Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [94]
11. The presence of the miraculous within the natural has a long history in Jewish theological conversation. Some key prior participants in this conversation are Nahmanides, the MaHaRaL of Prague, and Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev.
12. Jonathan Day, God's Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For the presence and survival of this theme in later Judaism, see Michael Fishbane's “The Great Dragon Battle and Talmudic Redaction,” in his The Exegetical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 41-55.
13. Parallel structures of thought in Kabbalah and astrophysics have been noted by several writers, including Daniel Matt, God and the Big Bang (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1996); David Nelson, Judaism, Physics, and God (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005); and Howard Smith, Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2006).
14. See Gen. 3:9. I have in mind also the Hasidic tale of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi's use of this verse in confronting his jailer in St. Petersburg. See especially Martin Buber's retelling of that tale in The Way of Man (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1966), pp. 9ff.
15. This is the key theme in the voluminous writings of Rabbi Yehudah Ashlag (1886-1955), the leading Kabbalistic figure of the early twentieth century. This interesting author has much to teach, though his legacy has been distorted in various popular presentations.
16. Bereshit Rabbah 1:4; 8:7.
17. See Gen. 32:28 and commentaries and discussion in my chapter 4.
18. Key to my theological-moral position is R. Simeon ben Azzai's preference for Gen. 5:1-2 (creation of all humans in God's image) over R. Akiva's choice of Lev. 19:18 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”) as the kelal gadol, the most basic rule of Torah. Talmud Yerushalmi (henceforth T. Y.) Nedarim 9:4 (41c). Everything else, in both halakhah and aggadah, needs to conform with this. When it does not, it needs to be reexamined. Yes, one may call this an “essentialist” approach to Jewish ethics, but it is one rooted in the rabbinic sources themselves. See the fuller discussion in chapter 4.
19. But I am interested in, and think we need to learn more about, the intelligence and communication skills of elephants, whales, primates, and others. We are told that King Solomon knew how to listen to and speak with animals. We will not reach his wisdom until we relearn this lost skill, among many others.
Chapter 2. Evolution Continues
1. Talmud Bavli (henceforth T. B.) Hagigah 15b.
2. On the whole process of the ongoing internalization of “spiritualization” of Judaism, see Ron Margolin, Miqdash Adam (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2005), pp. 57-122. This important study is soon to appear in English translation.
3. On Dreams 1:149; On the Cherubim 98-106; etc. On the question of Philo as mystic, see David Winston's brief remarks in my edited collection Jewish Spirituality, vol. 1 (New York: Crossroad, 1987), pp. 223ff., and more fully in Winston's “Was Philo a Mystic?” in Joseph Dan and Frank Talmage, Studies in Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 15-39.
4. Note that tosafot, Hagigah 14b, already question RaShI on this point.
5. North African Jewish intellectuals of the eleventh century were already writing under the influence of philosophy as absorbed and transmitted through Islam. See also the quotation from the Babylonian authority R. Hai Gaon, a century earlier, in the ‘Arukh, as quoted by B. M. Levin in Otsar ha-Ge'onim (Hagigah 14b), saying that “they did not ascend to heaven but were seeing and gazing within their own hearts, like one who perceives something quite clearly with his eyes.”
6. Even the much more “tame” rabbinic sources sometimes reflect this. When God seeks to redeem Israel from Egypt, chaos rises in the form of the sea's resistance to splitting. See Pirkey Rabbi Eliezer 42 and the discussion by Rabbi David