Rosh haShanah 5784 — 09/16/2023
Beginning with Bereishit 5781 (17 October 2020) we embarked on a new format. We will be considering Rambam’s (Maimonides’) great philosophical work Moreh Nevukim (Guide for the Perplexed) in the light of the knowledge of Vedic Science as expounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The individual essays will therefore not necessarily have anything to do with the weekly Torah portion, although certainly there will be plenty of references to the Torah, the rest of the Bible, and to the Rabbinic literature. For Bereishit we described the project. The next four parshiyyot, Noach through Chayei Sarah, laid out a foundational understanding of Vedic Science, to the degree I am capable of doing so. Beginning with Toledot we started examining Moreh Nevukim.
Rambam delves into the senses. He points out that all 5 senses are basically the same – they bring information from the outside into our consciousness, albeit through five distinct channels. However only 3 of the senses are associated with Gd, viz. seeing, hearing and smelling. Touch and taste are excluded, as they appear to require bodily contact to gain information, whereas the other three appear not to need such contact. Here is what Rambam has to say:
We have mentioned several times that the books of the prophets do not figuratively ascribe to Gd anything that the multitude imagine to be a deficiency or that one cannot represent to oneself as belonging to Him, may He be exalted, even if these things have the same status as those that are figuratively ascribed to Him. For the things that are predicated of Him suggest to the estimative faculty certain perfections or can be imagined to be perfections with respect to Him. Accordingly, in view of this having been established, it behooves us to explain why hearing, sight, and the sense of smell are figuratively ascribed to Him, may He be exalted, whereas the sense of taste and that of touch are not.
Now the status of all five senses – with regard to the fact that He, may He be exalted, is high above them – is one and the same. And all the senses are a deficiency from the standpoint of apprehension. This is so even with regard to a being that only apprehends by means of the senses, for the latter are passive, receptive of impressions, intermittent, and subject to pain, as are all the other organs. The meaning of our saying that He, may He be exalted, has sight is that He apprehends the visible things, and that of our saying that He has hearing is that He apprehends the audible things. He could similarly have had the sense of taste and that of touch predicated of Him, and that could have been interpreted as meaning that He apprehends the things that are objects of the senses of taste and of touch. For the status of the apprehension of all of them is one and the same. If, however, the apprehension characteristic of one of the senses is denied Him, it would necessarily follow that the apprehensions characteristic of all of them – I mean of all the five senses – should be denied Him. If, however, His having an apprehension characteristic of one of them – I mean an apprehension of what one of these senses apprehends – should be affirmed of Him, it would necessarily follow that He apprehends all the things apprehensible by the five senses.
Let’s try to unpack this passage. Rambam first comments that Scripture never ascribes certain attributes to Gd, because it is not possible to etherealize them or to imagine that Gd would “need” them in any way. Of course, Gd has no organs, nor does He need any, but we seem to need to ascribe to Gd organs so that we can picture His action in the universe in some way that we can begin to understand. As we have pointed out, this is a dangerous concession to the weakness of our minds, because we can begin to take these attributions literally. Nonetheless, in some cases we can use these analogies to human form, as we can interpret the body parts allegorically. In other cases, we don’t make the attribution because there’s no way to associate the organ with any kind of conception of Gd that we might have – the organs of procreation and elimination come to mind.
Now according to Rambam’s analysis, all the senses are means of apprehension. In the case of human beings (and animals), our actual sense organs respond to stimuli from the environment, which the brain then interprets to give us knowledge of what is “out there.” This interpretation, by the way, is neither a trivial nor an obvious process. In the case of vision, for example, photons in a certain range of frequencies enter the eye and create electrical impulses in the optic nerve and the brain. At some point the brain recognizes boundaries – lines and curves that separate one region of space from others, and eventually the image of an object appears in our consciousness.
People with sensory impairments may live in a very different perceptual space. For example, I have a cousin who lost an eye in a childhood accident, but nevertheless was able to obtain a private pilot license and could safely land, take off, and fly general aviation aircraft. He presumably had impaired depth perception, yet he was able to use other cues in the visual environment to make up for the lack of stereoscopic vision.
