Godtalk

We begin a new book of the Torah this week: Devarim (‘Words’), as it is known in Hebrew, is named after one of the first words of the book. In English, it is known as Deuteronomy (‘Second telling’) because Moses retells the story of the Israelites’ adventures and mishaps, recapping the past forty years.

But who was this man Moses? Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and scholar of Jewish law, was one who held Moses in very high esteem.

At the outset, Maimonides argues, Moses’ experience of prophecy was not fundamentally different from the other prophets: All prophets have exceptional understanding, character, and training, and all receive their prophetic understanding through an angel or in a dream.

As Maimonides writes in the Guide of the Perplexed, “Even in the case of Moses our Master, his prophetic mission is inaugurated through an angel: And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord in the heart of fire [Ex 3:2].”[1]

But Moses was a man of unusually high character, training, and intelligence (but not a divine being) who perfected himself so that he ultimately became a prophet of the highest rank.

Thus, Maimonides argues, Moses eventually transcended the usual limits, and achieved the highest possible level of human intellectual understanding.

At this point, Moses became like an angel, for he did not require food or drink for 40 days. And, in that regard, Moses’ perfection is not replicable. We can only get so far on our own intellect, Maimonides says, and then we have to defer to Moses.

Moses is singled out of this kind of praise on account of his extraordinary accomplishment: he was able to achieve union with the Active Intellect – the lowest sphere of the divine – to transmit a perfect reflection of the Divine Will.

Rather than using one’s own imagination to determine how to act, or rather than looking to nature to provide an example, Maimonides suggests that studying the Five Books of Moses provides the key to understanding God’s will.

What is interesting here is not Maimonides’ support of the tradition of divine transmission of the Torah, but the fact that he explained it in the context of Aristotelian philosophy, which was the science of his era. The Active Intellect is an idea taken from the work of Aristotle, adapted to the context of our Biblical heritage.

It took Spinoza, the disgruntled ex-communicated Jew from Spain, someone who spent his days grinding lenses in Amsterdam at the dawn of the modern era, to suggest that maybe it was Moses who created the laws himself.

“…after the Hebrews had gone out of Egypt,” he writes, “they were no longer bound by the right of any other nation, but were permitted to constitute new rights at will and occupy the lands they wanted. For after they had been freed from the intolerable oppression of the Egyptians…they again acquired their natural right to everything they could do, and each could resolve anew whether he wanted to retain or, in truth, yield and transfer it to another.”[2]

The Hebrews, in other words, had been able to free themselves from Egypt and establish their own self-governing nation. Note here that Spinoza does not say that God freed them from Egypt – he sees this event as their own doing.

“But at the first meeting,” Spinoza writes, “they were terrified, and on hearing God speak were so thunderstruck, as to deem that their last moment had arrived. Full of dread, therefore, they approached Moses anew as follows: Behold we have heard God speaking in the fire, and there is no cause why we would want to die. Certainly this immense fire will devour us. If the voice of God is to be heard by us again, we will certainly die. You, therefore, go and hear everything said by our God, and you – not God – will speak to us. Everything that God speaks to you, we will obey, and we will execute it.”

It should be noted here that Spinoza considers revelation to be the unfolding of reason, so what is terrifying them is not the fire on the mountain but the full weight of having to make all of these decisions by themselves.

Thus, Spinoza concludes, “By these words they clearly abolished the first compact and transferred their right to consult God and interpret his edicts to Moses absolutely.”[3]

In Spinoza’s mind, they went from a democracy to a theocracy and that has been the source of the problem. As someone who had been excommunicated from his community for engaging in free thinking ideas such as these, it is not difficult to understand his pained reaction to Moses.

Interestingly, when the academic study of Judaism first became a possibility in the universities of Europe, two separate groups can be identified: those who felt a kinship with the works of Maimonides and those who felt a kinship with the works of Spinoza. You could learn quite a bit about a person, in fact, based on the singular preference for Maimonides or Spinoza. Both were groundbreaking rationalist philosophers who read the Bible in radical ways. But one sought to preserve the tradition while another stood outside of it.

Personally, I tend to prefer Maimonides because he viewed reason and faith as compatible. As he taught: if a contradiction is found between what we learn from science and what we learn from the Bible then you should interpret the biblical text metaphorically. But Spinoza’s comments also get to the heart of the matter as well: some parts do read like they are all-too-human, and we be wary of totalitarian thinking in a religious guise.

[1] Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed. III:45, p. 576. Pines notes that the verse’s word order is altered by Maimonides.

[2] Benedict Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, 17.4.1-3.

[3] Spinoza, Treatise, 17.5.1-5, pp. 196-7.

In the context of the Biblical world, a verbal pledge or a vow – a neder in Hebrew – is a binding contract. It has the same force as the written contracts we have today. In a pre-literate society, a vow is your word and you do not retract it, come what may. Breaking a vow carries with it the threat of heavenly punishment. We see a vestige of this practice, in fact, when witnesses solemnly swear with their hand on a Bible before they testify in court.

A young woman may make a vow, but it may be canceled by her father at the time he learns of it. As the text states: “If a woman makes a vow to the Lord or assumes an obligation while still in her father’s household by reason of her youth, and her father learns of her vow or her self-imposed obligation and offers no objection, all her vows shall stand and every self-imposed obligation shall stand. But if her father restrains her on the day he finds out, none of her vows or self-imposed obligations shall stand; and the Lord will forgive her, since her father restrained her.”

So (in the Biblical world) her father has the power to cancel her vow at the time that he hears of it. Similarly, a husband has this power of annulling his wife’s vow: “Every vow and every sworn obligation of self-denial may be upheld by her husband or annulled by her husband.”

His ability to annul her vows is a key reason as to why she is not allowed to be a full witness in court case: her testimony might be overruled or swayed by her husband. How can we know what she says is true?

Interestingly, however, this situation only applies to married women: “The vow of a widow or of a divorced woman…whatever she has imposed on herself, shall be binding upon her.”

I find this point interesting, because it shows us that the key problem with a woman’s vow is not the fact that she is a woman. It’s her relationship to the men in her life that creates the problem with her vow.

In the Biblical world, a woman is dependent on the goodwill of the men in her life to be supported in a household.

Specifically, in a Biblical marriage the balance of power is tilted in favor of her husband. He may have multiple wives, and he may divorce her. She, on the other hand, may not have multiple husbands – not all at once, anyway – and she does not have the power of divorce, except under very specific circumstances. In the Biblical world, he has all of the power in the relationship.

The Bible tries to make her less dependent upon him by ensuring that she receives a ketubah amount – essentially, a lump-sum payment of alimony – so that she does not starve when she gets divorced. But this is not a situation where community assets are divided equally.

Furthermore, she does not have the same access to wealth prior to her wedding. If she has brothers, they receive the full amount of her family’s inheritance.

But once she becomes a widow or a divorcee – once her wealth is her own, she has a modicum of self-determination. Then she may make a vow and have it stand.

How has the world changed since then? For one thing, in the modern context, we start from the assumption that the two partners in the relationship – regardless of their gender – are equal. From our perspective, therefore, women are considered to be self-determining, and they may not be overruled by their spouse whenever they take on a vow. That might not sound like a lot, but it becomes critically important when it comes to the ability to bear witness. It means that women can take on the roles of men in leading the community, such as being counted in the minyan, the quorum of ten Jews needed for a prayer-community.

As for the Reform movement, the decision to count women in the minyan was made in 1845, which was the formal ratification of a policy that started in 1811. The first American rabbi to count women was Isaac Meyer Wise in 1846.