” and it connects this to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s “way of prophetic allusion” through “glory and Shekhinah” as a means of communicating in the divine name that for which there is no direct hint. It cites a formulation according to which “the nature of the supreme cause itself remains unknown to me,” and knowledge is only “by human analogy,” yet it argues that “the depth of the matter is revealed in the special continuous character of Hebrew Shemitic logic,” as a path intended to grant faith an inner meaning beyond the frameworks of ordinary logic.

Essential criticism of negative attributes and the distinction between types of negation

The text presents a logical difficulty according to which “one” and “not multiple” seem equivalent, so negative attributes gain nothing, and it sharpens this into the question: why not say “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is many,” if both sides are equally inapplicable? It argues that even those who advocate negative attributes do not actually mean that in practice, because the negative attribute also has a positive dimension that is not merely a formulation of “not,” and therefore negation neither “says everything” nor “says nothing.” It proposes a distinction between types of opposites and negations using the examples of light/darkness as opposed to heat/cold, and shows that “not cold” does not always mean “hot,” because there can be a middle condition such as lukewarm. From here it concludes that negation is not an operation that simply “analyzes” from within the concept, but turns toward something “outside the box.” It cites Orchot Tzaddikim’s parable of a cooked dish and the measured balance of character traits to show that traits like humility and arrogance are not merely mutual negations, but have their own independent meaning, and it connects this to the ability to hold together contents that are not simply “X and not-X” but concepts with their own substantive content. It concludes that the result—“there is a middle ground between negation and affirmation”—becomes necessary if the doctrine of negative attributes is to have any meaning, and that to understand this one must turn to a way beyond conventional logic, namely “the second Hebrew logic” and “Hebrew Shemitic logic.”

The things that touch on this topic itself, of negative attributes, I don’t really want to go into all the details in Yehalel or in Saadia Gaon, because for that you have to go a bit more deeply into the texts themselves and try to see how all kinds of contradictions that exist there are resolved. Rather, I want to talk a bit more broadly—and that’s also his purpose here, I think. I don’t think he’s really trying to make specific claims about negative attributes. Rather, he’s trying to understand more what a negative attribute means at all, or what is actually being said here when people talk about negative attributes. The question of names and attributes, or qualities, stands at the head of philosophical knowledge of God among the Jewish philosophers. As with the theologians, the mutakallimun, who believed in essential attributes, such as primordial, eternal, knowing, living, willing. And their opponents are those called the Mu'tazilites—which literally can be translated as separatists, deniers—who denied essential attributes. And he claims here—there’s a reference below to the Kuzari—I didn’t actually see there an explicit discussion of this dispute between the Mu'tazilites and the mutakallimun. Maybe it’s hinted at on the next page in another source. There’s a dispute between them over the question of how one describes divinity. Is it by essential attributes, attributes that refer positively to divinity, to its very essence, or by negative attributes? And the “deniers” among the Mu'tazilites—this goes beyond denial of principles; Mu'tazilites are basically empty, in the sense that they’re not really saying anything. I think that in this sense they’re called deniers more than in the sense of deniers as we understand that word today; he’ll note that later too. But there are other interpretations of the meaning of the name Mu'tazilites. In any case, what the mutakallimun argued about the Mu'tazilites was that the Mu'tazilites basically say nothing. Because if they make do only with negative attributes, then they’re saying nothing. The Mu'tazilites don’t even use negative attributes, or they do? No, no—they say they denied essential attributes, but there are attributes. So I’ll read quickly, because there are a few pages here that more or less repeat themselves in one shade or another, and afterward we’ll talk a bit about the meaning. Saadia Gaon in Beliefs and Opinions lists five matters: He is one, living, powerful, wise, and there is none like Him. And of these, three—living, powerful, and wise—our intellect grasps all at once, in a single act of apprehension. And it is impossible for the intellect to arrive at one of the three before the others. There’s some argument of Saadia Gaon here, if I understand him, that if I understand that He is living, then clearly He is also powerful, and clearly also wise, and all three—meaning, I can’t understand just one of the three without the other two; each one is derived from the others. But we understand everything together. Again, you’re digging into all of it—but these are three that are one. I think there’s a lot of room to quibble over that claim; I’m not sure I fully understand it. But that’s his claim there. And it is not explained whether these are essential attributes. That is, it isn’t clear whether these are essential attributes or not. But at the end of the essay: “He Himself is knowledge.” And there is a formulation here that the Holy One, blessed be He, is Himself the knowledge, and that also appears at the end of the parallel essay of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, which he brings later and cites that same statement. That He Himself is the knowledge; He is not described by the attribute “knowing,” rather He Himself is the knowledge. And there—here is a quotation from there—the soul praises Him by means of essential matters. And what are those essential matters? There are thirteen here. Interesting that this recalls Maimonides’ thirteen principles. No, these are not the same thirteen, but still, it’s also thirteen. One: primordial. Two: that He is truly one in Himself. Three: living and enduring. Four: powerful. Five: knowing. Six: creator. Seven: He is not chaos and void. Eight: He is not unjust. Nine: good. Ten: He does not change. Eleven: His kingship will not cease. Twelve: His command stands. Thirteen: one is obligated to praise Him. “He is not unjust” and “good” seem, at first glance, to be the same thing from two sides. And that itself raises a question here: does “good” deal with His essence, while “not unjust” deals with His actions? Right? What exactly is the difference between these two terms? But maybe there’s something more here than that. In other words, maybe there’s what? A break? So maybe there’s some nontrivial relation here between “not unjust” and “good.” Meaning, maybe it simply doesn’t say the same thing, beyond the difference you mentioned, namely that one concerns His actions. But let’s leave that for the moment; maybe we’ll come back to that point. In any case, it seems from this passage that the Nazir means to say here that at the end of the essay it turns out that according to Saadia Gaon there do seem to be essential descriptions. Above he says: “it is not explained that they are essential attributes,” afterward he says: “but at the end of the essay it says that He Himself is knowledge,” so it seems that it is an essential attribute, and then he says, “the soul praises Him by essential matters,” so again we see that these are essential things. The truth is that anyone who studies the passage there more carefully will see that when it says “essential matters,” it doesn’t mean “essential” as opposed to non-essential, say negative ones or something like that. Rather, “essential” there means powers of the sort where people want to praise Him with all kinds of paradoxical things: that He can create a square triangle, that He can make good into evil, that He can—right?—that He is subject to no limitations, and then you arrive at a description of paradoxical powers. And here—I don’t remember whether we mentioned this—but quite a few medieval authorities (Rishonim) speak about the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do paradoxical things, and that this is not a deficiency in His omnipotence. We talked about that—maybe in a conversation that was once recorded somewhere else? Maybe here. There too, with regard to knowledge and free choice, that’s basically the fundamental question. But regarding knowledge and free choice, what many people think is that there are really two contradictory beliefs here: on the one hand, He knows the future, and on the other hand, we have free choice. So a question that comes up in that context is whether the contradiction between knowledge and free choice is a contradiction on the logical plane or a contradiction on the perceptual plane, the plane of laws of nature or the physical plane. That is, when someone knows something before it happens, and therefore if that knowledge dictates the character of what will happen in the future—does that create a logical constraint, or merely a constraint of the laws of nature as they operate within our concepts of time? And that’s another issue. Because if it’s a logical constraint, then the two things cannot coexist. You can spin all the dialectics you want about the unity of opposites, but you cannot believe both that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows and that we have free choice. You can mutter it, but you can’t believe it. A person cannot believe both A and not-A. You can say it, but you can’t believe it, if those two things are truly a logical contradiction. But on the other hand, if someone tells me that the Holy One, blessed be He, can make it so that a stone will not obey the laws of gravity, that it will rise from the ground upward—that’s a claim that seems, all in all, something one can live with. There’s no principled problem with it. That’s a law of nature, not a law of logic. A law of nature—the Holy One, blessed be He, certainly can alter that. He created nature; He could have created nature here with opposite laws, so that every stone rises instead of falling to the ground. So here we’re going against the laws of nature, not against the laws of logic. The laws of nature are certainly in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He; He can violate them just as He created them. But the laws of logic—there are quite a few medieval authorities (Rishonim) who say that that doesn’t apply. