7th PRINCIPLE: Moshe’s Prophecy

Previously, we analyzed the Sixth principle of the Jewish faith which asserts our belief that God communicates with men through prophecy . We explained who could be a candidate to prophecy and the nature of prophecy (see here).
The Seventh Principle is also about prophecy. But it discusses the particulars of one Prophet: Moshe Rabbenu. The Seventh principle says that Moshe was the greatest prophet, and more importantly, than no man or prophet would be ever able to attain his level of prophecy.
First, we will discuss in which ways Moshe’s prophecy was higher than that of any other prophet. And second, why is relevant for us Jews to assert Moshe’s superiority.
Our Rabbis explained that the level of prophecy of Moshe Rabbenu was higher than the level of all others. For example: all other prophets received their prophetic message by the means of a vision, in a sort of trance, or in a dream. Moshe Rabbenu, however, was able to receive God’s message while conscious and awake, not in a prophetic trance. This is what the Tora calls: panim el panim, literally: “face to face”, which means that Moshe Rabbenu could listen to God’s words in the same way that a man listens to another man.
The possibility of being conscious allowed Moshe Rabbenu, first of all to be a perfect recipient of the Tora. In other words, the Tora is not Moshe’s interpretation of a prophetic vision. It is not written by Moshe by God’s “inspiration”.  We Jews believe that Moshe was indeed the writer of the Tora, but the Tora was dictated to him verbatim by God.  God talked to Moshe without any intermediation.  This way of “direct communication” which is above prophecy, was possible because Moshe was fully awake and aware while listening to God, “in full possession of his faculties, he did not receive God’s message not in visions and not by parables” ( R. Hayim Pereira Mendes)
Being awake while receiving God’s communication also allowed Moshe to talk back to God and to initiate a communication with God. Something no other prophet ever did. Although we do have texts which describe dialogues between other prophets and God, we believe that these dialogues took place in a prophetic vision, not in real life.  Moshe Rabbenu could communicate with God at will. “Whenever he wished, he could be enveloped by divine inspiration, and prophecy will descend upon him” (Yesode haTora 7:6) enabling him to be in constant contact with God.
Thus, Moshe was able, for example, to ask God a question. After the sin of the golden calf, a close encounter took place between God and Moshe. Moshe prayed to HaShem to forgive the Jewish people. At one point Moshe Rabbenu said to God: “Show me Your glory”. Our Hakhamim explained that Moshe was asking God a poignant question: “Why do You allow bad things to happen to good people?” Perhaps on behalf of all humankind, Moshe conveyed to God the question that so often troubles the mind of so many believers.  God’s answer to Moshe is a matter for a long analysis. But as it refers to our subject, God taught Moshe (and us) that the answer to that question was beyond man’s understanding (כי לא יראני האדם וחי), in other words, that this question (and other questions as well) was beyond Moshe’s comprehension. This teaches us that even the greatest prophet, Moshe, was still a limited mortal-man, not a human-god.
Now, why is so important to emphasize that Moshe’s Prophecy was superior to that of any other  prophet, in the past or in the future?
Because, the Tora was given to us through Moshe’s intermediation. And, as we will learn in the next principle, the Tora is eternal and unchangeable.  Conceiving that another prophet might ever achieve the level of Moshe Rabbenu, would open the possibility for considering that our Tora could be ח”ו changed or challenged by such a prophet, as biblical other religions claim.

 



