Welcome to Judaism, Demystified, a podcast for the perplexed.
We are joined by Doctor Lenny Goodman was a professor of
Philosophy and Jewish Studies and Andrew W Mellon professor in
the Humanities. His philosophical interests
center on metaphysics and ethics, and he has paid special
attention over the years to Islamic and Jewish philosophical
thought and their creative interactions.
Goodman was a winner of the American Philosophical
Association Baumgard Memorial Prize and was a rare humanities
recipient of Vanderbilt University's top research award,
the Earl Settlement Prize. He has written philosophical
essays on most of the major figures of Islamic and Jewish
philosophy and on a variety of topics in political philosophy,
bio philosophy, and the theory of knowledge and culture.
He serves in the editorial boards of History of Philosophy,
Quarterly and Medieval Philosophy and Theology.
He is an associate editor of Asian Philosophy.
He has served as Vice President and program chair of the
Institute for Islamic Judaic Studies.
He has also served as program chair for the APA panels of the
Academy for Jewish Philosophy. He was Jewish Philosophy Subject
editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
is a Fellow of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy.
Without further ado, Doctor Len Goodman.
Thank you for joining the Judaism Demystified podcast.
Professor Goodman, first of all, you're one of the most requested
guest returnees. So we're just so happy that
we're able to to do this. Again, we've been in touch a lot
obviously over the year since I think it was a year or so since
you were on last. And we're really looking forward
to this because for everybody listening, we wanted to discuss
the new translation to the guide which you which you just made
and it's been previously done by Moshe Friedlander and most
notably Shlomo Pinas. What has driven you to write
this new translation to the guide, and what do you hope to
add or change from the previous translations?
Thank you. And I should say one once we get
started, it's really a pleasure to be back and I love being here
and it's a it's a wonderful program and I've heard nice
feedback about what you posted. The the free letter translation
was the first into English you could see I I used to teach it
years ago. It was reprinted very
inexpensively by Dover and my students could afford, if you
would believe, a big fat paperback like that cost $1.40
back in the day. And it because it was the first,
it has many mistakes in it. Friedlander was feeling his way.
He was he was a scholarly man. You could see when you're
trying, when you when you used his translation that when he was
in trouble with the Arabic, he would rely on even T bones
important Hebrew translation, which is very natural for him.
And that's something that a lot of traditional people had access
to. When we're reading themselves.
Naturally, in that pioneering position that Friedlander was
in, he he has mistakes in his translation.
There was one way in which his translation was extremely useful
to me, but the Dover people did not include his notes.
His notes are very extensive and relied upon the four traditional
commentaries from the Middle Ages on the Guide to the
Perplexed. And those are very valuable,
walking you through what others thought about it but in order to
make the book cheap and accessible and so forth.
And they stripped that all out. So you can still get the if you
if you know how to work the Internet, you know you can you
can get the the full Freelander. Originally it was in three
volumes, and there was a one volume edition which contained
all of the notes that he had done.
And you'll see them cited whatever we used anybody.
Phil Lieberman and I, my my coworker, on that new
translation of the guide. Whenever we cited anybody, we
always gave credit, and we often found ourselves giving credit to
three Landers, pointing out things that the traditional
commentators had used the other translation.
And by the way, one nice thing about Friedlander he wrote in a
kind of Victorian English which was still accessible to people
at the time when he was doing that work in the 19th century.
And it fits, in a way, with the kind of traditional phraseology
that people find in the Guide to the Perplexed.
In the case of Shlomo Penis's translation, Shlomo Penis.
And that really is how his name was pronounced.
He kind of insisted on it. Even when he was teaching, I
knew I knew him. He was a great Arabist, a great
scholar, a very warm and lovely man.
He was asked to do this because of the interest in the guide of
Rail Strauss, and there was a scholar at the University of
Chicago, Ralph Lehrer, who was who was still around, and he was
supposed to help Shlomo penis with his English.
Because he was not a native speaker of English.
He knew many languages, but Lerner was also keeping an eye
on Penis's translation to make sure it stayed consistent with
Leo Strauss's interpretation. And readers who are interested
in my forthcoming companion volume to the new translation,
which is called The Guide to the Guide, of course, is they will.
They will find that Shlomo Penis had his own idea of what the
guide was all about. He originally began work on that
in Germany in the 1930s, and you can understand the pressure that
someone would feel in that time period, and everyone who worked
on anything at all Jewish at that time.
Eventually that was all suppressed.
But Leo Strauss was very concerned with the political
overtones of a work and developed the idea that medieval
philosophers were not necessarily telling it the way
they really saw it, that they were concealing their true
intentions. And he set about trying to work
that out. It was a reflection of the
oppressive times that, you know, Strauss lived under and
eventually got out from under when he came to this country,
when he when he got out from under the thumb of people who
were being at first watched and eventually destroyed by the
Nazis. And his thesis about that
indirection in the in the guide lived long after him.
Leo Strauss followed the Talmudic victim of raising up
many disciples. And he had many disciples, and
he was a man with an idea. Many of his disciples attached
themselves to that idea, and we're not themselves as creative
and original in their thinking as he was.
The the thesis that the guide is really concealing its true
message and is adopting a a skeptical view about biblical
and rabbinic outlook, was attractive to many people,
partly because it seemed contrarian and partly because it
was something new. It was new in 1935 when you know
Strauss first brought it up, but he but he brought it up again in
the 40s and again in the 50s, and it became a whole school of
thought. Many of the avatars of that
school of thought were were not as as learned or as creative and
as Leo Strauss himself was. But Penis was supposed to
translate the guide in that same spirit, and partly as a result,
he he projected Straussian ideas onto the text which really don't
belong there. I can be specific about that,
and in the commentary and in the guide to the guide, I'm going to
some detail about that. We have to believe that the
Rambam devoted himself to Alakha, to Torah, to the issues
of how do you make biblical philosophy.
We have to believe that he was very sincere about that.
I think that's demonstrated on every page of the guide, and
unfortunately you miss a lot of that.
In the penis translation, there's another problem with two
problems really, with the penis translation, and I taught it for
many years. I I know that translation very,
very intimately. One I mentioned that penis was
not a native speaker of English, so he doesn't have the feel for
the diction of the original. He knows Arabic, He knew Arabic
very, very well. He's a great scholar of Arabic
thought and literature, but he didn't have the feel of the tone
that Maimonides adopted, and that's partly because of
convention that people have in translating works from Arabic.
And you'll see the same thing in translations from the Hebrew.
They try to be very literal. I think that penis was
instructed by Strauss to be very literal, but in trying to be
very literal they get very etymological and etymology is
not going to give you the real meaning of a term.
You have to know the difference between a Hospice at a hospital
if you usage is what determines the meeting.
And we have a letter from Rambam himself to Evan Tibben trying to
encourage Evan Tibben not to be so literal when he translated
the guy from the Arabic into Hebrew during Maimonides own
lifetime. And he said look, sometimes
you'll need 2 words to express what idea, sometimes you'll need
one word to express 2 ideas. Don't try and follow the syntax
of the original. Unfortunately, Maimonides died
soon after writing that letter, and the translation that we have
for bibbid Tibbins tends to be a little too literal, and that's
compounded by a convention that they have in translating Arabic
and Hebrew. I don't know if our listeners
have ever taken a course in Latin.
When you take a course in Latin, the the kiddies, let's say
they're in 8th or 9th grade, are worried that the structure is
going to come around and see that.
Have they parse this sentence correctly?
Have they understood it? So they tried to imitate the
idiom and the syntax of the original to show that they were
parsing the sentence correctly. That's that's a good thing for a
kid to do who's in middle school is not a good thing to do if you
want to make a translation, have the kind of impact that the
original had on the original leader.
The language that the Rambam uses in the Guide to the
Perplexed is conversational. Professor Lieberman and I
developed the idea that it probably was dictated.
He was elderly at the time. When he when he wrote that book,
he probably did not sit in and write it out as he did other
books of his. He probably was dictating.
And you can see that conversational informal tone
addressing the reader who is a former disciple who has gone
elsewhere and needs to be sent. Chapters every, every little
group of chapters get sent on to him through through post, which
of course not. And that was it was not the the
kind of mail we have today, the that that need to establish a
rapport with your reader, to build a bond of intimacy and
trust with your reader, to speak in a conversational tone that
all comes through in the guide. It is not written in a
formalistic sort of way. It's written in in an intimate,
engaging way, in the manner of a rasala, as it's called in
Arabic, an essay in the form of a letter.
The whole thing opens with a letter, and it tells what the
occasion is for writing the letter.
And sometimes in an essay you'll see an author addressing his
leader and trying to bring him on board, trying to explain what
what we're up to, what we're trying to achieve together.
Rumba does that all the time, right through, right through the
book, speaking to him in a in a warm and friendly and even
fatherly way. The essay form originates in
antiquity, in the form of letters, where that the highly
structured organization that you see in the round bombs legal
code, the Mishnat Tarah, is not found in the guide.
On the contrary, it's very digressive.
It's very informal. It's organization and that
serves another purpose because as as Strauss suspected, there
is a subtext in the guide. It's not.
Don't believe anything. I'm telling you that's that's a
little extreme. But but the subtext is one of
trying to make sure that a reader who is not prepared to
deal with serious philosophical problems does not get in over
his or her head. And the way that's done is that
the bra bomb in the guide has not named the problems he's
going to address. Even the problem of evil, which
is a well known philosophical problem.
He doesn't name it. He says, well, I'll tell you
about the Book of Joe. If you've thought of it all
about the Book of Job, you know that you're going to be dealing
with the problem of evil. Why do innocents suffer?