Animals also live in different perceptual spaces. Dogs’ olfactory organs are greatly enhanced. Amoebas respond to chemical cues in their environment. Homing pigeons have magnetic grains in their brain that can detect slight fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field and use this information to home. People apparently have these grains as well, but that sense is much less developed in humans, especially in men, who can’t navigate very well, but won’t ask for directions anyway. Certain fish have electrical sensors on their bodies and can detect predators and prey from electrical fluctuations in the water. The common theme in all these cases is that the senses give us a picture, or a map, of our environment, with sources of pain and pleasure highlighted for us.
For Gd, of course, there is no outside environment that He has to navigate, nor are there sources of pleasure or pain. Yet Gd certainly apprehends things, such as our behavior, even if all these “things” and their activity and interactions are within Gd’s own nature. Since Gd apprehends, we try to understand this apprehension by ascribing sense organ to Gd: “eyes” because He apprehends things that are visible (to us), “ears” because He apprehends things that we hear through our ears, etc. Yet, even though Gd apprehends everything, we don’t ascribe to him “skin” to touch / be touched nor a tongue to “taste” things, even though he does “smell.” Why is that?
Here is what Rambam says:
Now we find that our books say, And the Lord saw [e.g. Gen 6:5], And the Lord heard [e.g. Num 11:1], And the Lord smelled [e.g. Gen 8:21], but they do not say, And the Lord tasted, nor do they say And the Lord touched. The cause of this is to be found in the fact that it is firmly established in everyone’s imagination that Gd does not encounter bodies in the way one body encounters another, for people do not even see it [RAR: I think “it” refers back to the encounter]. Now these two senses, I mean the sense of taste and the sense of touch, do not apprehend the things sensed by them before they are in contact with them. On the other hand, the sense of sight, that of hearing, and that of smell, can apprehend from a distance the qualities sensed by them as well as the bodies that are the bearers of those qualities.
We have discussed in the past the notion of “action-at-a-distance” – the phenomenon whereby two objects appear to affect one another without actually touching one another. When we hit the cue ball with a pool cue and it rolls and hits another ball which then rolls into a pocket, we are very comfortable with the sequence of cause and effect – stick hits ball which hit second ball. All these involve direct contact between the causative agent and the object being acted upon.
There are many cases, however, where it appears that object A affects object B without their ever coming into direct contact. Gravity is a good example of this. If I hold a ball above the ground and let it go, it will fall towards the earth. Why? What is pulling it towards the earth? This was a question that vexed both philosophers and physicists for a long time. Philosophers claimed that the object’s “natural place” was on the earth, and it simply moved to where it wanted to be. Physicists (much later) posited the existence of a gravitational field that projected the influence of any massive body into the space around it, and that influence becomes concretized into an actual force when a second massive object is present. The same was true with charged particles – first the electric and magnetic fields were posited, then it was discovered that in fact the electric and magnetic fields were two aspects of one underlying field, and that this field could carry energy and momentum – as light, x-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet and infrared, radio waves, etc. In other words, fields turn action-at-a-distance into two immediate-action interactions – the field interacts locally with particle 1, carries energy and momentum to particle 2 and interacts with it locally there.
How does this impact the senses? Consider sight. In Rambam’s time sight was considered an action-at-a-distance sense. There was object “out there” that had various visual qualities (size, color, etc.) which we discerned. The more modern understanding is that light in a certain range of frequencies hits the object, bounces off it and into our eyes, where it sets off a cascade of electrical activity, and we perceive the object. It is, to a certain extent, action-at-a-distance, but it is mediated by a field which is interacting locally, first with the object, then with our eyes.
We have a similar thing with hearing, except here the “field” is a bit more concrete – it is the physical air between the source of the sound and our ear, which senses the vibrations (fluctuations of pressure) of the air and starts other cascades of electrical activity in the brain. (We generally only hear direct sounds – if we heard all the echoes of sounds of various objects it’d probably drive us batty.) Similarly smell involves the actual contact of various volatile chemicals with olfactory receptors in our nose. This too is a kind of action-at-a-distance, as the chemicals are emitted by the source of the smell and are wafted into our noses by the air.
