Q&A: Clarification of Nachmanides' Words
Clarification of Nachmanides' Words
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Nachmanides' words are well known to all:
"A person has no share in the Torah of Moses until we believe that in all our matters and all our occurrences, all of them are miracles; there is no nature or ordinary way of the world in them."
I wanted to ask: isn't this an enormous demand/assertion?
And what is the meaning of "he has no share in the Torah of Moses"? Is this a condition required by the Torah in order to have a share in it?
With many blessings.
Answer
First of all, this is a statement that is not well defined. What does it mean that everything is a miracle? Are there no laws of nature? Our own eyes see that there is regularity and that nature operates according to laws. If his intent is that at every moment it is renewed מחדש, that does not have much fundamental significance, since the conduct is still regular according to laws.
His intention is to say that someone who does not believe this is not a believing Jew.
Discussion on Answer
Yishai, there are contradictions in his words on this matter, but in the portion of Bo this is a problematic interpretation. He speaks about "all our occurrences" and not about sporadic interventions. He writes that there is no nature at all. True, he is not speaking there about everything that happens in the world, but about what happens to human beings (the righteous?). I discussed this in my recorded lectures on miracles and nature.
Aside from the fact that the definition is not very clear,
where did Nachmanides derive this definition from at all? Is there an explicit command in the Torah to believe that nature is miraculous??
And according to his view that nature is a miracle, what practical difference does it make whether a person believes in miracle or in nature, if God created that too?
You have to look at his words on this in several places, and there it becomes clear that for not everyone is everything miraculous all the time, but only for the righteous and those in the middle. He holds that whatever happens to them is through higher intervention, meaning that God intervenes in the laws so that various things will happen to those people.