Why do wicked people apparently prosper?
But but the Rambam introduces all his problems obliquely,
indirectly, and counts on the reader to understand what the
problem is. That will deal with questions
that are critical in the guide, like what is the nature of
revelation? What is a prophet really?
How does how does rabbinic language relate to biblical
language? Different kind of approach,
different idiom. And by using that indirect
method, not laying out his, you know, introduction and telling
you here are the problems we're going to address and so forth.
Using the essay form, he can, he can make sure that people who
are not really motivated or capable of dealing with those
problems and seeing their way through how to deal with them
are not in danger by trying to address issues that they don't
know how to address. So, so that's a that that's that
there is an esoteric text, but the esoteric text is not occult,
is not hermetic. It's it's a it's a way of
bringing along those who are exercised by those problems and
leaving behind those who are bored by those problems, or
aren't competent to address them, or don't have the courage
to address them and so forth. That's a, that's a that's a a
nuance which the old translations tend to miss.
That is makes me feel like I want to start reading it like
right now. That was really good and I
wanted to get into the idea or the problem of contradictions.
How do you deal? How do you deal with the
contradictions in the more? What is your in the guide?
What is your approach to dealing with contradictions in the
guide? Good question.
Followers of Leo Strauss made a big point out of contradictions,
because Strauss took Mimari's had little discussion there.
He lists seven different kinds of contradictions that work
might have or body literature might contain.
And Strauss thought that contradictions were the the
bread crumbs in the past that would lead you to seeing what
the round bombs true intentions were, that he embedded
contradictions in the text. So when he says he believes
this, so you should understand that he doesn't really mean it.
But the but the little contradictions are the hint that
he's he means the opposite of what he's saying.
That is a false issue. There are contradictions in
every text. I've not yet come across any
serious thinker who avoids all contradictions, even the great
philosophers, Aristotle, Spinoza.
Nobody's more systematic than Spinoza, but no philosopher has
solved all the problems. If they did, philosophy would be
over and finished. But it's not, because there are
always ways of finding another angle objecting to a certainty.
Here's a problem you haven't solved yet.
The Rambam's most concerned with apparent contradictions in the
Torah itself. The fact that he admits that
there might be contradictions in his own book.
Is taken and jumped on by Straussians because they think
that, oh, that's going to take us to the fact that he doesn't
really believe in what he's saying.
That's a mistake. It's a serious mistake.
And if you read the guide to the guide you'll see how badly that
idea was handled. The kind of contradictions that
the Rambam is concerned with, for example, are pedagogical
contradictions where a where the Rambam needs to introduce an
idea in an oversimplified sort of way.
Later on as you read on, he expects you to read patiently,
expects you to read the guide more than once.
You'll see that the contradictions are only
apparent. But the Torah, the Torah, the
the kind of contradictions that Torah contains.
We know that God is not a physical being.
But the Torah always talks about God as God, as though God were a
physical being. That's a contradiction.
And in the course of the guide he will explain to you why the
Torah talks about God as though he were official or physical
being and how to understand what it means.
That means that you have to understand the poetics of the of
the of the Torah. The Torah is written in in a lot
of metaphors because a God is so transcendent, we can't describe
God directly. You can see that in the eloquent
silence of Bureishi in the book of Genesis.
It doesn't try to tell you why God created the world.
It just starts out by saying that God created the world.
You're going to have to try and understand what that means and
what what depth that idea has. And the rob always has rabbinic
company. And the rabbis said that the act
of creation is is so profound that it really is is is quite
beyond us to understand how that was done.
And so the Torah just tells you baldly, in the beginning, God
created heaven and earth. That's our starting point.
And and we're going to, we're going to work with that idea.
And that idea of creation is very important to the Ramba.
But he he does not think. He does not think that the Torah
does contain contradictions. He finds certain contradictions
in the rabbinic texts and often he says that's because they say,
oh, this rabbi said this and that rabbi said that and they
had a disagreement. So there are contradictions
between them and they have to be resolved.
And sometimes the Rabbis will take it as a starting point in
their exegesis that that they will say there's one where where
where they say Solomon, why do you contradict your father,
meaning David, It's bad enough that you do that and now you're
contradicting yourself. So they find they find 2
passages that seem to disagree with each other and and that
becomes a basis for exegesis. They just say what are they
really getting at. So they treat the Rabbis treat
apparent contradictions in the Torah.
It's sat the same way that they treat the apparent
contradictions between 2 great teachers who have to be
reconciled with one another. It's a it's it's it's food for
thought. So it's not hints.
It's not hints of disingenuous writing.
Right. So what you're describing, what
I'm trying to put together is you're describing the
contradictions which the realm is coming to solve within the
corpus of Judaism itself. Well, what about the
contradictions within the text itself?
You. If you read the translation,
every time the one of them appears, I tried to spell out
what he's up to and he will, he will answer the questions.
That's where the idea of pedagogical contradictions,
which is one of the possibilities he mentions in
explaining sometimes, sometimes an author, I guess a little
ahead of himself or starts assuming things that he hasn't
prepared the ground for, and you have to allow
oversimplification. And that's the kind of thing
that he admits he he may have done.
He does not admit that he's admitted contradictions in the
text in order to put you wise to the fact that he didn't mean
what he said. So the contradictions are trying
to lead you to delve deeper within the matter.
Sure. Sure.
Yeah. And it it would it would take
some time but if you but if you read the guide with the
commentary that Professor Lieberman and I wrote we we
pointed out. Well, here, here, he.
Here. He's using an assumption that he
rejected elsewhere. And I'll give you the the most
famous example. Maimonides upholds the creation
of the world. He thinks.
He says very explicitly that he believes that the world was
created from nothing by God. That view was considered to be
impossible by people in the Erbilian philosophical
tradition, which is a tradition that he respects greatly.
And those philosophers like Al Farabi and Abbaseta, great
Muslim philosophers that we study, that I teach, they
thought that that was incoherent to say that the world was
created. He doesn't think it was in
incoherent. He doesn't think that Aristotle
successfully disproved the impossibility and he
successfully disproved the possibility of creation.
But but he works in a very ironic manner.
He wants to make peace between the eternalists and the
creationists, and he follows the Muslim philosopher even to file
who thinks that either way you get to the existence of God, You
can be a creationist and then you need God, otherwise there
would be no world. Or you could be an eternalist.
And in that case eternal motion requires an eternal mover, and
it's got to be non physical if it's going to move things
eternally. That's the argument that he
uses. And so you get to God either
way. Now Ramba believes that not only
was the world created, but he believes that that's a better
argument, that he doesn't think it can be proved, but he thinks
he thinks that it gives you. He thinks it's more likely,
partly because he doesn't believe that everything that
can't exist does exist. So there's a rule for God's will
and God's exercise of that will in the creation of the world.
And he thinks that retaining God's will gives you a better
idea of God, not just making God into a mechanism or an algorithm
of some kind that produced a world by a kind of automatism.
So he's very well motivated. He acknowledges that he can't
prove the world was created, but he makes a big point of saying
that it couldn't be proved that it was eternal either.
And he even says, which is kind of fun, that Aristotle, who
makes a strong case for the eternity of the world, He says
he knew very well that he wasn't able to prove it.
His followers thought that he proved it.
But if you read it, he uses persuasive language.
Aristotle uses persuasive languages.
Surely you must believe and and Rabab says he wouldn't need to
use persuasive language if he had a proof.
This is an acknowledgement that he didn't have a proof.
So so it's it's he says he says with great respect for Aristotle
and he has great respect for Aristotle.
He says he says that it was Aristotle who taught us the
difference between proof and persuasion.
That's where we learn in in Aristotle's logic which was the
first thing Aristotle's the first thing about my mom studied
in in philosophy was early early book that he wrote when he was
just a kid in his early 20s, probably even earlier.
Nick he studied there was dealing in logic as developed by
Al Farabi the Muslim philosopher.
But his dialectical argument that the world was created.
His persuasion that the world was created, His argument that
things exist which don't think, thinks not everything that
exists has to exist. Which is a big argument in favor
of a voluntary God who creates the world by an act of grace.
He thinks he's got a better case there, but he doesn't reject.
He doesn't retract his idea that the philosophers have a good
case, meaning the Arthelians who think the world is eternal.
They have a good case. We have a good case.
If they proved that, we would have to allegorize the idea of
creation. He acknowledges that.
But but his his concession that the Aristotelian and Theo
Platonic argument works for an eternal world.
His intention? Tensionism.
Philosopher's polite word for contradiction.
It's in tension with his own belief that the world was
created. If he were a dogmatic sort of
thinker, he would say they were wrong and they shouldn't be
dragged out and taken to the stake.
He doesn't think that. He thinks, he thinks that we
have a better view. He's more tolerant than that.
So we see that tension there between his use of the
philosopher's eternalist argument, there's one
possibility, and our own creationist argument there's
another possibility. And if they prove that creation
was impossible, we would have to give it up and allegorize it the
same way we allegorize God's not having a human form, but but
that's a that. That's a that's a serious
tension in the Rambam's own philosophical writing.
And we can allow it. We can.
We can see what he's trying to do.
He does not really subscribe to the idea that the that the world
could have been eternal. He doesn't think they have good
enough reason for that. But they don't have proof, and
we don't have proof, so we won't try to make a proof where we
don't have one. That's intellectual honesty.
