One of the foremost Spanish rabbis of his day, Moses Naḥmanides (1194-1270) was also a learned physician and the author of enormously influential commentaries on the Pentateuch, Talmud, and other works. Reviewing a book on Naḥmanides’ thought by Moshe Halbertal, recently translated into English, Nathaniel Berman sums up the rabbi’s career:
Naḥmanides was both halakhist and kabbalist, as well as a Jewish community leader, indeed the Jewish representative in a pivotal 1263 [government-mandated] disputation with Christian theologians. He stands in striking contrast to most of the key 13th-century Spanish kabbalists, [who, as one historian put it], “did not contribute in a significant manner to the communal Jewish life as leading figures, nor . . . play a major role in the halakhic literature.” . . . Halbertal strives throughout the book to relate the various features of Naḥmanides’ oeuvre to each other, particularly his legal and kabbalistic visions.
Naḥmanides declared that the Torah originally was written without any breaks between words. It can, therefore, be read in different ways depending on how the letters are divided. According to the familiar reading, the Torah consists of stories and commandments; according to an alternative, esoteric division of the letters, it consists entirely of divine names. As Halbertal explains, this conception rests on a vision of the Torah primarily as the emanation of divine essence, not as communicative of a determinate message. And just as divine essence is infinite, the “current division of letters resulting in our Torah is merely one of the kaleidoscopic manifestations of the divine essence” itself.
In this view, the debates and differences of opinion that characterize the Talmud and post-talmudic rabbinic literature are a reflection of the mystical essence of the Torah, which can manifest itself in different ways.
Halbertal cites a passage from Naḥmanides’ commentary on Numbers 11:16, concerning the “seventy elders” assembled by Moses to serve as intermediary judges of the Israelites. Naḥmanides associates this group with the 70-member Sanhedrin [of talmudic times]. . . . For Halbertal, Naḥmanides thus ascribes “a quasi-prophetic quality to the number of judges on the Sanhedrin,” setting “the Sanhedrin’s adjudication within a kabbalistic framework.” By “creating symbolic structures on earth that parallel supernal ones,” human beings “draw down God’s presence into the world”—a key kabbalistic vision, most elaborately articulated in relation to the desert Sanctuary and the Temple, but often extended even to the most familiar ritual performances.
Read more on Marginalia: https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/beyond-the-era-of-the-torah/