6th PRINCIPLE: God communicates with prophets

The 6th principle of Jewish faith says that God communicates with man through prophecy.
The Prophets of Israel were exceptional human beings, called by God to inspire the Jewish people to return to God and His law. In order to be credible preachers, the Prophets had to be role models individuals, possessing an extremely refined character.
Maimonides explains that not every person could become a prophet. There were three key character-traits which were a prerequisite to become a candidate to prophecy and eventually, if God’s so wished, to be called by Him (=prophecy).
An individual who wished to be called by God had to be strong, wealthy and wise.
“Strong” is a person with the ability to control himself, his body, his appetites and the words he or she utters form his mouth. The highest level of strength is achieved when an individual is also able to control his emotions and thoughts.  ‘Strength’ is not measured by the ability to control other people, but by the ability to overcome one’s own impulses and appetites.
“Wealthy” is the person who feels that he or she already possesses all the material things he needs. In Judaism, wealth is not measured by quantity but by contentment and appreciation. One person could feel wealthy with 100 dollars, because he does not need more than a 100 dollars, while another person would be considered “poor” even if he has 1 billion, if he needs or wants to have 2 billion dollars. Richness is not measured by what onehas but by what one needs. The correct formula is not: the more you have the richer you are, but the less you need the richer you are.
“Wise”, is not the person who thinks that knows everything, but the one who is constantly growing in his or her thirst to know more. “Jewish Wisdom” focuses particularly in knowing more about God, His wisdom and His will. As our life’s experience become richer, we get to discover new levels of understanding on matters we thought we already knew. The knowledge of God and God’s way is obviously endless.  Jewish wisdom is the opposite of intellectual stagnation.
These are the three prerequisites for a person to aspire getting prophecy. Besides being a God fearing Jew, the prophet had to adjust his mind to God’s reality, leaving aside the conventional  worldly reality. Being “behaviorally” wealthy, for example, meant that a person had to reach a level of complete lack of interest for material possessions. A mind that expects to receive God’s words could not be distracted with material pursuits.
Paraphrasing rabbi Hayim Pereira-Mendes: “The prophets were prayerful men. It was the habit of this spiritual communication with God, and constant meditation upon His words and ways, combined with right conduct, that qualified the inspired men and women of the Bible to receive Divine inspiration or Divine messages. Just as physical and mental exercise result in greater physical and mental development, and consequently greater physical and mental possibilities, so spiritual exercises result in greater spiritual development, and consequently greater spiritual possibilities.”
According to our tradition there were schools for the training of prophets, like the one established by Shemuel one of the earliest prophets. These apprentices were called bene hanebi-im.  In that school they would train to attain behavioral wealth, strength and wisdom and, according to some Geonim, they will also train themselves in meditation techniques, which would mentally prepare them  to cope with the overwhelming experience of getting a vision coming directly from HaShem.(If the reader is interested in the fascinating subject of prophecy, I would recommend Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, z’l, marvelous book  Inner Space: Introduction to Kabbalah, Meditation and Prophecy ).
If a person attained such a perfection of character, he will be considered a candidate for Prophet, but he or she would not necessarily receive prophecy.  From this point of view ,prophecy could be compared with getting a phone call from God. And having attained perfection of character is like having a cell phone. It enables you to be a potential receiver of God’s phone call. But still, God might or might not call you. That is His prerogative.


5th PRINCIPLE: Praying exclusively to HaShem

The fifth principle of the Jewish faith says that we should only pray to God, and we cannot pray to anyone but Him. We should not pray to an angel, a star, a constellation or a dead person, even if that person was a great Tsadiq. We must pray exclusively and directly to God. Praying to something or someone else, other than God, is considered idolatry.
It is also forbidden to pray to God through intermediaries. Imagining that these intermediaries would carry our prayer to God. For example, in other religions one would pray to a minor god, to an angel, to a saint or to a dead religious leader, so this minor god, or this angel or the spirit of this leader would take his or her prayer to a greater god. In Judaism this is also considered idolatry (‘aboda zara).
According to Maimonides, the mistake of the generation of Enosh (= the civilization that developed after Adam, and withdrew from God) was the following reasoning: Since God created the heavenly bodies (the sun, the moon and the stars) to serve the world, and these creations are “the servants of the King”, it would be appropriate praising and honoring them because by doing so we would be indirectly honoring the King (I think that perhaps it must have been also tempting for those individuals to pray to the “servants of God” because they were visible and so they seemed more accessible than the “unseen” God). These individuals, Maimonides says, started building temples and pyramids to the sun and to moon, offering them sacrifices, thinking that they were honoring the true God. At the end, Maimonides asserts, they ended up forgetting that they were serving HaShem, and they just worshipped the stars ….
As I’ve already explained, when one prays to any entity or intermediary, human or nonhuman, real or imaginary, even though one thinks and declares that his purpose is to pray to God, it is considered idolatry.
Often, people mistakenly believe that if their intentions are correct, their actions will not be considered sinful. But given the severity of the prohibition of ‘aboda zara (idolatry), a God fearing Jew must be extremely careful in these matters, and pray solely and directly to HaShem. One of the best ways to avoid making these serious mistakes is to studying the laws of ‘aboda zara and its details.
Now, do not confuse the prohibition of praying to God throughout an intermediary, with someone praying for me or I praying for someone else. Praying “for” someone else is not the same as praying “to” someone else. Praying for each other is praiseworthy. In fact, we Jews always pray to God in an inclusive way: in the first person of the plural (=WE), praying collectively. This kind of “intermediation” is an integral part of our liturgy.
The Talmud also records many cases of Talmide Hakhamim who had many merits, especially for excelling in acts of Hesed (compassion, benevolence) as Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, or unimpeachable integrity, like Abba Hilqiya and his wife. The rabbis would come to them and ask them to pray, generally for a public matter like asking for rain, by the virtue of their enormous merits.
To be continued…
Dedicated to the memory of IDF Capt. Ishay Rosales, 23 years old, z”l