So some people might read the guide and they'll see his
allowing of of the entertaining of of Aristotle and Plato's or
whatever his views. And they might think that oh,
since he's not like you know, definitively you know X ING them
off. He might have actually maybe
even believed it. That's where someone would.
Certainly. Making the mistake, but this is
not. That certainly has been done.
That has been. Done.
But people. Oh well, maybe he believed it
because he leaves room for it. He leaves room for it, yeah, but
but people who do that don't go on to pay attention to the fact
that he decisively unmanned the the Argentilian view.
He shows that it's not a proof. It's not a proof, It's a it's a
it's a thing that they felt they had good reason to believe.
And he's right about that. By the way.
They didn't they didn't have logical proof of the eternity of
the world. They Aristotle actually thought
he did. He he he he didn't.
He wasn't. He wasn't just trying to be
persuasive and ignoring logic. Aristotle comes from a
background where the very idea of creation is considered to be
incoherent because you're getting something from nothing.
But of course, round Bob doesn't think it's really coming from
nothing. He thinks it's coming from God.
Yeah, I think one of the things that people also like to say is
that he was an Aristotelian through and through and and I
don't see that as the case. I think he was very loyal to to
the Torah obviously, and Aristotle's like the the mode of
which reason was used at the time.
So therefore in some places he agreed with Aristotle, not the
case that he did not. And this is one of those cases.
He has the most respect for Aristotle of all the
philosophers. But you'll also see as you read
the commentary in the new translation, which is very
extensive commentary, you'll see a heavy influence of Plato as
well. Plato and that time was thought
to have believed that God didn't really create the world from
nothing. They thought that Plato believed
that God created the world by or giving order and organization to
pre-existing matter. That's a doctrine called
forbatio mundi, the formation of the world.
That's probably not what Plato really thought, but it was
commonly thought that that's what Plato believed.
And Maimonides is explicitly dismissive of that view.
He says that just as bad as eternalism, he did respect
Aristotle enormously. He could compare Aristotle with
with with not only with Plato, but with Neoplatonists and and
Muslim Aristotelians. Like you got to remember, the
Aristotle and Plato were conflated in the Greek tradition
and they were they were considered about much more
compatible than they were, let's say in the Renaissance.
But the he thinks that Aristotle is the one who's worth arguing
with. He doesn't think that Epicurus
is worth arguing with because Epicurus doesn't really see a
role for the gods in nature. Epicurus believes in the gods,
but he doesn't believe in Providence, then believe in
judgment. He doesn't believe in creation.
So he says he's going to address the Aristotelian view because he
thinks that's the best philosophical view, and in many
respects he follows Aristotle. But on on the matter of
creation, he thinks that Aristotle got it wrong.
He doesn't think he can prove that.
He doesn't think that anybody can prove that, but but he has
good dialectical arguments to make his case that his view is
more probable because it leaves you the open future.
It leaves the the world is not totally determinate and
determined, and it leaves you a God who can exercise grace and
free will, not just working automatically.
So theologically it's preferable, and
naturalistically, cosmologically it's more probable.
So he thinks he's got good reason.
Having good reason is not the same as having proof.
He's very particular about that. And how does he know that?
He says Aristotle taught us the difference, right?
He thinks he's got a good dialectical argument and and I
don't, I don't think that he, I don't think that he's at all
sort of shaming his opinion there or concealing anything in
in trying to make that case. He's very open about it.
And you know, the another thing that I think people make the
mistake of saying that maybe the detractors of Rambam, they'll
say that, you know, Rahman was a was a dat Yahid.
He was like a singular kind of thinker.
And it wasn't wasn't in line of tradition.
But actually, if you like, you were mentioning before the
contradictions in the Torah, the Torah itself, you know, it'll
say, let's say for example, it'll describe the form of God
in a way, like his hands, his his finger and so on but then.
In. Yeah, but then in other places
it says that I have no form, right?
So the Torah does, you know, apply this idea of apophatic
negation, right? That's right.
Apathetic. Negative theology is very
important to the Rambam. And negative theology does not
mean that you peel the onion and find nothing inside.
It means it means you're moving ever more in the direction of
transcendence. And that's that's the move that
Rambam wants to make. And it's it's very, very clear.
He, he, he's very committed to the Torah.
But he thinks that if you're going to read the Torah not in
the way that a child might be taught, but if you're going to
read it in a in a thoughtful and sophisticated and informed way,
you're going to have to understand that the Torah is
full of poetry. And at the very first page of
the guide, he explains that one of the reasons that he's writing
it to this particular disciple who had to move to Aleppo is
yes, I saw what you could do in logic, and I saw what you could
do with astronomy and mathematics and this, they're
all subjects that Ramadan was very committed to.
But when I saw your poetry, when I saw your macabat, which is a
genre of Arabic literature that is a hybrid of poetry and prose,
when I saw your macabat, I knew that I had to begin to work with
you on what the poetry of the Torah is.
Because because if we're going to talk about God, we're not
going to be able to talk about God in any direct and literal
and explicit way. We're going to have to use
metaphors. We're going to have to use
poetic expressions that that bring people along but but don't
aren't intended to be taken literally.
And for example, there's a literature that some Mystics get
quite crazy about called the Shi or coma.
I'm sure you're familiar with it, where they start describing
God and how how big he is and how great he is.
And and the descriptions start sounding if if your listeners
have come across the stories of Paul Bunyan, it starts sounding
like Paul Bunyan's. Great blue ox babe.
The great blue ox that where a bird would take years to fly
from the hip of one horn to the tip of the other horn, they
start getting excessive like that.
They think that they're glorifying God, and Maimonides
finds that kind of approach disgusting, he says.
He says that it's it's dreadful that they they thought that they
were We're we're getting at God. If you want to get closer to
God, then you have to understand how utterly transcendent God is,
and you have to have a means of working towards the highest,
most perfect reality that there could possibly be.
And I'll tell your listeners and one of the things that they'll
see in the Guide, he introduces the story of Jacob's vision when
Jacob sees the ladder and the angels going up and down the
ladder, and Rambam conflates that vision with Plato's Ladder
of Love in the Symposium, where you're starting out with the
physical and moving from the earth on up to the heavens.
And he conflates it also with Plato's divided line, the
Republic. Those of you who who have read
Plato's Republic know that you start out with sensation and you
move on to sensory images, and you move on from that to
mathematical ideas and finally to pure concepts and beyond.
Pure concepts way up above the line.
Just as God is above the ladder in in Jacob's vision, way up
above what we normally would call reality is where God lives.
And that relates to you mentioned negative theology,
Apophatic theology. It doesn't amount to saying that
God is beyond being, which is something that some Platonists
like to say. He thinks that God is beyond
being in any usual sense of the term.
Why? Because God is a necessary
being, and all the beings that we confront in our world are
contingent. They might or might not exist.
They don't have to exist. They only exist because God gave
them existence. But God is above that ordinary
sense of being. So although we still call God a
being is the highest necessary being, but a necessary being is
a a totally separate category from the contingent beings that
are the finite realities that we constantly deal with.
Yeah. And and last thing I wanted to
say about that, you mentioned Shira Coma.
Also Sadiagon was very much against it and it was a kind of
a proto kabbalistic work for those who are listening.
It was. And the fact that they were so
strongly against it should tell you a lot about, you know, the
Kabbalah that came after, which is the Zohar, and so on and the
one thing. I can.
I can add to that that Sajiga own as a very young man was
interested in the Soviet 0 which another protocol ballistic work
because it's going to make reality out of letters and
numbers and so forth. And he he he tried to encounter
that, and he found he couldn't make sense of it, and so he
dropped it. And that's a that's an important
moment of transition in Sajiga owns spiritual and philosophical
growth. Question for you.
Do you see a correlation between Sophia Tira and the Pythagorean
Pythagorean of? Course, yeah.
That's what I thought. Not, not literally Pythagorean,
but Neo Pythagorean. Where?
Yeah, and that's where that's where Gibatria comes from.
All the letters have numerical values, and all the numbers have
spiritual anthological significance.
And that's a that's a way of trying to bring Neoplatonism
down to Earth. And before we move on to the
next question, I wanted to also say that you mentioned how the
Rambam is insistent that one must read the Torah not in a
literal way, in order to get A to get benefits.
It doesn't include the misspoke, by the way.
The misspoke you, you know, you read the the read.
The misspoke in the rabbinic way.
Yes, yes, yes. So actually that's what I wanted
to say. It's worth noting that he did
not just apply that in terms of reading the Torah, he also
applied it in how to read rabbinics in terms of Agadah.
He saw the in the same way. If you're going to take rabbinic
exegesis in a literal way, you're you're you're destroying
the whole point. That's right.
And by the way, he happens to be a past master of doing that.
So if you think of the Mishnah Torah as an exegesis of the
Halaqa, then you've got to think that Agada is the vehicle of
Jewish philosophy. And what it does is it uses
indirection, it uses poetic expressions Rabbinically they
follow in the spirit of the Biblical poetry.
And so if if the the Torah represents God as a king, so
they talk about God as a king who has servants and and go
about doing his business and so forth.
Where Where's the 1st place where the Torah talks about God
as a king where it says Barashi Bara elohim attachment to ours?
Because how does how does the king make things happen?
He commands let it be so right? Fiat looks he are so.
So there's an implicit metaphor there that God is being
represented as a king. Now we know that literally God
is not a king, but it gives you an idea of of how one could
think about God by that implicit metaphor.
And that kind of poetic language is used throughout the Torah.
And as you say, it's it's picked up on by the Ramba and he uses
it too. And he's he's very good at it
because he does have a good poetic sense himself.