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do things that are logically impossible. And that is not a lack in ability. And that’s the issue of free choice. And one of the questions there—and it’s a question worth discussing, I don’t know if anyone really has—is: is the contradiction between knowledge and free choice a logical contradiction or a physical contradiction? There’s an article by Yehuda Treuen in Da'at U-Tevunah of the Academic Institute for the Thought of Morality. One of the articles there is by Yehuda Treuen, and the same article also appears in one issue of Higayon. He discusses this matter somewhat there, and with knowledge and free choice in the background one has to examine what is really going on here. Is it a logical contradiction or a physical one? One could say: we cannot obtain information about the future, but that’s our problem. In other words, there is no logical problem in obtaining information now about the future. One could also say: no, it’s a logical problem—if the information exists now, then it isn’t future, it’s now. Meaning, there could be some logical problem here. But in that context too the point arises: can one say about the Holy One, blessed be He, something that contains a logical contradiction? I think not. There are three positions on this. What? I said that in the context of knowledge and free choice—a subject we may know less well—there are other cases. There is a responsum of the Rashba there about whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make someone a prophet even though he has absolutely none of the capacities for prophecy, doesn’t fulfill all the conditions for prophecy. There’s a question there that was asked of the Rashba: how can that be? After all, according to Maimonides, that’s not even just a matter of natural law—one has to conform to it. So he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, grants him prophecy. But if He wants to grant prophecy to someone who does not possess these qualities, then what’s the problem? Because according to Maimonides prophecy is a kind of natural phenomenon. According to Maimonides prophecy is a natural thing. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to grant prophecy—that’s the normal prophets. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to grant prophecy to someone who doesn’t have those basic capacities or those required dispositions, what—there’s some problem here? Because it’s against nature. Against nature. It’s against nature. It’s like someone knowing how to fly without having learned it—the Holy One, blessed be He, could decide that he knows how, but that contradicts the laws of nature, and that’s why the question arises in the first place. Okay, it’s clear that the Rashba answers this. I really don’t know—that is, one has to check to what extent this is really like a law of nature; maybe it’s even something weaker. But in any case, in that responsum of the Rashba, that’s what he says. That is, he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, can do anything that is a contradiction in terms of a law of nature, in our language, but not something that is a logical contradiction. Something that is a logical contradiction—we say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He cannot do it, and this is no deficiency. And we talked about Puss in Boots, right? It’s Puss in Boots—when the terrible wizard wanted to conquer the castle of the terrible wizard, he said to him, the terrible wizard: I heard you can turn yourself into a lion. Of course he immediately turned into a lion, and the cat was very frightened. Then he asks the wizard: fine, you can turn yourself into something huge, but can you also turn yourself into something small—a mouse, for example? So the terrible wizard said, of course; he turned into a mouse, and then the cat ate him and finished off the whole episode, took the castle, and since then its master has lived there happily ever after. And what lies behind this is some other kind of thing that also doesn’t contradict omnipotence. Meaning, can the Holy One, blessed be He, make Himself into a human being, like the wizard turned himself into a mouse? Right? If the Holy One, blessed be He, turns Himself into a human being, I’ll shoot him in the head and that’s the end of the story, right? What’s the problem? What will happen when I shoot in the head that human being into whom the Holy One, blessed be He, has turned Himself? Right? There are those who think that… yes, like the wizard. There are those who think so. That’s the whole problem here. Obviously He cannot turn Himself into a human being, right? There’s no doubt that He can’t. He can—even if I don’t know exactly how that works—even that can’t be. But if He takes on some human form and you shoot him in the head, you expect the world to remain afterward with the Holy One, blessed be He, still there, right? Well, obviously. Why? Because the Creator is omnipotent, no? There are things that are a logical contradiction. That the Holy One, blessed be He, should be something destructible is a logical contradiction to the very essence of the Holy One, blessed be He. Things that are a logical contradiction, the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do. He cannot do them, and this is no deficiency in His omnipotence. Moving on. Creating a square triangle—He can’t do that either, right? He can’t create a square triangle. Why? Because there is no such thing as a square triangle. Explain to me what you want Him to create, and then He’ll create it. What are you talking about? But that’s only from the human perspective. Right—now that’s a somewhat subtler question. I tend to say yes. I think so. He can? No, He cannot. Because that very sentence too is being said by a human being. The answer is that you formulate this very sentence itself within a logic that contains… You can’t speak outside the laws of logic, and therefore this is a somewhat theoretical claim. In other words, the question is whether this is a statement about man or a statement about the Holy One, blessed be He. Presumably I accept Kant—that outside your perceptual apparatus you cannot speak. Maybe there is something there; I don’t know. But it certainly isn’t something I can talk about, understand, or grasp. So therefore that’s… So why isn’t that a deficiency? We said that… Why isn’t that a deficiency? It’s not a deficiency because the question—when you ask me the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can do such-and-such and such-and-such, the truth is that I don’t even answer you “no.” I answer you that your question is unclear to me—explain it. In other words, I answer “no” only because that’s the language of everyday speech. The more correct answer is that I do not understand your question. Explain the question. In your question there appears a term that is only a sequence of words, and that sequence of words does not point… Is it a linguistic problem? It’s a linguistic problem. Normally every sentence represents a reality, and every concept points to something in reality. A word points to something in reality, right? “Square triangle” is a concept that seems at first glance to be a concept, right? It has two words that fit together, and maybe we even have some sense that we understand what is being talked about—but it points to nothing in reality, not only to real objects. Even as a concept it points to no concept in reality. There is no such concept. It is simply a random collection of words. For some reason it comes with some slight feeling of understanding, maybe, I don’t know. It sounds like something not entirely—I don’t know what. But in fact it represents nothing; it’s just words. Every question of that type is such a question. Because suppose you tell me: can the Holy One, blessed be He—let’s imagine this were a logical contradiction—know now what will happen tomorrow? Then the answer is neither yes nor no. The answer is that I do not understand your question. Because the concept “to know today what will happen tomorrow” is a very nice collection of words, but it is simply nothing—assuming this is a logical contradiction. Right. Okay? So in the end the problem—you can call it a logical problem—but the point is that there is no problem. Not that the problem is a linguistic problem. Rather, there simply is no problem. There is a certain formulation, but the formulation does not point to a genuine problematic. It’s a formulation behind which there is really nothing. It gives the illusion of a properly built