Parashat Devarim 5785 – 08/02/2025
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.
This year, Tisha B’Av is on Sunday, and the fast begins on Saturday night, a short while before the Sabbath ends. Remember to get well-hydrated and have your Sabbath afternoon meal before the fast begins. Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur are the only full 25-hour fasts in the Jewish calendar, so prepare for it properly. Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem. The Rabbis said that any generation in which the Temple is not rebuilt is as responsible for its (continued) destruction as the generation in which it was actually destroyed. I think for those of us who have the technology that can raise collective consciousness to the point that it can sustain a Temple, and sustain Gd’s manifest presence on earth, this warning should strike home forcefully. This would be a good time to rededicate ourselves to our program of creating heaven on earth. Have an easy and meaningful fast. (RAR)
Devarim 1:1 – 3:22
Rambam goes on to describe the seventh premise of the Kalām:
It consists in their belief that privations of habitus are things that exist in a body, being superadded to its substance, and are accordingly also existent accidents. In consequence they are always being created, and whenever one of them disappears, another is created. The explanation is as follows. They do not hold that rest is the privation of motion, that death is the privation of life, and that blindness is the privation of sight; in fact they do not believe this with regard to any privations of habitus similar to those mentioned. For according to them, the status of motion and rest is the same as that of heat and cold. For just as heat and cold are accidents existing in the hot and cold substrata, motion is an accident created in the moving body, and rest an accident which Gd creates in the body that is at rest, which accident likewise does not last for two units of time, as has been set forth before in the preceding premise.
Encyclopedia.com defines privation thus:
Privation is the lack of a quality or form normally required by the nature of a thing. It is a type of contrariety, and is thus to be distinguished from simple negation, which is based on contradictory opposition. Privation is opposed either to possession (Lat. habitus) or to form as to its contrary.
According to the Mutakallimūn, a lack of a particular accident (i.e. a property) is itself an accident. That is, if we have a pair of accidents that are mutually exclusive, every atom must have one or the other. Something is either alive or dead. There is nothing in between (Rambam and Aristotle and the Mutakallimūn presumably didn’t know about viruses), and everything must be one or the other. Now there are several problems with this whole scheme. Take Rambam’s example of hot and cold for example. Heat and cold, at least in the modern understanding, are two points on a continuum of temperature. It’s well-known that if we hold our hand in cold water for some time, then put it in lukewarm water, the lukewarm water feels hot, while if we hold our hand in hot water, the lukewarm water feels cold. So hot and cold are not really accidents, and to say that cold in an absence of heat is also not correct. There is an absolute zero of temperature, where there is virtually no motion of any kind, except perhaps for quantum mechanical zero-point motion, but this is something that doesn’t really interact with anything else. And nobody can experience the absolute zero of temperature because the human body would lose heat too quickly, our cells would freeze and burst and we would die. Even my friends in Winnipeg would agree. Incidentally, when I was visiting Winnipeg, I would walk by Kelvin High School on the way to synagogue on Shabbat. I could never find out from anyone why it was named that, so I had to assume it referred to the Kelvin (absolute) temperature scale. Fun fact – Neil Young attended Kelvin HS when he lived in Winnipeg.
But I digress. If every atom must have either an accident or its lack, then Gd must create the accident for each unit of time that He wills that particular atom to have that particular accident, and then must create its opposite going forward for each unit of time. Now there must be an infinite number of accidents and therefore an infinite number of their privations, To think that each unit of existence has whatever relatively few attributes it might have, and an infinite number of “negative accidents” (privations) for each one of the millions of accidents it does not have, seems to me to not pass the Occam’s Razor test. Of course nothing is beyond Gd’s power, but this does not seem to be a very clean solution to the problem of changing of accidents.
Rambam brings out some further issues in his discussion of the accidents of life and death:
The position is also completely analogous with regard to life and death. For both of these are, according to them, accidents, and they clearly assert that a unit of life disappears and another is created as long as a particular living being is alive. Then, when Gd wills its death, He creates in it the accident of death following upon the disappearance of the accident of life, which does not last two units of time. All this they assert clearly. Now according to this assumption, it clearly follows that the accident of death, which Gd creates, likewise becomes nonexistent after a moment of time, so that Gd creates another unit of death. But for that, death would not last. However, as one unit of life is created after another, one unit of death is created after another. Would that I knew till when Gd creates the accident of death in a dead individual; does He do so as long as that individual’s external form endures, or as long as one of that individual’s atoms endures? For, according to what they wish, Gd creates the accident of death in every single atom of the atoms of the individual in question. Now we find molars of dead individuals that are thousands of years old. Accordingly this is a proof that Gd has not annihilated that substance. In consequence, He should be creating in it the accident of death all through these thousands of years, creating a unit of death as soon as another unit of it disappears. This is the doctrine of the multitude of them.
There is a tradition that we do not cremate our dead because there is a small bone in the spine, called the luz, from which Gd will revivify the dead at the end of days. Leaving aside those whose bodies were cremated against their will (e.g. in the Holocaust) or accidentally (e.g. in a plane crash), but might be deserving of being revivified, and leaving aside the fact that the lack of the luz should be no barrier to Gd if He wants to revivify someone, does Gd have to create the attribute of death in every atom of everyone’s luz continually until the end of time? Again, it appears that this fails the Occam’s Razor test.