You know, another thing, before we got to the next segment, I
just wanted to point out that I started off saying this before
that people who are detractors of the Ramba will say, well he
was an original thinker and this is not in line with tradition.
But if you look at all of Hazel, they all basically unanimously
selected Unkulus as the Targum of the Torah, which is he was
the anthropomorphizing the entire Torah and that that was
the one they chose. So obviously everybody kind of
saw the same thing, anti corporate realist, you know, so,
So he's very much in line with tradition.
That's right. And and he has great respect for
Tug of Uncolus and he also puts alongside it Ben Rusio.
That's also the effort for Fessing not as systematically as
Uncle is but but he likes that and he says at one point you
know if you if you can't if you can't follow the arguments I'm
laying out here just stick with Uncle is he'll he'll keep you on
the right track. So that's that's very much no.
And the other thing, just complimentary to what you said
about how very much in the tradition Rambam is he, there's
all this question about the Mishnah Torah because he doesn't
cite his sources. But every time somebody goes to
try and find his sources, they find two things.
One is they always has a source, and the other is that he's
usually better at interpreting the original biblical text and
the source than the ordinary exegete.
He's very, very good at exegesis and and leaves them, leaves them
somewhat in the dust. But but my motto for the way he
uses those texts, the rabbinic texts in the Mishnet Torah, is
he never goes naked. He's always got a text.
He's always got a text and you'll see that you'll see that
in the in the guide as well. And he reads those texts very
creatively, but he doesn't. There are there are a few places
where he disagrees with them too.
He disagrees, for example, with the rabbinic idea of the Issa
Rai Ahaba, the sufferings of love, because he thinks it's
unbiblical and unjust. It makes God unjust, and
therefore it must be untrue. And so he rejects that idea,
which Sadhya had accepted. Sadhya had accepted it because
it's the rabbinic idea. And it's a kind of apologetic
idea because the idea is, oh, you know, the the person who's
making linen always breaks the best flax.
So God makes us suffer because we're the best.
It's part of our chosen this. You can see what motivated the
idea of the sufferings of love. But Rambam rejects it.
And that's one of the points where he says rabbi or no rabbi,
they were wrong and he's not. He's not embarrassed to do that,
but usually, usually he follows them and he works with them very
creatively. Excellent.
So this next one is going to be a long winded question.
It is from one of our friends with the podcast friend Brian.
So he submitted this and I just want to get a maimonidean
answer. It's basically involving you
know Unio Mystica or de vecout as it's known with the
unknowable one. How is that achievable?
Also to how do we clarify Rambam's view of the active
intellect for our audience before we get to this question?
Because I think you need to 1st establish that because obviously
Rambam and Aristotle they use the same language in describing
the active intellect but they meant something else.
First let me start off with his question.
Menachem Kellner has said that Maimonides project was was to
depopulate the heavens of divine intermediaries in proto
Kabbalist Judaism. However, Maimonides theological
and cosmological system we're still dependent upon finite
created intermediaries, the heavenly spheres or intellects
that orbit around the geocentric earth which he identified as the
Biblical angels in the guide. Maimonides appeal to the
mediatorial role of the intellects in bridging the gap
between the infinite God and the finite earth which resides under
the lowest sphere. It was through the sun, stars
and planets which their associated spheres that God
indirectly delivered Providence, revelation and miracles to
humanity, all of which are biblical theological categories.
For example, Maimonides said that Moses received the
revelation of Torah when his intellectual perception ascended
beyond the lowest sphere up into the higher intellects, beyond
the planets, as it were. The question this system poses
is the following. Now that we have Copernicus and
the telescope to tell us that the medieval geocentric
cosmology is wrong, what is a contemporary mimonadian to do
with the mechanics of the theological categories?
It would appear that there are only two options.
Reject that Providence, revelation, and miracles occur
since geocentric systems Maimonides posited to enable
them, do not exist, or else retain belief in those
categories by positing a separate theological system that
Maimonides had. Maimonides never conceived of.
Of the Maimonides and scholars I've asked this question, I've
only gotten 2 answers. One had Maimonides known that
his cosmology was incorrect, he would have posited another
system. While I agree that only defends
Maimonides the man and does not answer the theological question,
the second answer is the the invalidation of Maimonides
cosmology is the reason why we need quote UN quote kabbalistic
metaphysical worldview as it provides for Providence,
revelation, miracles without needing to resort to pre
Copernican cosmology. Is there a better answer?
Sorry for the long winded question but.
That's a good question, and I I have to say by way of preface
that Rahim Kellner is one of my oldest philosophical friends.
He and I have been close friends ever since the 1970s and he's
recently retired. He's a brilliant scholar and a
wonderful human being we had. Him on the podcast also.
He's a great guy. We had him on the podcast also.
Well, he's he's very well spoken and I know that that it wasn't
he directly who raised that question, but but it comes out
of his concerns very, very real. OK, let's start with the let's
start with the geocentric system and the angels, if you will.
Rampum was a good astronomer. He was not a great astronomer,
but he was up there with the best of them.
In his day. He learned from them.
He studied astronomy. He knew it well.
There was a problem that the astronomers of his day could not
solve, and it was centered on the apparent retrograde motion
of the planets. If you watch the planets very
closely, which very few of us actually do, who are not
professional astronomers. But in those days, it was
something that you, a learned person, was expected to know
that the planets were all, as the fellows said, geocentric.
They were like the rest of the heavens, orbiting around the
Earth. The sun was also orbiting around
the Earth, the moon too, all the cosmos, Earth was in the center.
That's why everything's full. Everything was rotating around
the Earth. And if that was so, why is it
the case that sometimes some of the planets appear to go
backwards? This is called the apparent
retrograde motion of the planets.
I include the word apparent because it's very difficult to
figure out why they would go backwards.
There were two prominent theories as to how to explain
that. One involved epicycles, and
people can't see me. This is all audio, right?
If I gesture, if I did gesture, all right.
Picture, Picture Picture a skater.
Pardon me, They can see you. Oh, they can.
OK, yes. Picture picture a a planet
orbiting around the Earth. And one reason why you might
think it looks like it's going backwards is because it doesn't
loop the loop. Just like a skater who's skating
in a circle and does a little circle on the circle.
That kind of circle on the circle is called an ampicycle,
which is just another way of saying a circle on a circle.
And when it's doing that motion, it appears to go backwards.
So we can explain the apparent retrograde motion of the planets
by positing ampicycles circles on circles.
The other prominent explanation was eccentrics.
Let's not say that all the planets are orbiting the Earth,
and the center of the Earth is the center of the whole cosmic
system. Let's say that the point at
which they're orbiting is off center someplace else, and that
would give you a mathematical model by which you could explain
the apparent retrograde motion of the planets.
Grambaum knows those two systems, and he knows that
mathematically they work. He says if you take the
astronomy of Ptolemy, which was all translated into Arabic, in
fact the name that it's given to this day, the Almagest, is the
Arabic title of Ptolemy's astronomical system.
You can save the phenomena. You can explain the appearances
on either of those two assumptions, and the math works
fine. So fine.
He says that you can predict when an eclipse will take place.
Mark Twain to the contrary notwithstanding, you can predict
when an eclipse will take place, to the minute when it will
start, how long it will last, when it will end.
The math works fine. The physics?
Not so fine. The physics does not work very
well because if you put the center of the cosmos not at the
center of the earth, you'd have a lot of trouble explaining why
everything is rotating around some imaginary point.
On the other hand, if you have epicycles, you'd have a lot of
trouble explaining why these uniform motions suddenly become
not so uniform. This was a problem that people
were working on. Every astronomer in the Rambam's
day, Averois. Others were working on this
problem. Averois wrote about it in his
Commentary on the Aristotelian Metaphysics.
He said when he was a young man he thought he could solve the
problem. Now he's an old man and he has
not solved the problem. He hopes that one day somebody
may figure it out. He doesn't know how.
The actual explanation we know with the benefit of modern
astronomy, is that we don't have a geocentric system.
And the you don't need epicycles, you don't need
eccentrics. You need to start out with the
the sun in the center of the of the solar system and the
revolutions are around that. You're going to need the theory
of gravity to explain why the planets and the and the moon
don't all crash to Earth or to or to the sun.
That it took not just Copernicus and Galileo.
It took. It took Kepler to describe the
orbits of the planets as ellipses, ellipses that are
pretty close to circles, but they're not, and it took Newton
to explain those. Ellipses are results of the
centrifugal force of explained by the laws of motion that
Newton developed and the gravitational force that Newton
explained. If you don't have Newton, you
don't really know why it all doesn't just crash to the
center. They didn't have that system.
And what the Rambam says, which is particularly brilliant and
very distinctive on the Rambam's part, he said it's not the
problem of the astronomer to tell you what the actual shape
of the cosmos is. What the astronomer has to do is
give you the mathematical model that would explain that would
save the phenomenon. And he's right about that.
We would prefer to have that kind of picture, that you could
actually build a model that would look like it, but you
couldn't. It would get you all filled up
with the basic assumptions of Aristotelian physics.
And he is not prepared to make that kind of conflict.
He thinks that the purpose of astronomy is served by what
today would be called instrumentalism.
That is, we're not, we're not really telling what it's really
like. We're giving a mathematical
formula that would allow you to save the phenomenon.
Brilliant. Move on the brown bombs part to
move in that direction of instrumentalism.
Pierre Duham, historian of cosmology, thought that Rambam
was pretty much unique in in adopting that creative move.
And it's a if you want to, if you want to under understand it
a little better, look at quantum physics today.
