Did the Rambam Inadvertently Help to Kill God?

Moshe Ratt
The essential problem with the Rambams principle of the denial of Gods corporeality is that this denial doesnt stop at the argument that God doesnt have a body thats actually quite manageable. The problem is that the Rambam denies far more from God; by his lights, any attribute or description one can think of is inapplicable to God and cannot describe Him. God doesnt only lack an image he also has no feelings or thoughts, love and anger, intent and speech. One can only speak of God in the negative sense what he isnt and the more attributes one denies him, the closer one gets to the truth. The simple man knows that God has no body or image; the smarter man knows that he has no thoughts or feelings; and the even smarter man understands that God should not even be attributed existence in the way we understand the term. God thus becomes the ultimate metaphysical nullity, a sort of black hole which consumes any thought or description attached to it, and denies the ability to describe it. Its worth noting how the Rambams Aristotelian God differs from the God of the Tanach and Chazal. The latters God is not some abstract nullity but a living God who rules the Earth He created. He thinks, feels, loves, is angered, rewards and punishes; He conducts dialogues with people, hears their prayers, regrets his decisions; He is awesome and exalted but also humble and near to all who call out to Him. In other words, the God of Israel is a living and active persona, not some sophisticated philosophical principle. In fact, to take the abstract agent of Aristotle and the Rambam, which is really no more than a physical or metaphysical First Cause, is an act of syncretism and secularization of the idea of God, similar to what Spinoza did when he called the world itself God. How can one worship such a God? While the Tanach uses a variety of images to represent the relationship between Him and Man such as Father and Son, King and Servant, and even Husband and Wife, thus opening the door for a complex and wonderful relationship Rambamism allows for one and only one type of connection between Man and God: intellectual comprehension. According to the Rambam, philosophical knowledge of God is the pinnacle of human ambition, and only through intellectual comprehension can Man become closer to God. The sole path to God thus lies in the Faculty of the Humanities, in the Department of Analytical Philosophy. Any other connection between God and man, based on experience or emotion, is nothing more than an illusion and a hallucination, which borders on idolatry (Its true that in Hilchot Yesodei Hatorah, the Rambam speaks of the importance of loving and fearing God, thus saving something from the original religious experience, but this is not the main point in his teaching; but notice too that the love and fear is in one direction only! God for his part doesnt love anyone and does not return love to his servants). In this framework of God worship as Philosophical study it isnt clear what the role of prayer is and if it has any effect. The Rambam himself doesnt answer this question, although one could

conclude from his writings that prayers purpose is solely psychological. Even doing Mitzvot becomes an educational-psychological matter to a great extent, one whose purpose is to maintain a properly functioning society, and educate people to avoid incorrect ideas such as idolatry. Very few will find purpose and satisfaction in such worship of God, which is little more than philosophical exercises with a few practices mixed in. Indeed, in the generations after the Rambam, many of those who followed in his philosophical path, abandoned keeping the practical Mitzvot by arguing that those who achieved their purpose intellectual comprehension of God no longer has any need for commandments; these are meant only for the ignorant masses. That and more. The denial trend has not stopped at God but spread throughout the entire metaphysical world. In Gods wake have followed the various angels, which lost their real, tangible existence, and became merely an allegory for the forces of nature; afterwards Heaven and Hell were destroyed, neither of which are mentioned in the Rambam in their traditional sense, as well as all the rest of the Heavenly spheres. In the end, nothing was left beyond the sphere of the moon. Today, anyone who argues that angels have wings, or that sinners are burned in Hell, may find himself accused of nothing less than idolatry What is left for Man is only the physical, material, reality of this world. Everything else is irrelevant: at best a philosophical abstraction, at worst an empty parable. The starkest expression of this attitudes conclusions appears by Yishayahu Leibowitz, who saw Judaism as a religion without metaphysics, the fulfilling of the Mitzvot as the sole legitimate expression of God worship, and prayer as a monotonous recitation of text without any expectation that anything will change as a result. In the wake of the Rambam, Leibowitz ridiculed any attempt at a more tangible conception of God, viewing them as idolatry. Since there are very few who are willing to worship God in this way of fulfilling Mitzvot without any metaphysical significance those who accepted Leibowitzs assumptions generally became completely secular. After all, if we have succeeded in banishing God from Judaism, getting rid of Mitzvot is not so hard by comparison. Those are the problematic consequences of the non-corporeality argument in terms of content. But the methodology which led to the argument leads to just as many problems. As we already mentioned, the Rambam arrived at his conclusions through his Aristotelian philosophy. He was aware that they contradicted the plain meaning of the Tanach and Hazal, but his faith in the truth of that philosophy was so great that he believed that the only way to save the Torah was to allegorize anything which contradicted rationalism. By the Rambams lights, if we insist on accepting the Torah according to its plain meaning, we will be forced to conclude that the Torah is simply wrong as it is contradicted by philosophical inquiry. Thus did the Rambam give rationalism a status of epistemic supremacy over all other sources of knowledge, making Logic king over tradition, the religious experience and simple faith. Logic is

the final arbiter on everything, and it alone determines what can and cannot be, what is true and what is false. Anything that doesnt measure up will be discarded. True, one cannot deny the epistemic importance of logic and the intellect. Without them we can neither understand the Torah nor explain our commitment to it. But the Rambam granted them far greater authority and capability than they deserve. While today we are more aware of the limits of logic, and are thus open to accept other possibilities (to say nothing of different kinds of intelligence such as emotional or spiritual intelligence), as far as the Rambam is concerned logic is as precise as mathematics: proper use thereof will lead to unequivocal and unassailable conclusions. Anything which contradicts them is necessarily wrong. Since that Pandoras Box has been opened, it no longer discriminates between arguments. As soon as logic was granted the authority, every individual now had the power to decide whats logical and what isnt according to his narrow purview and limited experience. Thus in the wake of the Rambam followed students who denied prophecy, miracles, and a substantial part of the Tanach simply because it didnt make sense to them. This approach went to extremes with the allegorists in the time of the Rashba, who allegorized the entire Torah, viewing the stories of the Avot and even Mitzvot as a parable for philosophical ideas. And why? Because it didnt seem logical to accept the stories at face value. To demonstrate the absurdity of this approach, it is sufficient to observe the many wonders of our own age, which are present in every home. If they were mentioned to a philosopher in the Rambams time they would have no doubt been denied as utterly illogical. Today we know just how limited rationalism is in describing physical reality as we know it, and how many errors resulted in attempting to do so. What, then, is the justification to place rationalism over a field with which we are even less familiar, that of God and all that is beyond nature? In a world where theres a smartphone in every pocket, one needs to be very mentally stubborn to declare that a staff becoming a snake or a God who speaks to humans are both illogical and need to be reinterpreted accordingly. The Rambam was of course not the last of the rationalists. If we look over at general philosophy, we see that Renee Descartes (17th century) rose to the position of the father of modern philosophy due to his rationalist methodology. According to Descartes, philosophy used to deal with the question What exists?; for him the question changed to What can we know for certain? He placed the intellect as the basis for Mans entire world, and demanded to accept as certain only that which the intellect would confirm. A century later, Immanuel Kant came and started another revolution by stating that the human intellect cannot grasp reality as it is, but in fact shapes it according to its tools. This put an end to peoples hopes of intellectually understanding that which is beyond human experience, such as Gods existence. If one accepts Descartes statement that one should only accept that which is intellectually proven and Kants statement that on the limits of the human intellect - than the obvious conclusion is that one can know nothing about God. When Friedrich Nietzsche declared

that God is dead, decades after Kant, he merely took rationalism to its logical conclusion. As one of my teachers said: Descartes prepared the rope, Kant hung the victim and Nietzsche discovered the body We therefore see what happens when logic is crowned as the all-powerful dictator, and how what started with the denial of corporeality led to the wholesale denial of God as well the entire metaphysical world accompanying Him. The Rambams intentions were good and his faith in logic was real. But because his faith in logic was too great, he created an opening for anyone and everyone to undermine the Torah and faith at will, thus paving the way to complete denial and atheism. This while a more balanced approach would have left room for religious experience and faith, recognized the limits of our intellect, and allowed us to keep faith in place without twisting the Torah into knots.