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A guide to remaining perplexed

A Guide to Remaining Perplexed By Reuven Rand Certain conversations seem geared toward challenging our assumptions A few years ago I sat in a bible class in which a student challenged the professor about the Hebrews' culpability for the het ha-egel the Sin of the Golden Calf How he asked could we blame the Hebrews for building a golden intermediary between the people and God when God had not yet forbidden them to craft a graven image I explained to the student after class that his version of the biblical narrative was incorrect the Hebrews had heard the Ten Commandments before Moses had ascended the mountain to receive the luhot ha-edut Tablets of the Testimony which set the stage for the Hebrews' transgression Rather than accept his mistake the questioner chose to challenge me on theological grounds If God had already given the Ten Commandments what further purpose could be achieved in acquiring two tablets Could the Tablets possibly have independent religious signi ?cance i Does our belief system even have room for such a concept The assumptions inherent in such questions are both manifold and manifest The ?rst assumption is that we have some theology in common to discuss otherwise we cannot even begin this discussion Another is that by means of a reductio ad absurdum from our philosophical notions we might rewrite a section of the bible ii However I was most stricken by his belief that our common theology is a rationalist one predisposed to treat the concept of an inherently holy artifact as superstitious nonsense For what in our religious corpus our Bible of miracles our Talmud of magic and demons and our halakhic literature that speci ?es evil spirit removing hand-washing proceduresiii hints to him that rationalism is normative The answer of course is that Maimonides was a rationalist and though his ??Guide of the Perplexed ? rarely ?nds its way into any Jewish curriculum iv he is imagined to be as authoritative a theologian as he is a halakhist Of course this fails to notice that we do not serve God as Maimonideans applying negative theology towards God ? s Cpossible attributes in order to understand him by what he is not Divine commandments take the prominent role in Orthodox Judaism not philosophy As Maimonides would put it few of us have even seen the palace Despite this there is a prevalent urge to assume Maimonides to adopt his conclusions piecemeal without using his approach to deriving them Why is this Another question may give us an answer What Modern Orthodox Jew would take a Kabbalistic approach to philosophy in which sparks of holiness pervade nature waiting for us to release them despite the outlandishness of the claim and its absence from our authoritative sources The answer is a Jew devoted to Torah-Umadda who has found this approach in Dr Norman Lamm ? s book of the same name and has adopted it as a brilliant justi ?cation of his lifestyle The Guide serves