I have to wonder if the Mutakallimūn, or any other religious thinker, or any scientist, think that the model that they have of creation is an actual depiction of reality, or whether it is a story, an analogy, a parable, to help us understand an underlying reality that transcends time, space, causality, and most important – language. In other words, are we looking at the landscape, or at a map of the landscape?
Now in terms of maps of reality, science has an edge of Scriptural exegesis, simply because it can make predictions of future behavior that can be tested against measured results. The way we do Scriptural exegesis is, unfortunately, very limited, because our consciousness and therefore our insight into Scripture is limited. We get caught up in different ideas of what Scripture means on an intellectual level. According to Vedic Science, this is the wrong way to understand Scripture. Rather, Scripture must be understood on the level of the sequence of sounds, because those sounds – those vibrations – are the actual vibrations of Pure Consciousness, or Pure Existence, which appear to us as all the forms and phenomena in time and space. When the rishis / Seers cognize Scripture on the level of their own Pure Consciousness, they are seeing / hearing the ultimate reality in and of itself and the virtual dynamics within Pure Consciousness. They are not creating a map – they are cognizing the ultimate reality.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Devarim
Devarim can be translated as “words.”
Devarim begins with “and these are the words Moses spoke” and ends with “Do not fear them [other nations] for the Lord, your Gd, is fighting for you.”
Reflecting on “devarim,” words, I thought about the letters that make up the words, the grammar that connects the words, and the different levels at which words, letters, and grammar exist and their connection to a life without fear in which we experience, without needing to be told, that Gd is fighting for us – and transforming our world into a world in which we have no enemies, neither outside our self nor inside our self. Not people, not thoughts or feelings, not storms or droughts or other acts of Nature do anything but support us, give us care, Love and Joy.
I also began to feel the letters are souls. They are the fundamental expressions of Gd’s infinite vibration through which Gd’s Self-Referral Awareness manifests and un-manifests the limited world that we ordinary folk experience as reality, Since Gd is Infinite Love and Joy, the letters are also this and their shapes and sounds are only limited on the surface level of their appearance. At subtler levels, they are more and more unlimited in their forms and sounds.
And at the Transcendental level they completely weave one into the other and their shapes and sounds and qualities of Love and Joy are infinitely varying.
The Hebrew letters are called “otiyot.” Yehudit Goldberg created a flowing exercise based on the shapes of the Hebrew letters and she called it “Otiyot Chayot”: “Chai” means “life” and “Chayot” are a class of heavenly beings, described in Ezekiel’s vision of the heavenly chariot.
As it is with the letters, so it is with the words, the Devarim, and sentences, this parshah and Torah as a whole.
Back to the physical level of the letters, there are 22 and there are 22 chromosomes in the DNA plus a Male and Female chromosome, which can relate to the long and short vowels. There are 24 books in Torah. This gives us a clear sense of the role of the letters in the manifesting of physical reality.
Kabbalah makes similar combinations for letters and the physiology and for Torah and the physiology.
The words Moses spoke were basically a review of the 40 years in the wilderness and here, too, there is a fundamental unity in the symbolism of the words of the review.
The mention of “40” often occurs in Torah as a symbol of completeness and here it occurs as 40 years spent in the desert between leaving Egypt (Mitzraim: Restrictions) and preparing to enter Canaan (“Synchronicity, Integration”), the Promised Land. This put in mind the Kabbalastic view of the 10 Sefiroth (qualities of Gd) times the four worlds (the world of Emanation: Atzilut; the world of Creation, Beriah; the world of Formation; Yetsirah; and the world of Action, Asiyah. This equals 40. And so when we experience the 10 qualities times the four worlds, we have 40, a symbol of completeness.
“Forty” is used by Dr. Tony Nader, PH. D, MD, MARR, in showing the connection between the Veda and the Vedic Literature with human physiology, as a way of illustrating that our human body is not only flesh, bones, muscles and so on but, in essence, Consciousness. “Consciousness” is a scientific way of referring to Totality, One without a Second, which from a religious point of view we refer to as Gd. Dr. Nader shows that the 40 aspects of the Veda and its Literature correspond to 40 different aspects of our human body.
So by exploring, intellectually, emotionally, experientially, the words and letters, sentences, paragraphs, parshahs of Gd, the grammar of Gd, the different qualities of Gd in the different stages of manifestation (within Gd), we become capable of entering a world in which we directly experience that Gd is Totality, we are expressions of Gd within Gd, Gd goes before us, makes our path safe, transforms any possible enemies into friends and we live a life very unafraid, very aware that Gd is filling our life with Joy, Love, words and actions of truth.
Such a life is one in which we fulfill Gd’s command: “Be thou holy, for I am holy” and in which we “Love the Lord, thy Gd, with all our heart, all our soul, all our might” and we “Love our neighbor (and, as Jesus put it, our enemy) as our self, our Self” and are loved by our neighbors the same way.
Such a life is a fulfilled life.
In our congregation there is a lot of Love and Joy, signs we are making good progress, signs we are experiencing a lot of protection and a lot of Fulfillment.
Thank You, Gd, for all You do
Baruch HaShem