In quantum physics today, we say that light sort of behaves like
particles and sort of behaves like a wave.
And we don't know exactly how to reconcile those two accounts.
And you know, my physics teacher in high school said, well, it's
a wave. That's very nice, but it's not
really an answer at all. We're we use instrumentalism
today to say that there's no operational meaning for knowing
the position and velocity of an electron at the same time.
You can know its velocity, but not its position.
You can know its position but not its velocity.
It's all probabilistic and and so forth.
That's a good example of instrumentalism in today's
physics, where we don't really know how to reconcile these two
different, ultimately Newtonian accounts of the nature of light,
whether it's a wave or it's a particle.
And in some behavioral situations it behaves like a
wave, in some behavioral and in experimental situations it
behaves like a particle. Well, Rambam has an interesting
story to tell about angels, and I want to go to that because we
know, as the questioner rightly implies, that the geocentric
system is not correct. We know that the heavenly bodies
are not inhabited by disembodied incorporeal intellects which run
them and which govern the earth through through their their
influence. The influences word, influenced
by the way everyone would like to know is actually an
astrological term. It means a non physical impact
and we should come back to that idea.
What does the Rambam say about angels?
He tends, on the one hand, to follow the ancient Pagan
astronomers and cosmologists and philosophers who thought that
the Pagan gods were really located in the in the spheres
and in the stars and in the planets.
And we know that because that's why they have their names.
They have Mars and Jupiter and Venus all have the names of
Pagan gods, don't they? But the the real idea, the the
the the commonplace idea about those Pagan gods was that when
those Greek words got translated into Arabic, the translators
politely changed the reference to gods to angels.
So they're angels. They're not really gods, but
they're subordinate to God. Called that time by Him, He
emotionally Mccarriffed Hebel. As we say in the Iladon, right?
God imparted the power to them to be His overseers on the earth
below, right? We sing that in the Iladon.
I can sing it for you if you like.
The and the idea of Iladon is to get people to not be afraid of
the heavenly bodies. They do not think that they're
awesome and arbitrary destructive forces.
That has to do with the depopulation of the heavens.
Indeed, the disenchantment of the universe and naturalism here
goes in hand, hand in hand with monotheism.
Because they are subordinate, they have delegated powers.
Coach Natan Bahem Leo emotionally, the care of Tebel
that God gave them the powers they have to be his overseers on
the earth below, Well, that's all very good and the Rambam is
sympathetic to that approach. However, when the Rambam gets
down down to talking about what an Angel really is, he has a
couple of very interesting things to say.
And picking up on what the Rabbi's say about it, the
rabbinic literature, they say, well there are two kinds of
angels. There are angels that are
permanent, and there are angels that do their job, or as they
put it, sing their song and go their way.
They only last for one moment. Those two kinds of angels
represent platonic forms. Those are the permanent ones and
natural forces. Those are the temporary ones.
God governs the world through the latonic forms which impart
the ideas, which are the patterns according to which
natural objects operate And natural forces like what it says
in the Torah about God said to wing, to blow away the locusts
or or to bring the quails or whatever, right?
Because God, with in and through nature and the natural forces
are the means by which God governs nature.
He has an interesting example of that in order to show his reader
that natural forces are often called angels, because the
question arises with regard to Judah.
Judah was supposed to provide offspring for his for for for
that that he had failed to provide.
You know that that his son had failed to provide and she gets
offspring. Tamar gets offspring from him by
pretending to be a prostitute and seducing him on the way.
This other question naturally arises that since the Rabbi's
think that all these patriarchs are so saintly, why did he stop
and visit a prostitute? She's there, sitting there in
disguise by the roadside. And the rabbi's answer the
question, The Angel appointed over lust made him do it.
The Angel appointed over lust. And the Ron mom uses that
passage to show you that natural forces can be called angels,
that angels can refer to natural forces, in this case a, a, A, A,
a lustful impulse which led Judah to to sleep with her.
That suggests to you something about his project in his
interest in naturalizing angels. Similarly, he says something
rather biting about contemporary rabbis, many of whom he did not
respect greatly. And he says some of those people
who call themselves the Sages of Israel, if you ask them what
forms the fetus in the womb, they will say, oh, an Angel
enters the womb and forms the fetus there.
And yet, he says, these people believe that an Angel is a fiery
force, one third the size of the entire cosmos.
Did that really answer the wound?
Is that fire burning inside this woman?
They're not thinking things through.
The Angel, he said, is the natural way in which the fetus
develops. These are the forces.
These are the patterns that God has ordained by which life is
made possible. If you told them that they think
you were crazed, they would dismiss that idea as a radical.
And yet they're the ones who think that an Angel is a fiery
Force One third the sides of the natural world.
What is he saying? That the laws of nature are the
angels by which God governs nature, Their forces, their
Platonic forms, They're the pattern and nature of things.
Well, this is, you mentioned Kabbalah.
This is the type of idea that Kabbalists tend to vulgarize,
but but the Neoplatonic idea that forms and forces are what's
really meant by angels is where the Round Bomb takes that idea.
So if you set aside the geocentric world, you still got
God governing and governing by way of natural forms and
intellectual patterns. That's going to lead me to say
something about the contemporary relevance of the Round bombs
thinking, and I'm going to press his idea and I'm going to carry
it a little further than he does in his explicit writing.
One of the patterns that Ron Baum is very interested in is
that there are four different kinds of causes.
He gets this from Aristotle, not just mechanical causes with one
thing bumping into another. There are also teleological
causes which involve the purpose or the good of things.
They're also the the, the, the benefit, the the the.
Sorry, every every kind of 'cause that Aristotle describes,
above all the teleological The purpose or end of things is part
of the causation, the idea, the pattern.
The idea is a formal cause. The teleological cause is the
final cause. The material givenness of a
thing is the material 'cause that we know.
If you believe in creation, that God created the matter, we know
that God put the matter into motion.
But we also know that that motion has a direction to it, as
a good has an end that it serves.
It's not just the kind of mechanical 'cause that today's
scientists then to put the emphasis on.
That's the one they can understand and that's the one
that they can manage. That's where we have control.
Today's physics is basically about causes that we can control
or judge or measure. And Ron Baum thinks there are
other kinds of causes. He gets this from Aristotle,
which are not the ones that we can manage and control.
There's a scientist, there's a philosopher today named Jake
Wong Kim who has argued against the possibility of free will and
has argued against the possibility of any kind of
divide involvement in nature. And basically what he says is
that when you're out of mechanical causes, or causes
that can be measured and calculated and tracked by
physics, you're out of causes altogether.
There'd be no source of such causation.
That's a that's a RE statement of the idea that all causes are
mechanical causes. And we know nowadays that not
all causes in physics are mechanical causes.
There's energy as well as physical particles.
There's radiation, there's electromagnetic energy.
Physics can encompass all those things, but when it does so, it
hasn't told you the whole story about causation.
You can see that in the case of evolution, if you think about
evolution, which is often raised as an anti religious line of
argument, evolution involves not just the change of one species
into another. Evolution involves not just
natural selection but through natural selection.
It involves the idea of adaptation.
Adaptation in ancient physics and ancient biology was thought
to be just a matter of, you know, the elephant can use its
nose to pick up straw or leaves, something to eat.
Adaptation was thought to be just a fact, something that's
there. Dogs hunt in packs, Cats sing
who attract friends. When you have the idea of
purpose, that means that there's something more to adaptation
than just change of species. Now, I wouldn't tell you why
there are no species. Because one type is better
adapted to its environment than another type.
And that idea of better, that idea of better fit, that idea of
adaptation is a process that's ongoing and can be explained, is
a very important idea in modern science.
And it can't be explained by physics, it can't be explained
by radiation, it can't be explained by mechanics.
It can only be explained by the pursuit of life, the pursuit of
survival and life for a lineage which will stay around only if
it has a little bit better capability of surviving than its
predecessors. If the Red Queen says to Alison,
we're looking glass, you've got to run pretty fast just to stand
still. And if you want to get anywhere,
you've got to run not just as fast as you can, but even
faster. Evolution does that.
Evolution is pursuit of the good.
And I'll tell you something that you're our listeners will be
very interested in. When evolution became a
prominent theory in the early 20th century, at the time when
genetics was just coming into play, many geneticists were
opposed to the idea of evolution because it was teleological.
It was looking at trying to explain the fit of animals to
their environment and the improving fit, the improving
fitness of those plants and animals to their echo niches and
to their systems. And they thought, that's
unscientific. Darwin has introduced the idea
of teleology, which we thought we were going to get rid of.
We were not going to talk about the good of things.
But without teleology, adaptation makes no sense.
The idea has to be that organs and organ systems and behaviors
have a purpose, and that those purposes can be obtained more
successfully or less successfully.
There's value built into the very idea of biology.
JBS Halding, who was a prominent evolutionary biologist, pointed
out that evolution to a biologist is like a mistress to
a man who's married. He can't live without her, but
he doesn't want to be seen in public with her.
And so biologists tend to avoid talking about teleology, even
though they can't do without it, because they have to rely on it
to explain evolution. Now, in modern evolutionary
theory, we have a synthesis of genetics with teleology, and
we've accepted the idea, which is at the heart of Darwinian
evolution, that organs and organ systems have purposes.
This is something that's well known to Maimonides, who after
all, gets his medical practice out of the tradition of Galen.
Galen, who lived in the 2nd century, was the physician of
Marcus Aurelius, the philosophical emperor.
And Galen knew that organs have purposes, that they serve
functions, and Rob knows that that's the case.