sentence, but in fact it isn’t—it points to nothing. All right, we got a little carried away and this isn’t really connected to here. But that’s what is written here: “essential matters.” With Saadia Gaon, he says that perhaps the soul praises Him in matters that can belong to His essence, and not in matters that are merely actions. And judging from the context there, that seems to me a bit less likely. I don’t think he meant to say that there are essential attributes in that sentence. No, it simply doesn’t arise from the context there at all. They are like the thirteen principles. I continue reading here—they are like the thirteen principles. And among the later matters, these are not matters of essential attributes. Right—His commands endure and one is obligated to obey Him—those are certainly not essential attributes. And we conclude that whatever one praises Him with, He is exalted and elevated above all. So these are not essential. Here I no longer exactly understand the Nazir’s argument, and I also have a certain issue with Saadia Gaon. Or no—really the whole issue is with the Nazir. There are two problems with the Nazir. First, I don’t understand where he’s heading. Meaning, that these are not essential attributes. Because it seems as though the paragraph begins, “but at the end of the essay, He Himself is knowledge,” or “they praise Him with essential matters,” and that seems to function as an antithesis to the previous paragraph. The previous paragraph says there are no essential attributes, but at the end of the essay—or no, sorry, it doesn’t say anything regarding whether the attributes are essential or not—but at the end of the essay it turns out that the attributes are essential after all. And then the final conclusion is that they are not. Maybe this is some initial assumption, I don’t know exactly. But doesn’t “He Himself is knowledge” mean that the attributes are essential? He doesn’t write that; he only says “and it is not explained that they are essential attributes,” and “the name one.” So “but at the end of the essay”—how did you interpret the first paragraph? He says that “one,” “wise,” “knowing”—those are negative attributes. “One” means not plurality. And why can’t you say the same thing about “wise”? I don’t know. If you can, then what do you want? Then you can say the same thing there too. If you can’t, then what have you accomplished? So I don’t exactly understand how he eventually reaches the conclusion that the attributes are not essential. Beyond that, his own proof—from his own proof that “whatever one praises Him with, He is exalted and elevated above all”—I don’t see why that proves that the attributes are not essential. Because the question is whether the problem is an essential one or whether there is merely a quantitative problem here. That is, no matter how much you praise Him for how good He is, in truth He is still even better. But to say that He is good is still, in principle, a statement about Himself. I don’t see the proof here—meaning, I don’t see that it says here that essentially an attribute is always a negative thing, or a thing that refers to actions, or something like that—and not an essential attribute. There are several kinds of attributes. He may speak about this later on. There are attributes of action, and there are negative attributes that refer to His essence. Both of those are attributes that are not essential attributes. Two kinds of attributes that are not essential attributes. But here I don’t see how he gets to the conclusion that this is one of those two. What I do see is only that you can’t give a full description of the essential attributes. I don’t see here a proof that the attributes are not essential. So what would the solution be? That they are negative attributes. That’s a point we’ll talk about a bit. There is also “the light of the Name is the light of glory, a clear form, the Shekhinah.” Here we already spoke in the previous essay that “the light of glory” is a clear form, or the Shekhinah is a clear form. Meaning, this is… the form of the Holy One, blessed be He, and a positive form of the Holy One, blessed be He. Form is an addition to His attributes, but it is a clear form. Meaning, it is not the form of a table, say, the way the form of a table relates to the table. The form of the table relates to the table as its essence: when you look at the table, you see that it has such-and-such a form. When you look at the Holy One, blessed be He, you see nothing. The Holy One, blessed be He, created a form that you can look at and relate to as a kind of collection of His own attributes. That, for example, is what the names in the world of emanation are. We talked about that at the end of the previous essay, in fact—about the clear form. So in that sense there are positive attributes of divinity. But again, these are attributes only by homonymy. They are not attributes in the way entities have attributes; rather, these attributes are themselves entities. Right? The names of God are entities. They are not attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He. The names of God are created entities, and they themselves represent the Holy One, blessed be He, and His mode of action in the world. One can discuss whether it’s this or that, but it is a clear form. Meaning, it functions, as it were, as a form for the Holy One, blessed be He, but in fact it is an entity. It is an entity that stands on its own; the Infinite is present in it in some way, but this is not really an attribute in the ordinary sense of the word “attribute.” And Rabbeinu Bachya in Duties of the Heart, Gate of Unity: the divine qualities are of two kinds, essential and active. And the meaning of “essential” is that they are qualities existing in God before the created beings and after them, attributes accompanying the essence of His glory. And there are three qualities: existent, one, and primordial. And each one of these three qualities necessitates the others, because the meaning of all three is one. Like we wanted to explain that the three come together. So here there are three qualities or three attributes that are essential. That is, they deal with divinity itself, not with its relation to us, not with the deeds that it performs in the world, that the Holy One, blessed be He, performs in the world, but rather they are things that relate to Him Himself. So we already talked about this last time—about existent and one; about primordial not yet. But existent and one—we said that these are the kind of statements made about the essence of a thing and not about how it appears. And therefore it seems that when we say of something that it exists, or of something that it is one, we are making a statement about its essence and not about its form. When we speak of the Holy One, blessed be He, in such terms, it seems that there really is here some reference to Him Himself and not to form—not even to the clear form, what he mentioned earlier, the light of glory. Rather, this is a statement about His essence, about His matter. “Matter” in quotation marks, right? Matter as opposed to matter and form. Meaning, about the essence and not about how it is reflected to us, how we see it. We spoke about this in the context of the ontological proof, right? That we said that the statement that the Holy One, blessed be He, exists is not one of His attributes, right? In fact that’s how the ontological proof begins. Now the term “primordial” is more problematic in this context. Existent and one seem fairly clear, but primordial—again we arrive here. “Primordial” basically means that He has existed from forever on the timeline. That is, there was never a section on the timeline in which there was no divinity. Now the timeline itself, according to Kant, is a form of human intuition. The timeline as such does not exist; there is no such thing. It is a category through which a person views the world. If there is no human being, there is no time. Therefore the statement that the Holy One, blessed be He, is primordial, at least in the Kantian sense, is indeed a statement connected to attributes of form—that is, attributes that do not touch the essence of the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather how He appears to my eyes. First of all, I think we already discussed that in Jewish, halakhic perception, it seems possible to show from a variety of directions that the timeline is not a category through which man views the world, but something that exists on its own. Kant is simply wrong. We also spoke about this in classes here on Berakhot; I no longer remember in what context. But we discussed that Talmudic passage in Nedarim or Shevuot. The Talmud says, after all, that one can make a vow by associating it with “the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died,” right? That if one can attach a vow in that way, then according to the prevailing view, to attach one thing to another in a vow means an object-to-object association. The day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died—apparently that is not an object, so what is “the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died”? It does not refer to all the prohibitions of that day, because those are obligations on the person. It refers to the object-status of prohibition, to the prohibited thing itself. I attach my vow to the prohibited thing itself. What is “the day on which Gedaliah son of Ahikam died” as an object? It means that there is an object-status of a day. Time too is an object. Time is not merely a mode of human intuition; time is an object. One can see other implications of this. And if so, it could be that “primordial” too really means