God’s Name Is to Be Understood Theologically, Not Philosophically

This week’s Torah reading opens with God telling Moses that he, unlike the patriarchs, has been privileged to have God reveal Himself by His ineffable name—picking up on the passage in the previous week’s reading where God announces Himself as “I will be what I will be.” Analyses of these texts in the Jewish tradition, writes James A. Diamond, fall into two categories. According to the philosophical or rationalist approach, championed by Maimonides, the Tetragrammaton—which itself seems to be derived from the Hebrew verb to be—represents God as “Being itself,” or, in Aristotelian terms, as “the necessary existent.” Yet rabbinic, midrashic, and kabbalistic approaches, Diamond argues, are more faithful to the biblical texts:

While rationalists attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through its midrashic genres and on through kabbalah, actually picked up on that myth—developing, expanding, and enhancing it.

How else can one characterize God wearing t’fillin, accompanied by a debate that appears early on in the Talmud as to what biblical passages are inserted in these divine t’fillin! It turns out that God’s t’fillin are the mirror image of their human counterparts. Just as the latter contains the passage declaring God’s uniqueness, so the former contains an analogous declaration: “Who is like your people Israel, a unique nation on the earth?”

As such, the Tetragrammaton conveys more of a relational being in a partnership of reciprocity with Israel. It connotes a God of endless becoming, as the imperfect tense of “I will be” indicates, a deity who cannot but be elusive, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom He establishes relationship. Other divine names then . . . correlate to various dimensions of God such as compassion, mercy, or justice, which are all manifest in relationships.

As opposed to Maimonides’ detached, unaffected, necessary existence, [the medieval commentator] Rashi exquisitely captures this God of relationship by fleshing out the meaning of “I will be what I will be” as “I will be with [the people of Israel] during this affliction [i.e., Egyptian bondage] as I will be with them during their oppression by other kingdoms.” . . .

[A] mythic continuum stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, and onward. Conversely, the philosophical abstractions consistent with notions of divine perfection actually require a violent distortion of the original text, imposing a notion of the deity that is foreign both to the written text and to its voluminous oral traditions.

Read more at theTorah.com

More about: Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Moses Maimonides, Religion & Holidays, Theology

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF