Question

To the honorable Rabbi M. Abraham, may he live long and well,
Many greetings,
My soul has reached the point of asking, and forgive me for going on at length:
It is well known that Maimonides’ view in Guide of the Perplexed I:55 is that one should not attribute to the Holy One, blessed be He, any “affections” or “passive emotional reactions” (that is how Rabbi Yosef Kapach, Schwartz, and Rabbi Shmuel ibn Tibbon translated it), meaning any change in His state. On the other hand, at the end of the Guide III:51, Maimonides speaks about intellectual cleaving during prayer, and that when a person is connected to the Holy One, blessed be He, and thinks about Him, then He is with him, so to speak. There is no doubt that the end of the Guide creates an atmosphere of exaltation and lofty cleaving, but I find this very difficult. Can a person really live with such a consciousness, one that may be philosophically correct but seems to me completely foreign to the Jewish conception and to all the midrashim of the Sages? It is enough if I mention the Talmudic statement in Yevamot 64a: Rabbi Yitzhak said: Why is the prayer of the righteous compared to a pitchfork? Just as a pitchfork turns the grain over from place to place, so the prayer of the righteous overturns the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He, from the attribute of anger to the attribute of mercy. And there are countless similar sayings, as well as the very language of the prayer the Sages instituted for us, whose entire purpose is to implant in our consciousness that God is near, hears, desires, has mercy, relents from evil, and so on. Can all their words really be dismissed as empty, to say that in the end it is all self-work — that is, everything comes back to the human being who is the one who changes as a result of prayer and supplication? Is there any greater falsehood than saying with one’s lips that You hear prayer from every mouth and listen to us, while at the same time maintaining a consciousness that in truth no reaction at all has occurred from the perspective of the Holy One, blessed be He? And to whom are we praying, if not to the God who is near, who listens to the cry of the poor? And I am aware that some say that everything comes back to the person — in order to elevate him, or to implant in his consciousness (through internalizing the nature of the requests in the prayer text instituted by the Sages) what a person ought really to want, and in that way the person himself changes in his spiritual level and becomes more elevated, someone worthy of receiving divine flow, and other such explanations. But these things, though they sound intelligible, really seem to me like sleight of hand bordering on heresy against the belief that God literally hears and listens to the blast of prayer, and there is none like Him.
And in place of my own pen and tongue, I can quote the words of the sage Shadal in precisely this criticism of Maimonides and those drawn after philosophy. He wrote in his Torah commentary, on the portion of Va’etchanan, on the verse “Hear, O Israel,” as follows: “The Torah and the Prophets constantly diminish the image of God and bring Him closer to the level of man, and they attribute to Him anger, will, love, hatred… and other affections and deficiencies, all in order that a relationship and bond between us and Him may be conceived. But if, on the contrary, we imagine in our hearts the god of the philosophers, one perfect with endless perfection, then it is no longer possible to conceive any relationship or bond between Him and human beings… What room is there for prayer if God is unaffected? And what room is there for repentance if the divine will does not change?” End quote, as needed. And there he wrote that philosophy too is true, “except that both are true in different respects,” but he did not explain further.
And as you know, similar things to Maimonides were also written by Rabbi Kook in the introduction to Olat Re’iyah, p. 22: “Prayer must be free of any notion of change of will or reaction in the law of the Blessed God, for that is a false opinion regarding divinity and leads to the corruption of the order of human perfection.”
That is, to think that prayer changes God’s will is incorrect; rather, it changes the person. And there Maran Rabbi Kook continues: “On the other hand, the very value of prayer and confidence in its effectiveness when its conditions are gathered together, aside from the effect of attaining the request and the soul’s elevation and merit through prayer, is a great cornerstone in the perfection of man. Therefore every person who prays must understand that prayer is a wondrous law that the Holy One, blessed be He, engraved into His world for the perfection of His creatures in all paths of perfection, and especially for the purpose of their moral perfection that grows from it, and it is not, God forbid, in the category of something embedded in His blessed law.” End quote. And perhaps this understanding is also alluded to by the Ramchal in Derekh Hashem, Part I, end of chapter 4: “The Master, blessed be He, always shines upon whoever draws near to Him, and there is no withholding of good on His part at all; rather, one who does not draw near to Him lacks His illumination, and the prevention is on the side of the recipient, not on the side of the Blessed Name.”
But it seems to me that Maimonides is unique in that he obligates a person to avoid in his thought any attribution of emotional reaction to the Holy One, blessed be He. For even the Kuzari (II:2) is aware of the above, only he does not require a person, if I am not mistaken, to refrain from every thought of “reaction” regarding God. And that is a big difference.
Perhaps we must live with the consciousness that although reason points to what the philosophers say, the Torah obligates us to believe the opposite, and that this is its essence and the very lifeblood of Judaism — as was also understood by those who follow the path of Kabbalah and Hasidism, to the point that they said that a person has the power, as it were, to increase the spirituality of God. Though I am doubtful whether this is indeed how Shadal himself mended the rift, since in his own personal life he tended more toward a philosophical conception of God.
I would be grateful for your personal view, and how you yourself reconcile these two conceptions on the existential level.
And your answer will increase me in learning, with esteem,
Nehorai Yahav
Jerusalem