not how He appears to my eyes, but a true description of essence: He has always existed. Like when I say that He exists—the statement that He exists is a statement about His essence and not about how He appears to my eyes. Then “primordial” is the same thing: “always existent.” And that “always existent” means that at any time that anyone exists, one will always be able to say of Him that He exists. Or really, that He exists necessarily—that’s the same thing, what we said, that He exists necessarily. It’s not exactly the same thing, but saying that He exists necessarily also implies that He is primordial. Maybe it isn’t the same thing. So then it may be that this really is an essential statement, a statement about the essence of the Holy One, blessed be He, and not about His form. But the truth is that perhaps what they mean here—and this is often what people mean when they use the word “primordial,” and not only those who hold negative attributes—even not only those who hold negative attributes, and in the context of knowledge and free choice they certainly express themselves this way—is that the concept “primordial” does not indicate someone who always exists on the timeline, but someone to whom the timeline does not apply at all. That’s a somewhat different statement. To say that He is primordial—if I were to say that about a table, it would mean that it always existed on the timeline, but certainly the timeline has some relevance to it. But there are statements about the Holy One, blessed be He, in a number of places where, when they say He is primordial, it is quite clear that they mean that temporal predicates cannot be assigned to Him at all. He is not subject to the rule of time. That is the concept “primordial.” Not that He always existed, but that the concept “always” cannot be attached to the Holy One, blessed be He. The concept “always” belongs to the timeline. Many try to solve knowledge and free choice in this way. It doesn’t solve the problem, but in the way they express themselves it seems that this is what they mean. Maybe that is the Rabbi’s answer. What? Maybe that’s the Rabbi’s answer. What? What they said, that He doesn’t belong to the timeline—that’s the answer, that it doesn’t apply to Him. What I said is that He is not… what is the question… That’s exactly what I’m proposing. That’s exactly what they say: that He doesn’t belong to the timeline, so in fact you can’t speak. Not that you can’t speak—rather, He does not know in advance because the term “in advance” doesn’t apply. And they say that the concept of time—we don’t understand it. So they say that my concepts of time and my concepts of knowledge regarding the Holy One, blessed be He—“knowing in advance”—they place that on the timeline. What? They do the same thing with the timeline. There? Just as the Rabbi says that knowledge is something else, that it isn’t knowledge in my terms, they do the same thing with time—that my time is not His time. No, what does that have to do with the point? I’m still asking in my concepts. It doesn’t solve it. Our concepts of time are not the concepts of time of the Holy One, blessed be He? No. No. No. That’s the answer. The answer is not that He has one time and we have another. He is not in time. That’s the answer. Also in the Kuzari, at the beginning of the second essay, he speaks about various attributes and their opposites, attributes contrary to one another, and there he sharpens this further. He says there that one really means to say a negative attribute; that is, one really means that the whole pair, both the first positive and the second positive, do not apply to Him. He adds: “You must understand from these attributes that they do not imply in the essence of the glory of the Creator any change or alternation; rather, they are said only to remove their opposites from Him, may He be blessed. For the Creator of the world is not many, nor absent, nor newly originated.” So their purpose is like negations. He doesn’t explicitly say “negative attributes” there, but later he does. And there he says—not there, but his intention really is negative attributes, that the whole goal of such statements is merely to distance the opposite from the Holy One, blessed be He, but not to say something positive about Him. Explicitly afterward: “And whatever attributes you ascribe to Him, you must understand from them the remoteness from Him of their opposites,” as Aristotle said: “The negative descriptions of the Creator’s attributes are truer than the affirmative ones.” “The negative descriptions of the Creator’s attributes are truer than the affirmative ones.” And one of the sages said: “The one who knows the Creator with greater knowledge is more bewildered concerning Him.” And another sage said: “The more a person understands about knowledge of the Creator, the more ignorant he is of the true essence of His glory.” The more you know about the Holy One, blessed be He, the more you are really saying that you know less about His essence; you know more what He is not. And another said that it is more fitting to remove and negate an affirmation from the Name than to affirm something of Him. All kinds of statements that argue in favor of negative attributes. Like in those conceptual circles we once saw here from al-Batalyawsi, that the attributes of the Creator are in the mode of negation. And let’s go on, because all this really is just bringing many references to sources that speak about negation. There are somewhat different details in their writings, but that’s not the main discussion. According to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi in the Kuzari, all the names of the Creator, except for the explicit Name, are qualities and secondary structures—that is, relative, relational attributes. And he adds: the attributes are divided into three parts: active, relational, or negative. The active are like impoverishing and enriching—what He does is called active; it results from His acts, impoverishing, enriching, and so on. The relational are like blessed, holy—these are attributes directed toward Him, these are attributes that describe Him. And the negative are like living and one. And all these attributes do not cling to the essence of His glory; that is, they are not essential attributes. And here there are discussions—below he brings a few references on this issue—whether according to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi there is really a total statement that there are no attributes, that there are only negative attributes, or whether there are also positive attributes, except that some are negative. In the first statement it says: all the names of the Creator, except for the explicit Name, are qualities and secondary structures, that is, relative, relational attributes. And what is the explicit Name itself? That’s… that’s the Tetragrammaton. And he adds: “But the attributes dependent on the explicit Name, may He be blessed, are the acts issuing forth without natural intermediaries, such as ‘who forms light and creates darkness,’ ‘who alone performs great wonders.’” At the end he says: “And we call Him wise of heart because He is the essence of wisdom, and wisdom is not an attribute of Him.” So apparently he does admit at least some positive essential attributes, exceptions to the basic rule that attributes are not essential. So there are formulations in Rabbi Yehuda Halevi that seem to imply that there are positive attributes. He says there are many that are not like that, but he admits some—in other words, he says that at the very least there are positive attributes, though not all are of that sort. He himself argues that no, in principle the attributes are not essential, and so they must be. What does it mean that He Himself is “wise of heart”? That’s what I told you: in Rabbi Yehuda Halevi there is the same statement as in Saadia Gaon. Saadia Gaon also states that He Himself is knowledge. So Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says that His essence is called “wise of heart,” meaning that He Himself is wisdom, and that is basically like Saadia Gaon, and that apparently looks like a statement about His essence. Fine—look below, there are some discussions here about whether there is a contradiction, no contradiction. In the end he does not give an answer as to why this is not a contradiction, but his assumption is that, in principle, according to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, the attributes are negative. And let’s ignore for the moment the question of “wise of heart,” whether he said that’s exceptional or not. According to Rabbi Moshe ibn Ezra in Sefer Arugat HaBosem: “One of the sages said: the wisest among people concerning the secret of the Creator is the most foolish of all, and the one who is most foolish of all concerning Him is the wisest concerning the secret of the Creator.” Right, we saw that in section 6b. And in Olam Katan by Rabbi Yosef ibn Tzaddik, the philosopher said: “It is truer to remove affirmation from the Creator than to affirm anything of Him.” And in Mivchar HaMa'amar and more references and more references. Let’s continue a little more, and then I want to talk about this a bit. In Emunah Ramah by Rabbi Abraham ibn Daud: “The truest attributes of God, may He be blessed, are negations; and neither essential nor accidental attributes are possible of Him, only relational ones.” And especially in Guide of the Perplexed it is well known that God is not definable, and He cannot be characterized by any quality. And the attributes attributed to others are not His essence—they are attributes attributed to others, but they are not Himself as His quality. “At the