By Micah Goodman, Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair
A publishing sensation lengthy on the most sensible of the best-seller lists in Israel, the unique Hebrew version of Maimonides and the ebook that modified Judaism has been referred to as the main profitable ebook ever released in Israel at the preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. The works of Maimonides, fairly The advisor for the Perplexed, are reckoned one of the basic texts that motivated all next Jewish philosophy and also proved to be hugely influential in Christian and Islamic notion.
Spanning topics starting from God, prophecy, miracles, revelation, and evil, to politics, messianism, cause in faith, and the healing function of doubt, Maimonides and the publication that modified Judaism elucidates the complicated principles of The Guide in remarkably transparent and fascinating prose.
Drawing on his personal adventure as a crucial determine within the present Israeli renaissance of Jewish tradition and spirituality, Micah Goodman brings Maimonides’s masterwork into discussion with the highbrow and religious worlds of twenty-first-century readers. Goodman contends that during Maimonides’s view, the Torah’s objective isn't really to convey readability approximately God yet fairly to make us discover that we don't comprehend God in any respect; to not unravel inscrutable non secular concerns yet to offer us perception into the real nature and goal of our lives.
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Additional info for Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism: Secrets of "The Guide for the Perplexed"
Sample text
The first seventy chapters are dedicated to liberating God from the limitations of language. 16 After freeing God from language (and so too from the world), he devotes the next hundred chapters or so to rethinking the intellectual foundations of Judaism, central among them the concepts of creation, prophecy, and providence and the reasons for the commandments. I will discuss the question of creation extensively in part 3 of this book. Now, let us take on the issue of prophecy. 2 Prophecy God’s perfection is not only a problem in talking about God.
God is not a part of nature and is not subject to the laws of nature. He created heaven and earth and is therefore distinct from heaven and earth. But if the Bible takes God out of the world, language still leaves Him in it. Even though it is in opposition to the anthropomorphic, scriptural conception of God, Maimonides’s move nevertheless is congruent with the Bible. 13 Justifying the Doctrine of Negative Attributes One should read the Guide according to Maimonides’s instructions and connect the chapters according to their subject matter.
For this reason, he does not have at his disposal a demonstration of the existence of God, or one of the necessity of negating these kinds of attributions in reference to him. (Guide, 1:55) Maimonides reverses the way people often consider the relationship between science and religion. Learning about science contributes nothing to our knowledge of God; it only rules out things that we might have thought we knew about God. The more deeply a person understands how nature works, the more he understands that it is not divine.