[Ekzamenov]

http://www.thejewishweek.com/middle/sabbathcontent.php3 Shabbat ReAaaeh The Torah IsnAaat Flat Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman Why did the ancient Church demand for such a long time the world was flat? They got the concept from Topographia Christiana, a treatise by way of a monk named Cosmas, who described the planet like a square jet with Jerusalem at its middle. But Aristotle himself, approximately one thousand years preceding, already knew better. How difficult could it be to find out the morning sun doesn't unepectedly vanish like a billiard ball dropping off a table? Why did the Church select Cosmas over Aristotle? More to the purpose, why do we select our own AaA'CosmasesAaA over our AaA'AristotlesAaA? The perfect Aristotle for all of us is Maimonides (Rambam), who mixed Judaism with the most recent medical understanding of his day-to challenge common Jewish opinions Aaa also about God. The end result was the AaA'Maimonidean controversies,AaA a section in our history that rough RambamAaas followers against Jewish thoughts as retrogressive as Cosmas. Nachmanides (the Ramban) tells us of the while discussing our sedraAaas warning against false prophets who lead us astray by indicators or portents [Deut. 13:2-6]. Indicators, states Ramban, are natural activities to which a points: a coming storm (for us), a sandstorm (for spiritual people). Portents are remarkable phenomena beyond the world of nature: the effects in Egypt, or the breaking of the Red Sea. Watch out for prophets who misuse equally to delude their hearers. This really is greater than a diatribe against fake prophecy, however. We ought to be skeptical of prophets who are false, but pleasant prophets who are true. Pursuing Maimonides, Ramban describes actual prophets about the grounds that their mental ability has affinity using the intelligence of God, letting them learn new facts. RambanAaas main case is Kabbalah, which in his time was still perhaps not conventional Jewish thought. With frequency, he presents Kabbalistic observations with the expression, al derech haAaaemet, AaA'Truthfully....AaA He also examined whatever medical treatises he may find to keep informed in the world of medicine. Ramban and Rambam were the Jewish types of Aristotle: all three might have insisted that merely a Cosmas holds fast to stagnant views without upgrading them with new findings. Relevant this is actually the statement since he adopted the Ramban/Rambam progressive road to reality (that he so rightly earned) a couple weeks straight back that Rabbi Louis Jacobs had died, without ever reaching the British primary rabbinate. Rabbi Jacobs kept available to the concept that nevertheless God spoke to us Aaa and he never doubted that God had Aaa people alone had documented what they believed thought was, so that Torah consists of consecutive literary strata. We call this the AaA'documentary hypothesis,AaA similar to the AaA'evolution hypothesisAaA in-the study of natural phenomena. There were many ideas of evolution before Darwin and there are many possible methods to comprehend TorahAaas proof of human authorship, but to reject human participation in the-way Torah boils down to us is much like siding with creationists (in our time) or Cosmas (in his). Even though I must admit its most useful expression comes perhaps not from a but from Galileo: he insisted he was becoming a specialist in GodAaas 2nd guide, the Bible being the first one, As he examined the market, the anti-Cosmas method of Torah is basic to Judaism. He didn't however have the language of AaA'evolution,AaA but he believed the Bible and nature were both published by God. We could increase that science and insight: Torah are similar facts in the same Divine author. That means a clinical method of Torah is not any different than the usual geological analysis of Rocky Mountain topography, or of Mars, for that matter. The Rockies, Torah and Mars are services and products of major change Aaa God only usually works this way. That's why we find actually new meanings in Torah. It's what the Rabbis intended if they created the idea of the Oral Law. Just their opponents insisted on reading Torah literally, and while we're still flourishing, they're gone. The Midrash says God made a number of things we'd need some time, but put them away until the appropriate time Aaa like the ram as his stand-in for your Isaac that Abraham found in the thicket. One particular point is just a clinical method of character, GodAaas key to that particular 2nd heavenly book: the natural world. Still another example is just a medical view of Torah, vaguely understood by our Rabbis of antiquity once they insisted on the Oral interpretation; intuited later by Rambam who thought we've immediate access to Divine intelligence; furthered however by Ramban who knew the uniqueness named Kabbalah; and fearlessly championed by Rabbi Louis Jacobs, who knew that the modern technology of divinely unmasked texts was waiting within the heavenly wings for all of us to understand. Shabbat shalom. professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College in Ny, is a specialist within the area of spirituality and Jewish practice. He's the publisher of AaA'My PeopleAaas Prayerbook: Conventional Hopes, Contemporary Commentaries,AaA and AaA'The Way In to Jewish PrayerAaA (Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, Vt. ).