You can't be a doctor if you don't know that, because if
you're somebody has a heart problem or a lung problem or a
brain problem, that means that this organ is not doing what
it's supposed to do. You have to find a way to get it
to do what it's supposed to do. All these things have purposes.
So when Jae Gong Kim says that only physical causes are
acceptable, and he's insisting that there are no other kind of
causes. He's intentionally ruling out
any kind of 'cause that would be oriented towards value.
He's giving you no causes that would be productive of beauty or
truth or goodness or even biological advantage, which is a
kind of goodness. Ron Mom is very sensitive to
that. So when he thinks about an
Angel, that's a metaphorical way of political way of describing
what happens inside a woman's womb.
When he says that an Angel forms the fetus in there, that has a
naturalistic explanation. But the naturalistic explanation
is rooted in the fact that this fetus is going to turn into a
human being. It has a goal, It has a
direction, It has an end to which it is striving.
Just as your heart has a function, and your brain has a
function, and your eyes and my tongue as I speak as a function
miss the good of these things. That's where the angels come in
properly. Not as guiding the spheres, not
as steering the planets. But where the Angels come in
properly is in projecting those possibilities of improvement.
The With that kind of thinking in mind, Rambam can say the
Torah doesn't need to show anything about the reality of
angels. It takes them for granted
because what it's really referring to poetically by these
forces that prophets might envision in their imagination as
voices or forms of human beings, what those really are, are the
emanation of divine influence, influence in the quite proper
sense. Now here's what I want to say
about that idea. It's a neoplatonic idea.
Rabam has applied it to his own sphere, whether it's astronomy
or biology or medicine, and one thing that we can learn from
Maimonides and that he learned from the Neoplatonic
philosophers like Alfa, Rabi and Avicenna and Plotinus and
Porphyry. One of the things he learned
from them is that what is communicated by God doesn't come
by way of poetically represented servants and messengers, and
malak is a messenger. Of course, that's a poetic way
of talking about angels, but what's really referred to in
that regard is the conveying of information, the conveying of an
idea, the conveying of a pattern, and a pattern which is
oriented towards the good, the true, the beautiful.
That is a different kind of causation than the mechanical
kind or even the radiation kind. Radiation might be a metaphor
for it, as we say that the light of the sun is a symbolic
representation of emanation. Emanation is the key Neoplatonic
term, and when you read the guide you'll see that he uses
the idea of emanation that he takes from Neoplatonism and
applies it to all of the philosophical problems that the
guy deals with. How did God create?
How does God govern? How does God inspire prophets?
Always by way of conveying information, he makes that the
model of charity. Most of our viewers will know
that the most the highest form of charity the Rob Bomb talks
about is to make someone else self-sufficient.
He doesn't confine that to the giving of a gift or support.
He thinks of that in terms of God making us self-sufficient by
delegating to us the power to act and the wisdom to choose
rightly. If we are so inspired, He
delegates that power to us. God imparts ideas to the mind of
prophets, which they then have to convey further to people who
aren't capable of receiving those ideas for themselves.
They pass those ideas along in the form of images and poetry
that people can relate to more directly because they take
concrete symbolic representations of what is an
abstract idea. Think about what Neoplatness
say, Plutonis, who is the founder of the Eoplatonism,
lived in the 3rd century, says When I teach somebody, I'm
imparting an idea, but I don't lose the idea when I imparted
it. It's not like it's not like
cooking your soup where the heat goes from here and goes to
there. You have the idea, and I still
have the idea. Inspiration is a form of
emanation. God is not diminished or
lessened by imparting the energies, which are intellectual
energies, which are teleological goals that that God gives by way
of governing nature. One final thing on that, because
the person who raised the question said, well, are we
going to do away with all those intermediaries?
I'm afraid we'll have to. We don't have the geocentric
universe, we don't have the planets being governed by
incorporeal intellects and so forth.
Maimonides adopts that system and follows it, and it's useful
to him. But remember that Rambam's
theology is ultimately monistic. There's one God.
He's absolutely simple. He doesn't really work through
emissaries and missions and servants.
That's a poetic way, a Levitic poetic way of expressing it.
God does it more directly. By the time your viewers see
this podcast, we'll be celebrating Pesach.
And what happens if Pesach we read in the Haggadah is that is
that God did this exodus. Yes, I see you smiling.
You're thinking yes, that's more before though He did it himself,
not by way of a seraph, not by way of any of these angels and
intermediate forces. God did it himself.
And that fits very nicely with the rob bombs.
Monism about God. God is absolutely simple.
God did not embody any complexity.
God is the source of all that goodness and all that guidance.
That's really the difference between the ROM bums you and the
kabbalistic of you. He's the Kabbalists.
The Kabbalists are a watered down poor man's version of
Neoplatonism, but they're relying very much on those
intermediaries. So the intermediaries,
intermediaries have this Bureau. They agree with the Ram mom that
God is the aim Soph and and and absolute and infinite.
But then they've got to have a way of relating that to the
world. So they introduce all these to
be wrote. That's.
The definition we're going to use emanation in in, yeah and
exactly. But in the Kabbalistic view,
emanation occurs in the Godhead already it's like a it it it
it's there's a division there. Whereas in Maimonides.
Yeah, it all gets swallowed up inside God.
My friend David Novak has made that point.
And yeah, it it it's a it's a serious issue within Kabbalah.
But but you see it isn't really a third entity between God and
nature. It's God directly governing,
directly inspiring, directly bringing about causation.
If there's if there's anything in between, where was in
between. When we get the inspiration we
understand it and that brings us back to the anti active
intellect. So I'll say a word about that
because that's where you started.
Aerosol deals with the Acts active intellect in two
different texts. One of them that most people who
read Aristotle know is De Anima, book three, chapter 5, where he
talks about the active intellect and compares it to a source of
light. The active intellect makes
things intelligible in much the way, analogously, to the way
light makes things visible. It was potentially visible, but
we couldn't see it unless there was light on it.
But in the other text where he deals with it is a more
characteristically less familiar Aristotelian text.
It's in the Eugenian ethics. Everybody reads the Nickelback
ethics, but the text in the Eugenian ethics is is where
Aristotle says there's a question of how a thought
process gets started. We we can't sort of deliberate
that we're going to deliberate. We can't sort of reflect that
we're going to start reflecting what are we going to do for
ourselves, up by the bootstraps. That's not really possible.
There's only one way that this could be done.
It's done by God. He says that.
He leaned in. Ethics.
It's very nice. And you can see the Rambam is
thinking along those lines too. What's the what's the force of
that idea? In the Middle Ages it was hotly
debated whether the acts, whether the active intellect was
a separate thing, was it God or something that came from God.
Those those Neoplatonic philosophers that Rambam
followed, Al Farabi and Avicenna, I thought the Active
Intellect was the incorporeal intellect of the lowest of the
spheres, and it was it was the source of inspiration for
profits and so forth. That's the.
Ishim right in the yes in the Torah?
Yeah, Hi ishim are high angels. But think about it for a minute.
And hotly debated in the Middle Ages, whether it was a facet of
the mind trying to understand what Aristotle said.
Was it a facet of the mind, the mind made active and thus
actually intelligizing or thinking or understanding or
deliberating? Or was it some external thing
that sort of injected this, this knowledge and this inspiration,
this thought into your head? And you know what was so
misguided about that medieval debate?
And of course the medievals had to go at each other over whether
it was hypostatic, external, or whether it was internal or just
a facet of the mind. And if you go back to Aristotle,
who originated the concept, the answer is both.
It's obviously both. The point about the active
intellect is it's the divine impinging on your mind and
giving you that thought and making it possible for you to be
the thinker of that thought. You become the active intellect.
It's not just something external, but it's not something
you did by your own bootstraps either, because your mind is
God's gift. That's in the Shmone Ezra,
right? Funny, a lot of dot dots, right?
God patiencely imparts our understanding to us.
That fits with what I said about Faceoff, doesn't it?
Here's this this absolute, infinite, completely
undifferentiated God, which relates to us by way of our
intellect. That's why it says that we are
created in the image and likeness of God and Ramba.
I'm glossing that line right at the beginning.
The first chapter of the guide says that the reference of the
image and likeness, you got to understand that's poetry, right?
God doesn't have a face. God doesn't have an image, the
image, the reference of the of the of the phrase.
But Sal moon in God's image and likeness, the reference is to
the same human circle for human reason.
Sorry, I can't hear you said something.
OK, OK. So, So and the answer is it, is
it internal or external? Is it coming to us from God or
is it something that involves our own human freedom and
creativity? The answer to that disjunction
is yes, it's both, of course. Of course, that's how God
relates to us. That's how God gives us the
understanding and the the ability to act, the ability to
operate intellectually. So it's exactly parallel to what
I said about Payson, not by way of a Sarah, right?
It's it's by way of nature. It's by way of the laws of
nature. It's by what God gives us from
His own supernal transcendent perfection, which is beyond
anything that we would understand by understanding.
I I've been taking notes as you've been saying all this.
That's why you see my head going down sometimes, because I'm
trying to write notes and put this together for myself.
I hope I was more coherent that I didn't feel I was it.
Was brilliant. And it's something that I I'm
going to have to listen to a few times.
I wrote some notes to just to kind of outline certain things
you said, and I wanted to ask you if I've been understanding
it correctly. But even before I do that, even
before I do that. So when it comes to prophecy,
you would still posit that prophecy does not need any
intermediary processes in order to get from God to to the
prophet. Actually the Rob Bob thinks it
needs a lot of intermediary process processes.