4th Principle: God is Eternal

As we have previously discussed since God is not and has not a body, therefore, nothing associated with the physical realm can apply to Him. Sleep, wakefulness, anger and laughter, joy and sadness, do not apply to Him. Whenever the Tora or the Prophets speak about God in this way (anthropomorphism) , they do so in a metaphorical way or describing a prophetic vision. Similarly, we cannot apply to God concepts such as birth or death. God does not exist in time, or He exist independently of time. Beginning, end, age do not apply to Him.
Asking ourselves, “If God created the world, who created God?” is like asking: “If the baker baked the bread, who baked the baker?” The concept of ‘baking’ cannot be applied to the existence of the baker, only to his actions. Similarly, the concept of creation cannot be applied to the existence of God. God is eternal. He was not born or created. In the beginning, God alone existed. Other than God , everything had a beginning and was created by God.  Even time itself is among the things created by God.
Jews never believed in the eternity of the universe. The Fourth principle of our faith asserts that only God is eternal. Maimonides (1165-1204) wrote: “A fundamental principle of the Law of Moses is that the World was created anew and that God formed it and created it from absolute non-existence. That which you observe, that I repeatedly argue against the eternity of the world according to the view of the philosophers, is to demonstrate the absoluteness of the miracle of His existence as I have explained and clarified in the Guide for the Perplexed.”
Why Maimonides emphasized this belief?   Beginning probably with Aristotle (384- 322 BCE), philosophers and scientists denied a beginning of the Universe. They thought that the universe was never born or created. In their opinion, the universe was eternal (‘olam qadmon).  This solid idea started to change only in 1930, when Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding.  And if the cosmos was expanding, and not moving in circles as it was previously thought, then it must have a had a point of beginning. A few years later many scientists came with a simple inductive formula which affirmed that tracking back the movie of the universe’s expansion one will inevitably find a moment of beginning.  The most famous hypothesis that asserts the beginning of the universe is the Big Bang theory reaffirms the Biblical idea of beginning. It is the first scientific theory that postulates a beginning of the universe, after 25 centuries of denying it.
Now, when scientist assert that the world had a beginning out of an “initial singularity of infinite density which contained all of the mass and spacetime of the Universe”  they need to address where that singularity came from, without a Supernatural Power intervention.  While by definition God is eternal, in scientific terms you definitely need to explain how something would come out of nothing.  This question is, undoubtedly,  the Aquiles heel of the Big Bang theory.
The belief in God’s eternity also touches upon the question of theodicy. According to Rabbi Hayim Pereira-Mendes, God’s eternity has also implications in our expectations for justice. Since God is eternal, punishment for the wicked or reward for the righteous, might take place beyond the time-limits of our lives. “The knowledge that God is eternal, especially when coupled with the knowledge that He is omnipotent reconciles us with our trials and sorrows, and solves the puzzles of earthly life and its many seeming difficulties and contradictions. Thus, we observe that the good often suffer misfortune or trial, and the wicked are successful and apparently happy. But God is Eternal, and will, in His own time and in His own way, in this life or in the Future or Eternal Life, show us the meaning and benefits of the sorrows and trials, the difficulties and contradictions.”

Dedicated to the memory of IDF Capt. Ishay Rosales, 23 years old, z”l



13 PRINCIPLES: The right way of thinking about God

 שהבורא יתברך אינו גוף, ולא ישיגוהו משיגי הגוף ואין לו שום דמיון כלל
Last week we began to study the third of the 13 principles of the Jewish faith: “God has no body, and we should not attribute to God human characteristics or conditions.”