Taste and touch, on the other hand, do not act at a distance. To feel something, it has to be touching our body. To taste something, it has to be in our mouth. On the surface, these interactions are local and immediate. On a deeper level, we have discussed that all objects are nothing other than patterns of vibration of the Unified Field, and the interaction between objects is a larger pattern of vibration (taking into account the pattern that we perceive as object A along with the pattern that we perceive as object B). These interactions are not strictly local, because we are not localized objects – we are vibrations of a field, and we can interact with other field vibrations over a certain distance, albeit perhaps very short if we’re talking about touching an object with our finger.
So Rambam is exactly right when he says that all the senses are essentially the same – they involve some interaction with objects that are outside ourselves, and they are all mediated by some kind of vibrating field that carries energy, momentum and information from the object to us. The differences lie in the subtlety of the intermediating field and the distance over which it operates.
When we speak of Gd, of course, there is no outside and nothing mediates between Gd in His role as Subject and Gd as His role as Object. There is no distance, no communication, just Being. This can be conveyed with the analogy of seeing, hearing and smelling, but taste and touch are just too concrete to even be suggested of Gd.
L’Shanah Tovah to all!
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Rosh Hashanah, Parashat Ha’Azinu
What is the connection between Rosh HaShanah and Parshah Ha’Azinu – One connection is that Rosh HaShanah begins a period of restoring the connection between our individual selves and Gd, The One, The Wholeness – “Ha’azinu” means “Listen”: not just “hear” but “listen, listen with full attention.” Listening with full attention lets us hear not only the words of Moses and Torah but to experience Gd as the Wholeness within Whom the words are vibrations.
As Moses speaks to our ancestors (and to us), Moses calls upon Heaven and Earth to listen. Not only Heaven and Earth outside us, but within us.
He praises Gd and rebukes Israel for turning away from Gd. Moses concludes by telling our ancestors (and all generations) to set our heart to his words so that we may command our children to obey Torah. Better than this is to live so Torah is alive in us and our words and lives will be so alive we need not command our children to obey Torah–they will Live in our Universal Love, in Torah and will naturally be and act in harmony with Torah.
The central message in Moses’s song is that there is no god besides Gd.
Gd Says, “See now that it is I! (who Am your Rock and Your Shelter). I Am the One and there is no god like Me”. Deuteronomy 32:39, chabad.org translation.
As we realize this, we realize the implications of Gd’s Being One: not only is there no god besides Gd, there is nothing but Gd and all that exists is an expression of Gd, within Gd. Everything is Gd from the Universe, to galaxies, stars, planets, mountains, trees, people, ants, stones and quantum bubbles; all actions, thoughts, feelings, decisions, memories and plans.
And so, when Gd praises or rebukes, Gd is Praising or Rebuking Gd; Gd is playing a game in which Gd is the Director, Screenwriter, Actors, Camera Crew, Audience and Reviewers. Gd is the virtuous and the villains.
Gd is all thoughts and all decisions, all actions and all roles.
When we read in Torah that our ancestors turned away from Gd, it is clear that Gd was the One who Is the Thought that made them turn and they were roles Gd played so it was Gd turning away from Gd.
It is good to remember this so that we are not hard on those who stray, whether it was our ancestors or our neighbors or ourselves. When we make a decision to turn toward or away from Wholeness, it is Gd who is making the decision and it is Gd playing the roles of all who turn.
But, that said, we can’t spend our lives constantly thinking “Gd is All, Gd is my thought, I have nothing to do with anything…” and so on.
We have to act naturally, spontaneously, just being the people we are, with the personalities and skills we have, yet always favoring what we know to be right, letting our heart always filling with love for Gd and all beings..
Torah is Divine Sounds and Glowing Streams in our consciousness: Torah is meaning, literal and symbolic; Torah in the vast range of commentaries on it; Torah in our feelings, thoughts and conversations, Acting with virtue, with Love, helps us to sense Torah, to sense Gd, to develop a firm sense of right and wrong, to act with wisdom, and to better and return to our Source – Gd.
Gd Hides, playing the roles of every limited value: humans, galaxies, ants, stones, quantum strings; Gd Guides the seeking to return for all roles and Reveals Gd to the roles as Gd Chooses.
So not only at the time of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur but every moment always, let us do the greatest kindness, the greatest love, to ourselves and our neighbors and attune ourselves to Torah, to Gd: naturally, spontaneously comfortably, easily but steadily, consistently, routinely, uniting more and more with Universal Love and Joy, the One and Only “I”: Gd.
Baruch HaShem