That's why I'm asking. OK, let's, let's, let's let's.
Because in the other everything you've said until.
Now it's not. Magic, right?
No, I'm saying everything you've said till now has been can be
understood without needing the intermediate processes.
That's why I brought in prophecy right now.
Because prophecy as you just mentioned the Rahman really
relies on it. So how do we understand this?
And the only. Lie.
He was a lie prophecy. We don't have Judaism.
Yeah, yeah. No the intermediary to get to
that right? No, I understand.
I understand the Prophet. The Prophet is first of all got
to be very well educated. He doesn't believe that God is
going to give prophetic inspiration to a frog, right?
And the prophet also has to be morally pure.
And he indirectly implies that Muhammad can't be a real prophet
because he wasn't pure enough in his physical appetites.
He doesn't name the prophet there, but that's what he's
implying. And he's got to have the right
kind of mind in order to have the right kind of mind.
He has to have the right kind of brain because we're physically
embodied beings. And here he follows a lady.
People conventionally like to contrast Rambam with Halebi.
Oh, Halebi is the man of faith, and Halebi believes in language
and land and so forth. And Rambam is totally
intellectual. Rambam is very intellectual, but
he does believe that you can't be a prophet if you're
depressed. He says that it can't be a
prophet. I mean, he thinks the reason
prophecy ceased was not because God stopped inspiring people,
but because when you lose your confidence, you lose the land,
you lose the ability to do that kind of poetic rhetoric, that
poetic expression that would give people access.
A prophet has to be, according to the ROM bomb, A prophet has
to be an intellectual, A philosopher, someone who is
capable of thinking these higher thoughts and receiving that
inspiration, Yes, from the active intellect.
But bear in mind what I said about the active intellect is
still applies. The act of intellect is, is your
intellect made active by the by by the contact with God?
And if you don't have the right poetic gift, if you don't have
the right kind of brain, if you don't have the right kind of
language, if you don't have the right kind of emotional
self-confidence, you won't be able to be a prophet.
And Maimonides compares that to a kind of miracle that that that
God can his can buy his own free will.
You might have all the prerequisites, but you still
can't do it because because either your brain is right, or
your mood is right, or your your morals is right.
One thing or another. A prophet for the Rambam is a
philosopher who has that extra gift of imagination and language
and the right kind of brain matter, size and shape.
He goes into all that, and if you've got all the intellectual
prerequisites, you still might not have the poetic gift.
God might withhold prophecy from you, and he gives examples of
people in the guide he names. Figures who tried, they were,
they were disciples of prophets and they couldn't get there.
You know, if you want a comparison to to make it very
accessible, think about think about somebody who wants to be a
concert violinist. And he does all the theory and
he learns all the music and he makes all the movements, but he
doesn't have that extra gift. And he's not, You know, he might
be able to play in an orchestra, but he's not going to have the
feeling that that would make him a concert soloist.
That's the kind of thing that the Ramba has in mind with the
Prophet. He's got to have the right
imagination. He's got to have that poetic
gift. You can go to school and and and
learn how to write, but if you don't have a poetic gift, you
never be a writer. That's that's what he has in
mind now. Now there is, you could
metaphorically speak of that as being imparted by this Angel
like thing which is called the active intellect.
But the intellect, the active intellect is just another way of
saying that you've got the inspiration.
So the mediation, the the, the, the, the ontology of it.
There's not another thing there that that is there's mediating
between you and God. So if he's a lot, if he was
alive today, he would have no issue saying that there's no,
you know, we don't need these stages in between the the the
inspiration could still. Be ultimately since ultimately
the root of the of of Maimonides the the Maimonides direction is
always going to be towards God's transcendence.
If we have an ability to create a a middleman processes that
doesn't impinge on his transcendence, OK, great.
But if we don't have that, as proven by the geocentric model,
you know, not working, the Rahman will just fall right back
on to where it really all starts, which is which is in the
monotheistic conception of God's transcendence.
It's going to be direct. It's going to be direct.
Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
All all of that other stuff. And that's, you know, he could
talk about the Angel appointed over lust, but he hasn't really
literally believed that there's an Angel appointed over lust.
You know, the point is the point is that that that that Judah was
subject to that as anybody might have been and and this is what
he did. And and it was, you could say it
was nature intervening. And so nature gets personified.
So you're not doing much better than saying an Angel appointed
over lust, right? It's he likes to.
The person who said he wants to depopulate the heavens is right
and that is a basically monotheistic move.
The disenchantment which makes physics possible is a
monotheistic move and and the we don't have arbitrary spirits
going around doing this and that.
It's it's basically between you and God and and the rest.
The rest is poetry and it's useful poetry because it can
enable people to connect and and and and try and envision these
things. But you know what?
What's symbolized by Jacob's Ladder is what's matters, which
is that there's a, that there's a a connection from the latter,
which stands on the earth, to God, who is at the highest
degree. Degree means steps.
The steps, What are the steps? They're the steps that a human
being must go through to accommodate, into to to, to
arise to that, to that level. Just like just like in Plato's
Symposium with the ladder of love, you, you, these are these
are steps that we have to achieve as far as what prophecy
would be today. He thinks that prophecy could be
restored if we regain our land because then we would have the
confidence. I would add a little bit to
that. We haven't gained out land, but
not uncontested exactly as we know today and the horrible
things that are going on. And we haven't necessarily got
the moral purity people who think they're morally pure
because they they drive an electric car instead of an
internal combustion engine car. I'm not quite as morally pure as
what the round bomb had in mind. He he he was talking about.
He was talking about somebody who doesn't talk himself into
thinking that he's that that he has obtained some kind of moral
perfection by by being politically correct.
We've got a ways to go, but he does not think that it was some
kind of supernatural thing, like once we had prophecy and once we
no longer do. I would add one thing, however,
and this This is not something that Rambam says, I would add
that we, in order for somebody to be a prophet, there have to
be people who's ready to listen to it.
We don't have that. Somebody's standing on the
corner and saying, oh, you're all doomed or something like
that. People walk by.
They, they smile, they laugh, they make faces, they make
gestures. That idiom is no longer
successful as a way of reaching people, and whether there is an
idiom that could reach people in in a really important and
impressive way, that remains to be seen.
So it's not just a matter of, you know, we don't have the
confidence to speak like prophets, we don't have the
confidence to listen to prophets.
So if you're talking about somebody trying to do that
today, that's a serious issue. This was incredible.
I want with your permission to kind of just give you an outline
in some of my notes and just if you can just let me know if I'm
on the right track with. But I think that I've started to
you know, get this, but let's let's just go through it.
Your basic idea is, is that these intermediate intermediate
processes are not necessary to achieve the result that
Maimonides would want to achieve.
So now with angels, right. You made a very, very important
point that and I and it's it's interesting because a lot of
times I remember that when people, you know, when you say
like angels are forces of nature, it sounds like it's a
almost like a like a cheap way of getting around the idea of
angels. What you said was subtle in that
you're saying that no it's not just angels are forces of
nature. It's just a a word used or
whatever. You're saying that when we use
angels to portray forces of nature, we're trying to elevate
nature. We're elevating nature more from
just being natural into something that is filled with
meaning. I think you're right.
That's, that's beautifully put, Betsy.
Because if you think about it, when I, when I was speaking more
roughly than I should have about different kinds of causes, what
I wanted to get at was that beyond radiation, beyond
physical mechanism, there's there's causes that are
elevating. It's presupposed in evolutionary
biology, but they're kind of embarrassed and shy about it,
like JBS Alden said. But these are causes that
involve, yes, elevating the mind to a higher plane, as as someone
might have in poetic inspiration or or artistic inspiration.
And artistic inspiration that would really create beauty and
not just the novelty. And and it would involve the
functioning of our organs and our bodies, the functioning of
our mind, the evolution of species so that they can become
more adaptive because they're in a challenging environment that
if they don't adapt, they're going to die out.
That kind of causation is the kind that physics doesn't deal
with. Biology and medicine have to
deal with it. Psychology has tended to stay
away from it, but but Mammar Dean psychology is very aware of
it. So.
So you can think of the growth of the mind rising to a higher
plane. Yes, I think, I think you're
absolutely right. And when it comes to the active
intellect? Yes.
Which is in a sense even bigger because it plays into so many
more fundamental aspects. So I understood you correctly.
What you're trying to say is, is that even when you when you go
look into Aristotle and even when you start to pick apart the
active intellect, at the end of the day it's not that your mind
is going into an active intellect.
We're talking always about our own mind.
It's talking about the animation and inspiration that our mind
can can can all of a sudden have a spark with and so it would be
nice with the concept of active intellect it it gives it.
You know if we can if the Rambam who who at that time was for him
to not believe so, right? If the Rambam wants to use
active intellect as the intermediary in in terms of what
inspires our mind, great. But if the active intellect
doesn't work because we're throwing out the geocentric
model, that does not mean that the same effect can't be caused
by God outright. That's right.
You take a word like there's some words that have been
cheapened by overuse. Sublime is 1 Sublime meant
originally, you know, in the 18th century.
It meant a sign or a sight experience that was overwhelming
because you felt like you were in touch with something divine.
And then it became, you know, popular pablum of tourists.
You know, Niagara Falls is sublime.
And the people who lost the use of that word and they just would
stand there and say, you know, well the same sort of thing
happened with inspiration. Inspiration means that you're
getting an idea or trope of poetic expression of musical
inspiration. You're saying that that came
from God. We don't think it has to come
from a muse. We think if it's real and we
appreciate God, it's coming from God.
That doesn't mean that it's coming to everybody the same.
