Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Seeing God?

One of the best known phrases in the Torah is from the sedrah of Mishpatim when the Children of Israel accept the Torah by saying “na-aseh venishma” (“All that HaShem hath spoken will we do, and obey”). Nishma is from the word “to hear” and this has given rise, among some Jewish thinkers, to the idea that Judaism values hearing above all other senses.

Yet just after this verse from Exodus 24 we read the following remarkable passage:

9 Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel;
10 and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under His feet the like of a paved work of sapphire stone, and the like of the very heaven for clearness.
11 And upon the nobles (atzilei) of the children of Israel He laid not His hand; and they beheld God, and did eat and drink.

This section stresses the visual, specifically seeing God both through “sight” (verse 9) and also “vision” (verse 11).

These three verses raise many questions and the Rabbis of the Talmudic period understood this passage in varying ways.

For example, with regard to “eating and drinking” Rab says “In the future world there is no eating nor drinking nor propagation nor business nor jealousy nor hatred nor competition, but the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads feasting on the brightness of the Divine Presence, as it says, And they beheld God, and did eat and drink” (Bavli Berakhot 17a).

Yet in Bamidbar Rabba we read “R. Johanan, however, said [that the pleasure derived from gazing at the Divine splendour was] real nourishment; as it is written: In the light of the king's countenance is life2 (Prov. XVI, 15)”

The Aramaic translation by Onkelos has “as if they were eating and drinking” so follows the idea expressed by Rab.

The text itself in verse 11 implies that “seeing God” is dangerous (NB: the word atzilei in this verse is obscure and is understood to mean “nobles”). Bamidbar Rabba develops this idea as follows:

“R. Tanhuma said: It teaches that [Nadab and Abihu] waxed haughty and stood upon their feet and fixed gloating eyes upon the Divine Presence. R. Joshua of Siknin, in the name of R. Levi, said: Moses had not gazed gloatingly upon the Divine Presence, yet he enjoyed its splendour.”

Yet what is striking in these comments is a lack of focus or concern by the midrash over the basic idea of “seeing God” itself. In fact there are other passages understood by the Rabbis in this way – e.g. on “This is my God and I will glorify him” from the Song at the Reed Sea the midrash says that all of the children of Israel actually saw God at the Red Sea – because it says straight after “The Lord is a man of war”.

A modern scholar, Daniel Boyarin, argues that concern over the idea of “seeing God” actually has its source in Hellenic rather than Hebraic sources because of the problem of anthropomorphism – sight implies that God is (as it were) corporeal. This was not an issue for the Hebraic tradition.

This concern emerges clearly in Maimonides, who is well known for disdaining anthropomorphism for reasons based on Greek philosophy. Our passage is discussed in several places in his Guide to the Perplexed where typically he says of verse 10 “this refers to intellectual apprehension and in no way to the eye’s seeing”.

Yet there are strong contradictory traditions. In Maimonides Laws of Repentance III:7 he declares that anyone who says there is one God but that he has a body or physical form is a heretic (alongside an idolater amongst other categories). The Rabad challenges this passage robustly – he claims that “greater and better men than [Maimonides] have accepted this doctrine” because of the way in which they have read scripture and midrash (i.e. as in the passages above).

There is a little discussed work, which may date back to the late Talmudic period, called the Shiur Qomah which actually provides measurements for the limbs of the “Divine body”. It would appear that in the passage from the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides is attacking this tradition and those who accepted it – i.e. people such as Saadiah Gaon, Judah HaLevi and Abraham ibn Ezra.

In addition, in the roughly contemporaneous writings of the Hasidei Ashkenaz (German Jewish pietists) there are many grossly anthropomorphic passages. They saw the Torah as a collection of names and, in some cases, that these names give clues to the dimensions of the Divine limbs as in the Shiur Qomah. It should be noted that the passage from Shemot above mentions one such limb, i.e. God’s “feet” an imagery appears in several places in the Tanakh and which may be euphemistic in its own right.

What is striking is that Maimonides critique of such views has become universally accepted thereby arguably introducing a Hellenistic philosophical conception of God into the heart of our understanding of Judaism.

Given that ideas of God’s corporeality were clearly accepted by pious Jews of Maimonides period, it is also conceivable that these ideas existed in the Talmudic period and of course before that in the Biblical period.

Returning to the theme of whether “seeing” is more important than “hearing”, at the giving of the Ten Commandments the Torah says “All of the people saw the voices” (Exodus 20:14). The midrash on this says:

Rabbi Ishmael says “They saw what could be seen and heard what could be heard” but Rabbi Akiva says “They saw what could be heard”

Boyarin argues that this passage, amongst others, indicates that Rabbi Akiva strongly privileged seeing above hearing and there was a strong desire amongst the rabbinic sages who followed this idea to “see” God in some sense, albeit that this is dangerous if done incorrectly as seen, for example, in regard to Nadab and Abihu above.

In conclusion, we should not take for granted the idea that “hearing” is predominant in our tradition. Further, the passage from Mishpatim above is remarkable and worthy of much greater study.

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