beginning of thought it may seem fitting that the blessed Name should be described by this kind of attributes. But upon verification and precise analysis this impossibility becomes clear; rather, He should be described by His actions, and regarding this it is said: ‘The Torah speaks in human language.’” That is, the Holy One, blessed be He—it’s attributes of action, as we said. The Holy One, blessed be He, is described by His actions and not by positive attributes. More deeply than the previous one—now he says, as though, not only attributes of action, but one can in fact also speak of attributes in His essence, but only negative attributes. “Deeper than the previous one, because describing the blessed Name by negations is the true description, one that no corporealization can touch. And there is in it no deficiency, in any way, with respect to the Name. And this is from the general rule. And negative attributes in no way inform us at all concerning the essence we seek to know, what it is.” Meaning, what he is saying here is that there are two alternatives for what is called attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He. There are attributes of action, and there are negative attributes. And this is deeper, because it deals with divinity itself—but therefore it also says nothing about it, only what it is not. And in that sense one can then also understand all the previous contradictions about “wise of heart” and all those things: when we speak of statements about His essence, we actually mean negative statements. I’m reading in section 10: “In the negation of attributes there is nothing.” We’re also running a bit here because of the name-change. “And they are of no use, because they say nothing—they only say negative attributes.” However, according to the author of Emunah Ramah too, negations do indeed remove many doubts, yet they do not convey anything. That is, according to the author of Emunah Ramah—because in the previous paragraph it seemed as though he does accept negative attributes as “deeper than the previous one”; in the last paragraph, in section 9, there is a statement of Ibn Daud himself that he has only attributes of action. Here it seems that there are only attributes of action, and negative attributes really say nothing. That is, in this paragraph, in section 10. In section 9 it looked like there are these two kinds of attributes. “Even according to the author of Emunah Ramah, the negations—although they remove many doubts, although they remove doubts”—it helps to understand that there are negative attributes here—but after you understand that the attribute is negative, then the attribute itself tells you nothing. However, here he begins already to hint at the direction of what follows. After all, we began with the introduction, which we dealt with last time, namely that it is impossible that we know nothing at all about the essence whose existence we believe in. Right? We saw this from several angles, but it cannot be that I say “I believe in God” and then people ask me “what is God?” and I just keep my mouth shut, because then the sentence “I believe in God” is itself a meaningless sentence. It says nothing. “I believe in X” or “X exists,” and I know nothing at all about what X is—then I have said nothing by saying that X exists. Therefore faith requires some knowledge of divinity. Some knowledge. So now there were those who held—and Maimonides in Guide of the Perplexed speaks about this—that knowledge through negative attributes is knowledge. That is, one who knows negative attributes of divinity knows something about it. And that solves the problem, if you know negative attributes. Here he says that in the negation of attributes there is nothing. It is zero, emptiness. Even according to Emunah Ramah the negations convey nothing. So in fact he sharpens that same problem with which he opened this essay. So we are left, in effect, stuck. So although this is useful for removing all sorts of doubts, as Ibn Daud says here, still, what do we mean when we say “God exists”? If we know nothing at all about who this God is, then what have we said by saying that He exists? “For it is no empty thing for you, because it is your life and the length of your days”; “and you who cleave to the Lord your God are all alive today”; “for with You is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light”; “and as for me, nearness to God is my good.” The Guide says: “The more you add in negation concerning Him, may He be blessed, the nearer you come to apprehension”—you come nearer to apprehension, I don’t know—and you will be closer to Him. But how? “Indeed one must find a special way that ascends to the supreme Name, may He be blessed.” So all this is really just motivation for understanding why one needs Semitic logic. That is actually the subject of the coming sessions, and even more broadly it is the subject of Sefer HaShem that we’re entering into around all this. But even in the revealed dimension, the goal is basically to reach a situation in which even within the revealed there is some form of cognition beyond the ordinary forms of cognition. Because otherwise, in the whole matter, we really know nothing at all about divinity. We said at the end of the previous essay that the philosophers speak in the worlds of creation, formation, and action, and the kabbalists speak in emanation. Therefore the kabbalists speak of positive attributes, because the positive attributes of divinity are found in emanation. And when the philosophers speak about attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, since for them there is no emanation—there is us, and opposite us there is the Holy One, blessed be He, and some infinite distance between us and Him—then all they can say about Him is only negative attributes. There are no positive attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the worlds of creation, formation, and action. And then it turns out that when we say the sentence “God exists”—I’m returning to the beginning of this essay—we are actually saying nothing. That is the claim he wants to make here. So the Guide of the Perplexed, of course, senses this, and as we mentioned a moment ago, he says: no, negative knowledge is also a kind of knowledge. We do know something about divinity. But, says the Nazir, I do not understand—for the negative attribute only says what He is not, and it tells us nothing about divinity. So then how is there nevertheless anything in the sentence “God exists” or “I believe in God”? Therefore he argues that one must find some special way beyond the logic that says that within the negation there is nevertheless some positive statement. And this is really where we finish the race. Maybe we’ll just read chapter 11. “There is an intermediate between negation and affirmation. Positive negation, beyond, continuation, hint toward something higher than it. Like holy, separate, distinct, exalted above all. But holy includes affirmation within it—holiness—from essential holiness, the being of holiness.” When I say that He is holy, it isn’t just to say that He is separate from us and not something that belongs to our conceptual world. There is also some positive statement here. “After the negation of the divine attributes in their external sense, they rise in their inner, higher sense. There is a passage, a continuation, from the rejected external to the inner higher.” What? He says nothing here—he says that there is some positive statement when I say that He is holy. “For this way there is support in the way of prophetic allusion according to Rabbi Yehuda Halevi: how did He make known by the Name that of which there is no hint? And Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s answer is by prophetic allusion, by means of what is called glory and Shekhinah.” So glory and Shekhinah are statements that do tell us something about His essence, by means of—meaning, in our terms—but they still tell us something about Him. “The nature of the supreme cause itself remains unknown to me; I compare it only with the known action, the order of the world. This is always according to human analogy, causes of divine actions, perhaps circled-around causes or surrounding causes of divine actions, according to human analogy—that is, according to the human conceptual world. However, the depth of the matter is revealed in the special continuative character of Hebrew Semitic logic.” And that is exactly where Hebrew Semitic logic begins, and we will elaborate on that further on. But the central claim here, just to see the whole picture, is this: he begins with the point that one cannot believe in God without knowing something about Him. You cannot know nothing. Now true, the hidden dimension speaks, in fact, through His knowledge, and that is the world of emanation and all that. The revealed dimension speaks about creation, formation, and action, and therefore it runs into a kind of wall when it comes to dealing with divinity. Only negative attributes are possible for the sages of the revealed dimension; there are no positive attributes. So apparently those who deal with the revealed cannot really know divinity at all, because they are saying nothing. What is the God of whom you say that He exists? According to this, Maimonides believed in nothing. They know what He is not. So Maimonides proposes a solution—he himself felt this difficulty—that negative attributes also say something. And therefore those who work in the revealed dimension can also arrive at faith. But the question still remains: what does that mean? For in truth it really says nothing, says the Nazir. Here the previous paragraph ends. For if it really says