In antiquity, this belief was as , or perhaps more, revolutionary than monotheism. Since for the pagan world gods were represented with human figures. The gods were born, died, fought, had insatiable appetites and a tremendous thirst for power. In a way, these gods were conceived at the imagine and likeness of those who worshipped them. For the pagan mind, an invisible god was an inconceivable god.
Now, the Tora repeatedly speaks of God in human terms. For example, the hand of God; God’s arm,  God’s eyes, etc. Jewish tradition explains, however, that these are merely metaphors, expressions which’s purpose is to make Biblical ideas accessible even to the simplest human minds, for whom is very difficult to grasp abstract concepts.
There are many translations of the Tora into all languages. Do you know what is the official translation of the Tora, according to Jewish tradition? It is the Aramaic translation written by Onkelos haGuer (“Onkelos the proselyte” 35-120 of the Common Era), made under the supervision of one of the greatest rabbis of the Talmudic period, Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol. This translation is called “Targum” (“the translation”, par excellence), “Targum Onkelos” or “Targum Didan”, this latter name means “Our official translation”.
The Targum’s first objective is to debunk anthropomorphism, that is, explaining what those expressions, which apparently attributed to God a human image, really mean. For example, the arm of God can refer to His power; the hand of God, to His miracles; the eyes of God, to His permanent supervision on humans, etc. In this way, and through the Targum, our rabbis taught us to refrain from attributing to God images, or any human likeness, despite the apparent Biblical references.
Another important point: in the Tora says that God created man “in His image and likeness.” Loyal to its rejection of anthropomorphism, Jewish tradition explains that the image and likeness of God which man possesses, is no the human body. It means that human beings, unlike other living creatures,  are endowed with free will. We have impulses, but we can dominate them. We can choose between doing good and doing evil. This power, our moral freedom, is what makes us similar to God, Who is the epitome of freedom (“Almighty”= the One Who can do anything).
Before ending this topic, I would like to briefly refer to a question that I have been asked many times: If God does not have an image, how can I think of God when I pray to Him? Is it wrong to “imagine” God?
Imagining or visualizing God like an angel,  an old man or a giant, is typical of paganism. Personifying God is a misleading reflection of our imagination, which projects into God human attributes, in a superlative level. What to do then when you communicate with God, when you pray to Him, and somehow you need to hold on to an image in your mind? I think the answer is simple. When we Jews refer to God, we say “HaShem”, which in Hebrew means “The Name”. (As if saying “He, whose name is ineffable.”). Hence, if it is impossible to abstract, or concentrate while talking to God, without bringing a specific image into our  minds, we could visualize the name of HaShem, i.e., the Hebrew letters of His name.
In short, it is a fundamental principle of the Jewish faith to know that God has no body,  image, or any human likeness. Human attributes described in the Tora are mere metaphors, expressions, that make ideas about God more accessible to the most basic levels of human understanding.
Such is the distance between the human and the Divine reality that the way in which we Jews refer God is by calling Him, “The Name”. When we pray, we should abstain from projecting any images or figures that would ח”ו personify God. However, visualizing in our minds the name of HaShem, the Hebrew letters of His Name, is an acceptable way of thinking about God.

 