It's coming to me. I'm going to try and communicate
it. I'm going to try and explain it.
I'm going to try and share it. And if I'm a poet, I'll I'll use
imagery to try and share it, to make it more accessible to
people who haven't shared the same experience.
There's a there's a term of right at the beginning of the
guide, even before chapter one. He talks about lightning
flashing, and it's an image that's used by Avicetta and
other Neoplatonic philosophers. And sometimes, he says, the
light flashes so frequently that it seems to be continuous.
Why? Why is it not continuous?
Well, because we're human beings.
We live in a temporal world. We we don't live in that
timeless world that we think of as a divine world, but it looks
continuous to us because it's so repeated and so steady.
And some people, he says, don't see that light at all, but maybe
they see it reflected by some shiny object.
That shiny object, as I explained in the commentary,
that shiny object is the prophet.
He gets it directly and he finds a way of sharing it with others
who don't get it directly. So they get it indirectly.
And that's, that's what prophecy does.
That's what revelatory books do for us.
They put us in touch with, with a, with a source of inspiration.
In the case of Moshe Rabbanu, that inspiration gives you a
system of law and a way of life. In the case of some other
prophet, it gives you a vision. It gives you a momentary
epiphany which he tries to share in in poetic language mediated
by imagination. In the case of Moses, it's it's
only only his intellect. The pellucid lens of of the
human mind is the only thing between him and God.
But but in the case of in the case of another prophet, it it
comes colored. It comes by way of the the
colored lenses of prophetic imagination which which give him
the poetic tropes that he needs to express, to try and convey to
others what he has understood by way of his imagination.
And you know and. Then when you say this, it it
actually makes to me what I just just kind of popped into my mind
is it's highly unlikely to me to think that the Rambam would
hedge his bet on his entire understanding of Judaism by a
necessary understanding of certain intermediate concepts.
It's very, very difficult because A, the Rambam's always
stress transcendence and monotheism in everything.
It makes sense to me that if he's going to create some
geocentric model or or however even as Benji noted, it has to
be post creation. A, so that's not even going to
ever impinge on God's unity. But B, it also doesn't make it
necessary, doesn't make it necessary that that is
necessary. Because ultimately when we have
this model of transcendence, we we don't.
We're not forced to have to explain these things in terms of
how it gets from point A God to B, because we're not.
We're not working with. He's got, he's got a couple,
yeah, yeah. He's got a couple of things
going on there. On the one hand, he wants to
operate in terms of science as known in his day and a science
in his day. He knows it doesn't quite work,
but he's going to work with it the best he can, so he's not
going to be off by himself. Just as he respects the the
halachic and the midrashic tradition and use it as best he
can, he's also going to respect the scientific tradition and
that's the size that comes to him.
He's aware of scientific progress.
I don't think he was aware of how radical the process would
have to be before you know, the habits.
The habits would have to be turned inside out in order to
explain a simple fact like the retrograde motion of the
planets. But he he, he wants to use that
kind of science. He wants to he wants to show you
that modern science is compatible with Tora.
And he he says a couple times that science is makes progress.
He does not believe that, you know, the decline of the
generations. He thinks that he thinks that
there's progress in Halafa. He thinks that there's progress
in science as well. And like even rushed, he's
waiting on there. He's he's waiting to see how it
all turned out. And he didn't live long enough.
The the centuries that it would take just turned out better.
And we have to, in similar humility, recognize that the
science that we have is itself a work in progress.
It's it's it's not bad. It's not inferior to religion
and it goes hand in hand with religion.
He one one thing he says about science.
He says this with regard to the the mythical music of the
spheres. It was thought by Neo
Pythagoreans that this that the the spheres move so harmoniously
that they must make music. And Ptolemy was entranced by
that idea because he liked the Pythagorean angle on it, the
mathematics of it, because music is very mathematical and the
Rambam picks it up from Aristotle that if the if the
smears made music we would have heard it and we don't hear it.
So he doesn't think that it's true.
And then he says at the end of that chapter that we we have to
follow and he picks this up from from Khazal, from the from the
rabbinic sages. He says we have to follow the
sages of the nations in in all these scientific questions.
That's a very, very telling remark.
What it tells us in terms of the point that you're making is he's
using the best science that he knows.
He knows that that science is not going to be forever.
They will be progress. They will be new, further things
learned. And our commitment is to this
best science that it knows. So for example, when it says in
the Torah that Joshua is fighting a battle and it seems
to say that the sun stood still and the Catholic Church got into
great exercise about that and then people had to believe that
that God made the sun stand still in order for the battle to
be finished completely. Probably Rambam says no.
What it says. If you read the the Hebrew, it
says that it seemed the longest day of the year.
It seemed like like a full day. He means subjectively the way it
felt when they were fighting. It seemed like the sun was not
setting. It was subjective.
God didn't make the the the whole cosmos sees its motions
just to allow the battle to be completed properly.
We follow the teachings of the sages of the nations
astronomers. They don't have to be Jewish,
right. So that's that's his vision, and
and it directly addresses the point that you were raising
about. If Rambam were alive today, he
would rely on the best science that we have.
But that best science has to be sharply distinguished from
scientism. The idea that mechanical causes
are the only causes is a false idea.
The idea that the causes that are known to physics, because
they're the ones that we could control, is a bad idea.
We know about theological causes from biology.
We know about beauty. We know that beauty and truth
are real. And if you want to picture the
active intellect as the source of that kind of causation,
that's a poetic way of expressing the fact that God is
ultimately the source of that kind of causation that God gives
us beauty and truth and value. Right.
This was, this was incredible. First of all the question I I
almost felt bad asking because it was so long, but your answer
was so thorough that I feel like you know we're going to have to
go back and listen to it over and over again because there was
a lot there and it you were really building it up and and
building on you know each point and really like creating a
tapestry. So I think that, you know, for
us, we're listening to this over again.
We should really appreciate what you just did because.
It's it's very, very obvious that you care about the
question. Very, very.
Much I I do. I have thought about this
question both in connection with Rambam and in connection with my
own philosophical work. I have a a new book that's in
the oven right now. It's it's going to be published
by Cambridge University Press on God and Truth, and obviously I'm
inspired by the Rambam, but I'm also carrying these ideas
further in terms of what we know about cosmology and evolution.
I'll give you a little kicker on this.
The big problem in Maimonides Time was that they thought that
creation was illogical and possible and so forth, and he
showed that it wasn't impossible.
But he would have given his eye teeth to know what we know about
the redshift because the redshift tells us.
When I was when I was a kid in college, even in Graduate
School, there were two main theses about cosmology, Fred
Hoyle's steady state theory and the alpha and Beta and Gamma
theory about The Big Bang. And now we have sufficient
evidence to say that steady state physics is no longer the
right story, that there really was a Big Bang.
If Mam Bam had known that there was good evidence to say that
the universe began, that proof, it's good evidence, but there's
good evidence that the universe began.
He did not think that we could have any evidence that he didn't
realize the astronomy, because we know about the redshift would
tell us that there actually was an initial singularity which
could be interpreted as the moment of creation, you know, 15
billion years ago that's he would have, he would have given
anything to know that it's it's very rich, it's very powerful.
By the way, even Fred Hoyle couldn't do without continuous
creation because matter had to be continuously created in order
to keep the universe stay state. But we but we now know that the
whole theory was was a good theory but was not a correct
theory. And what seems to be the correct
theory is that the universe did begin.
Rambam would have been thrilled and delighted to know that.
And when you think about the fact that people use evolution
against theism, when evolution gives you a teleological concept
which supports theism, that shows you the kind of rhetorical
bind we're in and the physics which does support creation.
Oh, that's kind of neglected in those discussions.
Thank you so much. And before we go, we want to
want you to plug your your book, your translation, one more time.
Let us know how we can get it and so on.
And also you know, I one thing I wanted to say that for all our
Safari listeners you'll find you'll be very happy to see some
great citations in there from Bahama, Jose Faour and you'll
see Malcolm Calendar and so on. So there there are some really
good resources that you that you were influenced by, which is
really amazing to see. Ben, Ben.
One of the reasons why a new translation was needed.
Add a new commentary quite beyond the question of Leo
Strauss and his 1935 thinking about it.
There's been a vast amount of literature about the brown bomb,
and we try to reflect that. Bill Lieberman and I tried to
reflect that in the commentary, and it's again reflected in the
guide to the Guide. They're both published by
Stanford University Press. They'll be out in May, and I
look forward to hearing from people who get a hold of the
book and and read it. They will learn from the Round
Bomb, as I did working on that book for decades.
Every day I worked on the guide. I learned something new every
day over a period of decades. It's that rich.
You can learn from it every single day.
Unbelievable. We're so excited for that.
And also we're going to obviously promote the hell out
of that book when it comes out. So we're very excited.
We are excited for the book and we're excited for you.
And we are. We hope that this is not our
final podcast together. There is more to unearth,
there's more to talk about. Like you said with Maimonides,
there's there's always, always, always a conversation to be had
and we wish you good health and we wish you to enjoy the
achievements of of decades of work that you put into this
book. And thank you so much for giving
us the time to elaborate on the book and on that major question
that we brought up. We couldn't have been more
pleased and more appreciative. Thank you so much.
Thank. You thank you both very much and
it's been a real pleasure and I'm I'm looking forward to
seeing the podcast when it's posted.
Let me know and I'll tell my friends.
And we will be in touch all. Right.
Take care you're. Welcome.
Thank you. Hey guys, thanks so much for
tuning into the Judas and Demystified podcast.
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