nothing, you are only saying what He is not, but you have said nothing at all about what He is. Fine—if you say about something that it is not a flowerpot and not this, still what is it? What do you believe in? That it is definitely not a flowerpot. That does leave one option in the basket of all the negative attributes. And that says something positive. In the end there remains one option, so it says “not a flowerpot.” It says that there is some being that is not this and not this and not this and not this and not this and not this, but what is it? The being that has all the negative attributes, which remained as an essence after stripping away the positive ones. Fine—but what is there? So I think that in fact we do feel that it says something, and this touches a bit on what Natan emphasized in the previous class. I do identify with that emphasis. That is, there is some sense that to say “God exists,” even if I cannot state any positive attribute of divinity, is still a sentence that has some meaning. I didn’t acknowledge that in the previous class only because I wanted to explain the difficulty more clearly as an introduction to what follows. It has some positive content. And that is the whole essence of the use of a name, the name of something. I say “Moshe is such and such”—what have you actually said? After all, I don’t know who Moshe is. All I know about him is that he is such and such—right, like Shakespeare. It wasn’t him, but his cousin whose name was Shakespeare—that famous joke. Still there is some sense, when we say “Shakespeare wrote Macbeth,” that this means something. Why does it mean something? All I know about him is that he wrote Macbeth. So what have you told me by that? You haven’t really told me anything. Somehow it seems that when I call something by a name, I grasp something of it. I don’t know exactly what. It is very hard to understand this in standard logical terms, and therefore today in philosophy it is indeed accepted to say that such a sentence means nothing—in analytic philosophy. But somehow there is a sense that it does mean something. Yet in order to explain that sense more fully, we need Hebrew second logic, and that is exactly what he is going to do from here on. That is the move. Right. When people speak—maybe they take… God is… we say a great deal. We speak about God, we speak also among the sages of the revealed dimension and in the stories of the Torah, the Exodus from Egypt, the Torah, and all the stories of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). But even among the sages of the revealed dimension there is, as it were, something—something positive to say about Him. Yes, but all that is attributes of action, everything you said. What’s the problem? Attributes of action. Fine. So there is some abstract being—I don’t know what it is, true—but it created the world and gave the Torah. And that’s faith in God. What’s the problem? What about unity, for example? Can you understand unity that way? I can think that He tells me—He tells me to think that not… The statement itself is still another attribute of action. Who says? Who says attributes of action are only of that sort? Maybe His actions are abstract. I can understand. No, no—faith in unity is to believe that He Himself is singular or one. And when I say that He Himself is one, does that tell me something? It tells me nothing. Why not? Of course it does. I don’t know what “one” means there. Something is one—X is one—what? Then examine what the concept “one” means. I don’t know how to project… I don’t know what this “He” is such that I can say He is one. He is one, one and unique. Something is one; that is said of it. That essence that you call God is one. So what does that have to do with it? No, so I’m saying: someone who believes only in attributes of action, only in attributes of I-don’t-know-what, negative ones—although there are those who interpret “one” as a negative attribute—apparently does not believe in God; he believes that there is some being that gave the Torah, and that’s all, and created the world. Creation of the world—it is much easier to show this there; it already came up in the previous class. When I say “God created the world,” that is a statement about the world, not about God. All I am saying in that sentence is that the world is created. I am not saying that there is a God. The fact that the world is created—that is what I am saying. Then why do you talk about God so many times? But I want to talk about God. In whom do I believe? I do not believe in the world; I believe in God. And when you say that all I know about God is that He created the world, then you have said nothing—only that the world is created. Obviously, if it is created, there is some being that created it. Yes, but if I have no concept—if I say only that He created the world and gave the Torah, then I know that He can perform miracles. So I said you can derive implications, but you still remain with attributes of action. And is there a problem with that? There is a problem, at least from the standpoint of the accepted demands of faith. The accepted demands of faith require belief also in the being itself, not only in what it does. Just as you yourself initially reacted—you objected to this, you felt there was a problem with it. So then they believe only in faith in the actions. Fine—but Maimonides goes there too. That’s why Maimonides invented all the negative attributes. He invented all the negative attributes as a solution to the question: who is that one in whom I believe? It is not enough to believe that He created the world and gave the Torah. Why not? Because those are statements about Him—but who is He Himself? Fine, so you don’t know who He Himself is. What do you mean, then, that you don’t believe in Him? From your point of view, you could just as well believe in Buddha—if he did all those things, created the world and gave the Torah and all that. The main question is about the addition of these attributes. And understand that this is the only thing I can know: everything He did. I know nothing about Him. But I said that’s not true—that it isn’t the only thing. And how to understand that? For that we need Hebrew second logic. But we also have a way to know something about Him. All right, this is really a topic that from here on we’re now beginning to deal with, and further on as well. I still want to talk a bit more about negative attributes. I think we no longer have so much time for it, but let’s still say a bit. The main problem the medieval authorities (Rishonim) deal with regarding negative attributes, as far as I know—I’m not a great expert in these topics, not in a yeshiva-style way usually, I don’t know—but usually the main problem the medieval authorities (Rishonim) deal with in this context of negative attributes is that you are really saying nothing about divinity. Negative attributes say nothing. So Maimonides works hard to explain that no—even if you negate things of Him, still, by way of negation you somehow delimit Him. You say He is not this, not this, not this, and so somehow you already obtain some sort of concept, perhaps even a positive concept. There is room to discuss whether in Maimonides, in the end, a positive concept is formed, or whether the negative concept itself is also a concept. Fine, that is an inquiry to be made in the words of Maimonides. But it seems to me that there is a problem here that troubles me, and it is far more fundamental than the issue of negative attributes. Why do negative attributes say nothing, and what do they solve at all? They solve nothing, and they say everything. Because if you say He is one, then you say: well, that He is one really means that He is not many. But “not many” and “one” are synonymous concepts. Simple logic, no? To say of something that it is not many, or to say that it is one—that is saying the same thing. So why should I care whether you say of the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is one, or that He is not many? You have said exactly the same thing about Him. If I say of someone that he is not wise, or I say of him that he is foolish—is that not the same thing? What difference is there between saying he is not wise and saying he is foolish? “One” and “not many” in the way you grasp it. But He is also not one in the way you grasp. He is not many in the way you grasp. He is also not one in the way you grasp one. No, I said that “many” you grasp numerically, and that He is not. You also grasp “one” numerically. What—one in that sense? “One” is one of my concepts—what is that? One is not numerical. No, what you grasp is “not many.” So again, you gained nothing by saying that He is one. You could just as well have said that He is also many, in order to negate the possibility that He is one in the sense of my concept of one. Right? You could say that He is evil just as you say that He is good. So in fact you say that He is one—and why is He good? For the reason the Kuzari gives: because people value oneness and goodness more. So it’s just to fool them. Well, I don’t think the Kuzari says that. You can’t say such a thing. Can one say He is evil just as one says He is good? In any case, that can’t be. I think also—I know that passage in the Kuzari—and it seems to me that all these medieval authorities (Rishonim) who speak about Him as beyond these concepts altogether, that with respect to Him neither one nor many applies—still, there is preference for one over many, and not merely in order to fool the fools. There is no doubt about that. Why is it smaller? Both are concepts that do not apply to Him. So whichever way you go— That is what I’m asking. It returns to the simple logic of whichever way you go, as I said before. In other words, if you say that to say “one” and to say “not many” is the same thing, then when you say that He is one and you say that He is not many, you have said a sentence about Him. You have gained nothing by changing the formulation; you still know something about Him. And by the same token, I also have no problem with the negative attribute not saying anything—on the contrary, the negative attribute says everything. It says exactly what the positive attribute says, exactly the same thing. If you say that this doesn’t speak about Him, then why should I care whether He is one or many? Then say: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is many.” That’s what you ought to say. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is not one.” Exactly the same thing, after all. There is no meaning; one and many are exactly the same in this respect. I don’t think the commandment of Shema Yisrael was given to fools, and the Kuzari doesn’t think so either. Or at least not only to fools. Want to say something? It seems obvious—one has to say, and we discussed this on several occasions, though I never remember anymore on what occasion I said what—but there are concepts of negation, and there are several concepts of negation. There are several kinds of negation. When I say that light and darkness are opposites, or that darkness is the absence of light, and when I say that cold is the opposite of heat, I am making two different statements. Therefore there is a practical difference, for example—let’s shorten this, because it’s a topic worthy of at least a whole class on its own—but with light and heat: when we combine hot water and cold water, we get lukewarm water, right? If we combine light and darkness, what do we get? Light, right. If we combine light and darkness—bring a flashlight into a dark room—what will there be? Something intermediate? No, there will be light. Right? Depending on how much light you bring in, there will be more light, but there will be light; there won’t be some intermediate thing. Cold and heat are two entities that, when you mix them together, cancel each other out. Meaning, what remains is something neutral. In other words, cold and heat are opposites of the kind we might call plus one and minus one. Light and darkness are opposites of the kind plus one and zero. Therefore, regarding light and darkness, there is room for that famous inquiry as to whether darkness is an entity in its own right or only the absence of light. But cold is certainly an entity in its own right—an entity not contained within the entity of heat, and when they meet they act upon one another. Light and darkness are like one and zero. Add one to zero and you get one. If you add one to minus one you get zero. Right? So there are two kinds of opposites, and this is already found in the medieval authorities (Rishonim); this issue of there being two kinds of opposites is already in the medieval authorities (Rishonim). Rabbi Ariel talks about this a bit in the context of one famous halakhic inquiry. You can see this in a number of contexts. They act on one another. That is only a practical indication—it only indicates that these are two kinds of opposites, that this is a different kind of opposite. It’s not that this is the definition. That’s how we distinguish the fact that cold and heat are opposites of a different kind than light and darkness. If you ask me for a definition, the definition will be that they act upon one another. But again, a definition is always a description. Once you give the definition, you also understand what it is. But understanding what it is—that is already an inner thing. It is not a matter of concepts, not conceptual thinking. The inner understanding, ultimately, at the end of the process, is not done in concepts. It is the thing itself. That is, you understand it. The moment you formulate it, you are already using concepts. The purpose of formulations is to awaken in you that same nonconceptual, nonverbal understanding. I have no choice—I use formulations, language, in order to awaken in you those same sensations, as much as possible, that I have. And if I succeed, then those are the same sensations—or at least that’s the attempt through language. But in the end, the aim of language is to awaken in me certain nonverbal sensations. Which may be somewhat related to the dispute with post-structuralism that we mentioned, about verbal or nonverbal thought. In any case, there are opposites between which there is a middle. Right? Between cold and heat there is a middle. In what sense are cold and heat opposites? If we combine them with one another, we get a third thing. We get zero, the lukewarm. Right? Now if I say “not cold,” I haven’t thereby said “hot.” Right? When I say “not cold,” I haven’t said “hot”; I’ve said either hot or lukewarm, I don’t know. Not cold. I don’t know what it is. Either hot or lukewarm. Right? Now even if I say “not hot,” I haven’t thereby said “cold.” I can say both, and in the end something remains in the middle. It seems to me that now this becomes deeper and we have to be a bit more precise. I assume that there is such a concept as “not cold,” and that it is more basic than “hot and lukewarm together.” That is, hot and lukewarm both belong under it, but it itself is really the opposite of cold. Now one can formulate this differently, or look at the same phenomenon from another angle. The operation of negation is one of the standard operations in logic. In logic there are operations of intersection, union, negation, and various logical operations. It seems to me that negation is not an analytic operation. Because usually all mathematics—or logic—is described as some set of analytic operations. When I look at: all human beings are mortal, Socrates is a human being, therefore Socrates is mortal—that is an analytic unpacking of the proposition “all human beings are mortal.” I am saying: there is a statement about an entire group of human beings, and if we analyze that statement, then included within it is also a statement about Socrates; he too is one of the human beings. Right? So analysis is dissection. When I analyze what I already know, I can find within it the conclusion. So every logical inference is basically an analysis of what I already know—not every one, but usually logical inferences are an analysis of what I already know in order to sharpen more clearly one detail within it or one part of it. Therefore such an inference is also necessary. It is necessary because it is already contained in what I already believe in any case. That is why the inference is necessary, and anyone who argues with it is already within one of the premises. So you only have to analyze the premise accepted at the beginning of the argument in order to reach the conclusion. That is an analytic operation. The operation of negation, in that sense, is not an analytic operation. Because to say “not X” is not to analyze what lies within X. To say “not X” is the opposite: it is to say what does not lie within X. That is, the operation of negation is always to know everything that lies outside the concept. Let’s take the example of the set of all mortals. Fine, I know that all human beings are mortal. So an analytic operation means: let’s analyze or open up this set, peek inside, and see who is in it. Socrates is there, so I can infer that Socrates is mortal. But to infer that some specific being is not mortal, I cannot simply open the box of mortals and peek inside to see whether he is there or… For that I have to look outside. I can say he does not belong to the mortals. He is not here because I don’t see him. That’s also not exactly analysis, but it still isn’t full negation. He’s not here—but then what is he? In order to know what he is, I have to look outside this box into another box. That is, from knowledge of this box alone I cannot derive negating statements analytically. Even though somehow it seems to us that there is a necessary relation between a statement and its negation, because negation of negation is affirmation—that is accepted. Although I don’t think that is necessarily true. Why is negation of negation affirmation? Because that is basically to say that the negative is something hidden within the positive. Negate twice and you return to… You don’t really need to go outside in order to understand what the negative is. But if you take the negative to be a concept that exists in its own right—it is an existing concept, like cold and heat. This is one existing concept and this is another. Then to say that a certain thing is not cold is not yet to say that it is hot. You need to look at the group outside in order to see whether it is hot. This is another aspect of the description we gave before. I think that in every pair of concepts described as opposites—but they have their own names, and in that sense light and darkness are like this too. Darkness—you gave that as an example before, where it wasn’t like this. There is really some independent meaning in each one of them, not just that it is not the previous one. There is a book Orchot Tzaddikim, an early ethical work. It speaks there about how it is fitting… Here I have a citation from it—let’s look for its inner words. “There is a trait that one must use in most places, and there is a trait that one must use only a little.” Notice that here too we are speaking about traits, human traits, not divine ones. “This is like someone making a dish, and he needs vegetables and meat and water and salt and pepper, and from all these kinds he must take each in due measure, some a little and some a lot. If