13 PRINCIPLES: How many idols did Abraham destroy?

We are learning the 13 principles of the Jewish faith. Previously, we analyzed Principle 1: God exists and 2: God is one . Today we will learn Principle 3:  God does not have a body.
The famous text ANI Maamin says: “The Creator, blessed be His name, has no bodily form or bodily conditions that affect Him. He cannot be compared with [or represented by] anything [human] at all “.
Our first patriarch, Abraham, not only formulated the idea that God is “one”. He also understood that HaShem is “invisible”, i.e, that He has no body or image. And that His existence is categorically different from ours. This revelation was perhaps more revolutionary than the idea of the unity of God. To better understand the magnitude of the amazing revolution carried out by Abinu Abraham, I will describe very briefly how pagan civilizations viewed their gods and idols.
To attribute to God an image, a figure or even a human condition is called “anthropomorphism”, and is one of the most characteristic features of pagan religions. The pagan gods have bodies of human forms. They are born and die. They have desires and passions, and they fight against each other. These gods, in every way, were created in the image and likeness of the men who conceived them.
The pagan gods did not give away anything for free to humankind. They did not care at all about the fate of humanity. They had excessive human passions and boundless cruelty by which, among other things, parents were able to kill their own children and children their own parents. The main affair of the gods was “conspiring against each other”,  guided by an insatiable thirst for power. Take, for example, Zeus, the supreme god of the Greeks, a “very advanced” civilization.  His father, Cronus had six children, but he was warned that one of them would dethrone him. Cronus ate (sic.) his own children one by one. When the turn of the sixth, Zeus, arrived, Cronus’ wife Rhea deceived him and wrapped a stone in a blanket, which was swallowed by Cronus thinking he was destroying his threatening son. When Zeus grew up, he decided to avenge his brothers killing his father. But before killing him, he made him drink a poisonous potion that made him disgorge his siblings. Zeus was a very promiscuous god, with unbridled passions which he could not control. He even had children with human-women (many women who were afraid to admit an act of infidelity or rape, claimed that they had become pregnant by a god). Zeus spent his time constantly fighting against those who aspire to take his power, who were not few. Zeus, like all pagan gods, was so busy in his adventures, wars and the satisfaction of his urges, that he had no time, and absolutely not interest in the affairs of humans. If Zeus unleashed a storm, it was not because he had compassion for humanity and sent them the much needed rain. It was because Zeus had to fight his own enemies, and attacked them with lightning, or deafened them with thunders.
These gods were a (superlative) reflection of the appetites, and the lowest and suppressed instincts of the humans who conceived them (usually men of power). These gods were not worshipped out of love, but strictly for convenience. The pagan priests said for example, that if ten warriors were sacrificed to Zeus, Zeus would absorb their spirit and thus he will be better prepared to fight against his enemies, the Titans. In exchange for this useful sacrifice, Zeus would made rain in Athens or would unleash his lightnings upon the enemies of the Greeks.
This brief illustration tries to show the reader what ABODA ZARA was all about, and help us understand a little better the magnitude of the revolution that Abinu Abraham carried out,  among people who were, they and their gods,  much more primitive and savages than the Greeks.
Abraham Abinu’s fight against anthropomorphism was certainly the most important revolution in the history of human thought.  And, as expected, it caused many reactions against him and his descendants.
We all know the Midrash that says that Abraham physically destroyed the idols of his father Terah. But we must also understand that the iconoclastic mission of Abraham went much further than that. A single man, with one single idea–the belief that HaShem, the true God, has no image, no human needs, no human traits, nor human likeness–disrupted the lies of the idol-worshippers, unmasked their deceiving leaders, and dissolved the foundations of all pagan civilizations, from the time of Abraham until today.

 



13 PRINCIPLES: Monotheism vs. Syncrethysm

אני מאמין באמונה שלמה, שהבורא יתברך שמו, הוא אחד ויחיד
In this column, we are analyzing one by one the 13 principles of the Jewish faith. Earlier, we saw the first principle: Believing that God exists. The second principle, monotheism is the belief that God is one.
Monotheism also includes another important element, which is explicitly stated in the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not have other gods before Me.”
This element, “exclusivity”, is the way the Jewish people practicedmonotheism since its beginning. And in this sense, monotheism was, perhaps, what protected the people of Israel more than any other value during its long history, and also the most costly one …
To understand in depth these two angles of monotheism, we must first know what “syncretism” is. In ancient times, it was common for peoples and civilizations to constantly fight against each other. There were very few periods of peace. Much, much less, than there is now. Empires rose on the ruins of empires, and were continually trying to conquer all the peoples around them. These wars of conquest were waged by empires or powerful nations to get richer: especially charging heavy taxes to the conquered people, slave trade, spoils of war, etc. When one nation conquered another nation the conquerors also imposed their religion, their gods. But when imposing their gods, they did not demand that the defeated people get rid of their local idols. Simply, they demanded that now they must serve in addition the gods of the victorious. This was an extremely common phenomenon and nobody in a polytheist society considered it as something wrong. What difference does it make between serving five and ten gods? Serving new gods was not only the prerogative of the defeated. Thus, when the Assyrians conquered the Phoenicians, they imposed their god Marduk, but also adopted the Phoenician god Melkart, who was fashionable in the entire Mediterranean.
This phenomenon, serving simultaneously two different religions and their idols, is known as “syncretism”.
Syncretism was also very common when two or more people wanted to forge an alliance and form a united front against a common enemy. Adopting the gods of other peoples without waiving your own, was a gesture of friendship between peoples.
Syncretism was accepted among all peoples of the world, with one exception: Israel.
The monotheism of the Tora not only opposes polytheism, it also opposes syncretism. When Alexander the Great conquered Judea, around the year 350 BCE, he demanded, as the most natural thing, that Jews place a statue of Zeus in their Temple. And he could not understand why Jews were willing to sacrifice their lives before accepting Zeus. At the end of the day, Alexander reasoned, we are not demanding them to stop serving their God, just to accept an additional god, as the rest of the world does!
Many historians say that the rejection of syncretism practiced by our parents, and for which they were willing to give their lives, helped triggering the first anti-Jewish feelings. Why? Because the peoples of the world did not understand that the belief in one God means that God has to be worshipped  in “exclusivity”. So it was not surprising that the Gentiles perceived us as “intolerant”,  “intransigent”, “close minded”.
They did not recognize the idea of “exclusivity” as it is learned from the second of the Ten Commandments. And without this exclusivity the Jewish people would have disappeared a long time ago. Our values and principies would had diluted and mixed with multiple cultures and religions.
If we would have given up the practice of monotheism ח”ו, we would now be where the Phoenicians, the Assyrians and the Greeks are. In the museums of ancient history

