Sunday, June 18, 2023

Rambam - Everything is miraculous

 Ramban (Toras HaShem Temimah)  A person does not have a part in the Torah of Moshe unless he believes that all things that happen are miracles and not part of Nature and examples of the natural events of the World. The goal of the Torah is entirely miraculous and complexly wondrous.  There is no distinction between  a person living a full healthy and pleasant life of 80 years while one who ate Teruma dies and the splitting of the Sea and the fact that no dog barked  

All are miraculous events, involving alterations of Nature . What seems to us as being natural are in fact hidden miracles/ Thus we are not aware that a person recovering from disease is in fact because of the charity he gave while the death of a clearly healthy person was because he ate prohibited fats. Therefore the Rambam is problematic in the fact that he favors natural explanations over miraculous ones. He also says miraculous events are only temporary aberrations even though he rejects this idea in his treatise on Resurrection

3 comments:

  1. "and the splitting of the Sea and the fact that no dog barked"

    A dog barking or not barking is not the same as the splitting of the sea.

    The Torah itself goes to lengths to emphasise the miracles that were wrought for us in Mitzrayim and the desert, and points to that no other nation has seen such miracles. it does not (as far as I am aware) talk about dogs that don't bark being a great miracle.

    Sorry, on this one, I have to stick with the illustrious RambaM

    ReplyDelete
  2. The Torah relates that during the Plague of the First-born, the dogs that were in the vicinity of the Jewish people did not bark at all. The commentaries explain that this was something that is considered miraculous, because in general, dogs bark wildly when the Angel of Death is present. Moreover, the dogs that were among the Egyptians did bark constantly. The Midrash teaches that as a reward for this silence, for the entirety of history, if a Jew owns a piece of non-kosher meat, he should give it to a dog, rather than anyone else.

    https://aish.com/reward-of-the-dogs/

    ReplyDelete
  3. thank you for enlightening me

    ReplyDelete

ANONYMOUS COMMENTS WILL NOT BE POSTED!
please use either your real name or a pseudonym.