he uses too little meat, the food will be meager, and if he uses too much salt, it will be inedible because of the salt.” Up to here, that’s an introduction to cooking. “And so too with all of them. If he uses too little of what requires a lot, and too much of what requires a little, the food will be spoiled. But the expert, who takes from each the proper amount, then the food will be pleasing and sweet to its eaters.” And now he moves to the point: “And so with traits. There are traits from which one must take a great measure, such as humility and shame and the like. And there are traits from which one must take only a little, such as pride and brazenness and cruelty. Therefore a person should weigh and balance by understanding, taking from each trait its proper measure.” He does not repeat himself in the final sentence. There are traits from which one must take a lot, like humility. There are traits from which one must take a little, like pride. To take much humility and little pride—isn’t that the same thing? Those are two independent decisions, apparently. Supposedly anyone who has much humility has only little pride, and anyone who has much pride has only little humility. So why is this described as two separate decisions, as two traits regarding which I can decide my relation independently? If we say that the two are independent, then let’s say this is two ends of the same thing. I think you would find it very hard to formulate it, but if you break it down into components—everything you identify as a characteristic of the proud person, I think at least, will turn out to be something that cannot characterize the humble person. That is exactly what I want to say. What I want to say is that even when there are two things that seem opposite, they have separate names: this is humble and this is proud. It doesn’t say this is proud and this is not proud; it says this is humble and this is proud. The concept “humble” has a meaning beyond merely “not proud.” Now as far as characteristics are concerned, I don’t know whether we’ll find a practical difference; that is debatable. But from the standpoint of the meaning of the concept itself, clearly this is a meaning beyond merely the opposite of “proud.” If I knew only what “proud” means and didn’t know what “humble” means, then I wouldn’t know the same thing. In other words, it is not enough for me to know that someone is not proud in order to know everything. When I know that he is humble, I know something more about him. And this is true of every pair of opposites. Returning to the point we discussed earlier: when people speak about the unity of opposites—yes, this is discussed in Rabbi Kook, and I already said, maybe I mentioned Nicholas of Cusa a very long time ago, a Christian thinker long ago, so Rabbi Kook didn’t invent it. But when people speak about the unity of opposites, then I believe that regarding the Holy One, blessed be He, this is there and its opposite is also there. If that is a logical contradiction between those two things, then it is nonsense and simply meaningless muttering. Only two things that are not logical opposites can both be believed concerning the Holy One, blessed be He. I can believe about the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is both proud and humble, for example, in these terms. Why? Because “proud” is not the opposite of “humble.” Proud is one thing and humble is another thing. There are many characteristics—perhaps even all of them—that are opposite to each other, but still, the concept itself is not merely the opposite of pride; there is something positive here. But are there contradictory things? Fine, one has to know regarding every characteristic within humility and pride exactly how to relate. I’m bringing this only as an example. You cannot live in a world in which you believe two contradictory things if the whole content of one is merely that it is the opposite of the other. You need to understand: I cannot believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance if the whole content of “knowing everything in advance” is actually determining the future. That cannot be. Only if it has its own content, and free choice also has its own content—the connection may clash at the level of characteristics, so then I have to examine exactly what my position is regarding the characteristics. But these two things themselves are not such that the entire content of one is that it is the opposite of the other. Then I can live with the belief that both this is true and that is true. But if everything is only the simple logical opposite of the other, then basically to say “I believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, is both X and not-X” is nonsense. I can believe that He is both X and Y, even though Y often carries some connotation of being the opposite of X. But to say that He is both X and not-X—that I cannot do. I can say the words, but the words say nothing. There is no conscious state accompanying those words, let’s call it that. You can mutter them, but they do not express anything that exists in my mind. All right. Therefore it seems to me that the entire doctrine of negative attributes really means that when you say He is one, there is also something positive in that. It is not merely to say that He is not many. Even those who held negative attributes did not mean to say that. None of them, it seems to me at least, would ever dream of saying: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is many.” That cannot be. And apparently, according to the way the Kuzari indeed expresses himself, as Dvir already suggested earlier, in a way that seemingly hints that one could say that—many and one both lie outside the conceptual world of the Holy One, blessed be He—still, we use one pole and not the other. That’s a fact. We say that He is good and not that He is evil. We do not say that He is evil just in order to negate the fact that He is good in our concepts. Right? We say that He is good, perhaps also in order to negate the concept of evil in our concepts, but that is not the whole content of negative attributes. They also have positive content. The negative attribute also says something. It does not say only that it is not the positive attribute. But on the other hand, this also solves the second problem we raised. That is, then it also doesn’t say everything. There is some further degree of freedom here. You said He is not many, but that still does not automatically mean oneness. In other words, there is some gray area between them. It isn’t that there are two sentences such that you can formulate the sentence positively or negatively and in fact you are saying the same sentence. So what exactly is the meaning of negative attributes? To say that He is good and to say that He is not evil—is that exactly the same statement? What difference does it make whether I say that He is not evil or that He is good? Maybe that is not the same statement. There is some gray intermediate zone between them, and perhaps really even behind them, as we said earlier—that at the root of the two opposing components there stands some more basic concept, which is the true opposite. And it seems to me that this is the intuition that the medieval authorities (Rishonim) somehow do not discuss explicitly, but it is clear that it stood in the background when they spoke about negative attributes. Because otherwise the whole doctrine of negative attributes—you could simply say: what on earth is going on there? It solves nothing and says nothing, just nothing at all. To say that He is not evil and to say that He is good is exactly the same thing. I do not understand what the difference is. If it really is an opposite in the ordinary sense, then what have you gained by formulating everything with a preceding “not”? You want a double negation in order to tell me what it is. So what? A double negation and saying what it is—that’s exactly the same thing. What difference does it make? It’s only because there is lukewarmness between them. What? Because in the example of cold and heat, not good… No, no—the fact that there is lukewarmness between them is only an indication that it does not mean the same thing. Obviously that is not the point itself. The point is that there is an intermediate between them. For lukewarm is both not hot and not cold, that’s true. Lukewarm here is both not hot and not cold, but I didn’t mean to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is lukewarm—obviously not. The lukewarm is an indication that these two concepts do not merely each say the opposite of the other. Therefore I said earlier that there must be some deeper opposite underlying the two concepts of opposition. So this must also be true for those who hold negative attributes. And if any of them does not believe this, then he has said nothing. He just said something for no reason—simply said it. Therefore it seems to me that the conclusion he states at the end—“there is an intermediate between negation and affirmation,” that is how section 114 begins—“there is an intermediate between negation and affirmation. Negation contains affirmation in it, beyond, continuation, hint toward something higher than itself.” That is, there is something positive in this negation. It cannot be that a negative attribute solves the problem here. It doesn’t solve it, because it simply says nothing. One of two things: either it solves nothing, or it says nothing. Choose whichever move you prefer here—one of those two options. In order to understand Maimonides, one really has to understand what is here, and one has to resort to something beyond standard logic—and that is pure ideal logic.