 



13 PRINCIPLES: Science, creation, Creator

Principle # 1: God exists
In his Pirush Mishnayot, Maimonides (1135-1204) formulated the 13 principles of the Jewish faith. “The first principle is to believe in the existence of God… and that He is the cause of the existence of all that exists.” In other words, Maimonides explains that the belief in God consist of believing in the existence of a Creator of the Universe. That’s the first thing we should know about God.
There was always opposition to this principle. For centuries, the idea that prevailed was that of Aristotle, who held that the World was not created by God, is eternal and has always existed as we see it today.
It took a long time until this idea changed. In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered something revolutionary. The universe is not static, neither is moving in an orbital circular way. The universe, Hubble proved, is expanding! And if it is expanding, it must have had a starting time, a point zero when it all began. That was the first indication in the history of scientific thought that the universe had a Creator. As I explained in my book “Awesome Creation”, secular scientists of that time (the 1930’s, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington and many others) strongly rejected the idea of an expanding universe, because they considered it a “religious” concept. The idea of the beginning of the universe is very close to the idea of Creation, these naturalist scientists reasoned. With unusual candor Eddington said: “Philosophically, the idea that the universe had a beginning, is repugnant to me …”.
Either way, from that time, Aristotle’s idea of the eternal universe, which dominated the thinking of the scientific world for over 25 centuries, finally collapsed.
And although many scientists will always persist in denying that what science is discovering reinforces the belief in the existence of a Creator, these evidences are now stronger than ever. Why? Because in the same way the powerful telescope Hubble developed in Pasadena, helped humanity to “discover” the Creator of the universe, microscopes are helping us today to appreciate more than ever the sophistication of the microcosm, especially, the incredible complexity of the cell and its components: “Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than -10^20  grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world. Each microscopic cell is as functionally complex as a small city. It is irreducibly complex. When magnified 50,000 times through electron micrographs, we see that a cell is made up of multiple complex structures, each with a different role in the cell’s operation. As we delve further into the cellular world, technology is revealing black boxes within previous black boxes. As science advances, more of these black boxes are being opened, exposing an “unanticipated Lilliputian world” of enormous complexity that has pushed the theory of evolution to a breaking point.
Today, thanks to the possibilities we have to observe the incredible complexity of the macrocosm and the microcosm around us, perceiving the exquisite design of Creation, and the subsequent existence of God, as its intelligent Creator, is more accessible than ever


13 PRINCIPLES: Why do we Jews believe in God?

אתם עדי, נאום ה’
In his Pirush haMishnayot, Maimonides (1135-1204) formulated the 13 principles of the Jewish faith.
 
“The first principle is to believe in the existence of God.” 
 
In his book Mishne Tora Maimonides describes belief in God, first, as “knowing God” (ידיעת ה).
What is knowledge of God?
We, the Jewish people, collectively experienced the revelation of God on Mount Sinai, when we were given the Tora and celebrated the covenant (berit) with HaShem. In a technical sense, our knowledge of God, knowing of His existence, is based on this historic event. At this very basic level, our faith in God is intimately related, and dependent, on the faith we have in our ancestors. That is: I trust my parents, who believed in their parents, who believed in their parents, etc. who believed 120 generations ago in their parents when they asserted having experienced “personally” the revelation of God on Mount Sinai. That generation that left Egypt, “heard” the word of God revealing the 10 commandments (see Shemot-Exodus- cap 19, 20 and 24).
 
