Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider

Chapter 7: Deconstructing God's Indwelling: The Challenge to Halevi

159 C H A P T E R 7 Deconstructing God’s Indwelling The Challenge to Halevi I n this chapter, I continue with Maimonides’ radical deconstruction of God’s presence in the world. As a direct corollary of the sort of austere presenceless shekhinah explored in chapter 6, Maimonides had to deal with a host of biblical terms commonly used with reference to God. On their face, they undermine his project to “banish” God from the human domain because they pose seductive lures for drawing Him back in. At the very heart of Aristotelian physics is the principle of motion, the operative feature of the cosmos. Associated with properties such as potentiality and actuality endemic to the workings of the natural world, the literal application of motion to God constitutes an offence of capital proportions. Leading up to the chapter on shakhon, Maimonides rationalized the biblical use of numerous terms connoting motion, such as “approach,” “coming,” “going,” and “going out” with respect to God. While doing so, he also constructed an intricate preface to his avowedly antimythological conception of the shekhinah . What follows is an attempt to reconstruct that preface in pursuit of the acutely outsider God advocated by Maimonides. 160 ■ Converts, Heretics, and Lepers God’s “Coming” Chapter I:22 of the Guide focuses on the term “to come” (bo); to eliminate any of its anthropomorphic connotations, alternative meanings for this term are suggested when its subject is God. Depending on its context, for example, it can allude to either “the descent of His decree or to that of His Indwelling [sakinah]” (GP I:22, 52). The latter sense is then illustrated by two verses: “I come to thee in a thick cloud” (Exod 19:9), and “For the Lord, the God of Israel, comes through it” (Ezek 44:2). No general guidelines are offered as to what context demands which figurative option. The only instruction is to take these two proof-texts as paradigmatic, so that “all passages similar to these signify the descent of His Indwelling.” The task at hand, as I am convinced it always is, and one which the literature to date has largely neglected, is to return to the passages from which these verses have been excerpted and reread them in light of translating “to come” in this sense. Only then will it be possible to extrapolate to “all passages similar to these,” for without this reading there can be no determination of “similarity.” Exodus 19:9 consists of God’s informing Moses as to the manner of His appearance at the upcoming Sinaitic revelation. The destination of the divine coming “in a thick cloud” is Moses, so that “the people may hear when I speak with you and trust you thereafter.” The Mishneh Torah cites this verse in attributing the steadfast conviction concerning the veracity of Mosaic prophecy to the people’s unmediated witnessing of God’s communication with Moses (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 8:1).1 Though not privy to the content of that divine communication, they did hear Moses’ being addressed by God to convey that content publicly, a form of direct hearsay evidence.2 The insertion of “descent of the Indwelling” into this event, as described by the Mishneh Torah, is consistent with its narrative logic. A more anthropomorphic reading, such as that of Onkelos (as established in the Guide’s previous chapter on the term “pass”), can accommodate something “created,” like a shekhinah that emits sound or speech. On this reading, God has created something of ontological substance separate from Himself that descends and is enveloped by the “thick cloud” and from which speech emerges. Once Exod 19:9 is subjected to the more philosophically refined hermeneutic of the Guide, though, this substantive Indwelling account, I argue, becomes untenable. Notably, the verse appears again in the Guide’s exposition of the mass revelation at Sinai (II:33) where initially its role and narrative context are consistent with the Mishneh Torah account. The verse is taken to specify that “it was him [Moses] that was spoken to and that they heard the great voice, but not the articulations of speech” (ibid., 364). However, that reading, which maintains the participation of a publicly audible divine sound, is quickly discounted by its relegation to “the external meaning (zahir) of the text of the Torah.”3 Playing with the rabbinic midrash in which the first two...