Some thoughts on this point: As Rabbi Yehuda Halevi says in his book “The Cuzari”, no other nation lived this collective experience of the Divine revelation. Other religions, in their own words, are based on “individual revelations.” Islam is based on the testimony of a single individual, Muhammad, who privately received the Koran from the angel Gabriel. The only person who witnessed the resurrection of Yeshu was Mary Magdalene. The subsequent Christian historiography is based on her exclusive testimony. The same happened to Joseph Smith (1805-1844), the founder of the Mormon religion, who had private religious visions and revelations. The people of Israel, however, witnessed God’s revelation collectively, as a people. 600,000 men between 20 and 60 years of age, in addition to women, elderly and children. A total of no less than 3 million people. The Cuzari explains that no people could “fabricate” to have had a collective experience–and in fact no religion ever claimed so, because, although this argument would give more credibility to their belief that would be an unsustainable claim: it would be enough for one individual of that generation to openly voice his version of the events, for this “collective” testimony to lose all of its historical value. The Jews are the only people who claim to have experienced this “national revelation,” which, by the way, it is a fact accepted by all other Biblical religions: Christianity, Islam, etc.
This historic event, which we call MA’AMAD HAR SINAI, is only the basis of our faith. It is the first element of our faith, that according to Maimonides, we should convey to our children. It is the foundation upon which all other spiritual and philosophical aspects of our faith rest and relay upon. The prophet Yesha’ayahu defined the Jewish people (43:10) with the following words: atem ‘eday, “You are My witnesses”; you, the Jewish people are the only witness who ever witnessed My existence.
The knowledge of God begins with this historical foundation but obviously does not end there. The search for God is a long path, and walking that path is the existential mission of a Jewish individual. It is not an easy path, especially for those who were not raised in it. And more especially in our days, when the belief in God’s existence is challenged from the field of biology (evolution), psychology, cosmology, theodicy, biblical criticism etc, etc.
 
In the coming weeks, BH, we will address these issues in more depth.


THE 13 PRINCIPLES: # 13: Tehiyat hametim, just for the righteous?

The thirteenth principle of the Jewish faith states our believe that the dead will be brought back to life.   This is known as resurrection or in Hebrew teḥiyat hametim. (“Resurrection” should not be confused with what ḥakhme haqabbala call gilgul neshamot , or reincarnation).
In his “ma-amar ‘al teḥiyat hametim” Maimonides explains:
“The concept of resurrection is well known among all Jews, and there are none who dispute it. It is mentioned many times in our prayers… prophets and sages.  The body and the soul will be reunited again after they have been separated by death. This concept if found in the book of Daniel (12:2): “Many who sleep in the dust shall awaken, some to everlasting life, some to everlasting shame and reproach”.
We have no specific details about how or when exactly teḥiyat hametim will take place.
For Maimonides, the resurrection of the dead is just for the righteous (ṣadiqim).   “It will be absurd for the wicked to be brought to life again, for even when they are alive they are consider dead”.   In the wise words of Rabbi Hayim Pereira Mendes. “The reward of the righteous in future life is spiritual happiness, the punishment of the wicked is exclusion from it.” Wicked people, do not recognize God and are not aware of the existential goal of this life: coming closer to Him (uldobqa bo). If given a new opportunity the wicked would waste his life in vanity, physical pleasures and material endeavors.
To better understand Maimonides idea, let us imagine a scenario close to teḥiyat hametim. If I’m now 80 years old, and I’m offered the elixir of youth to become again a 20 years old, what would I wish to do with my life now?   If I say: “Well, now that I know what is important in this life, and I’m given this new opportunity, I will dedicate myself to strengthen my connection with HaShem”, then, I qualify for Maimonides’ teḥiyat hametim!.  But if I say: “If I’m 20 again, I will party all day long” or something like that, then I don’t.
VERY IMPORTANT FOR PARENTS OF TEENAGERS
Teens & Social Media
by Audrey Weitz
Helping your teens navigate the exciting and potentially scary world of social media.