Parashat Devarim 5786 – 07/18/2026
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. The text we are working from is the two-volume translation by Prof. Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Devarim 1:1 – 3:22
Rambam makes one last point about time and eternity:
Accordingly one’s saying: Gd “was” before He created the world – where the word “was” is indicative of time – and similarly all the thoughts that are carried along in the mind regarding the infinite duration of His existence before the creation of the world, are all of them due to a supposition regarding time or to an imagining of time and not due to the true reality of time. For time is indubitably an accident. According to us it is one of the created accidents, as are blackness and whiteness. And though it does not belong to the species of quality, it is nevertheless, generally stated, an accident necessarily following upon motion, as is made clear to whoever has understood the discourse of Aristotle on the elucidation of time and on the true reality of its existence.
Here the question of describing an eternal reality from a time-based perspective, and with time-based language and concepts, reappears. Now Rambam has already written at length on the fact that we can’t say anything positive about Gd, because it would define (i.e. limit) Gd, who is infinite and eternal. Here Rambam focuses on Gd’s Existence. Gd’s Existence is eternal and eternity is detached from time altogether. We can’t say that Gd exists, either before creation, or after creation, or if there is no creation. So the question of whether Gd existed before creation makes no sense at all. Eternity is not just a long time – it is a state that transcends time, which, as it were, looks down on time and gathers, in a glance all of time in its purview.
Incidentally, this consideration also bears on the question of Gd’s foreknowledge vs. human free will. If Gd knows what we are going to do, since He knows the future, how is it that we have free will? But if Gd transcends the concepts of past and future, then the concept of fore knowledge doesn’t really arise. As Rambam puts it, Gd’s knowledge is not separate from His essence, which of course is infinite and eternal. We have speculated that this may mean that all that we see as activity is actually Gd’s internal dynamics; Gd therefore knows everything not in the way that we know something objective, outside of ourselves, but rather as an internal knowledge of Gd’s own Self. More than that I can’t speculate, not having experienced Unity Consciousness myself. I just wanted to point out the relationship between the question of creation in time and the question of Gd’s foreknowledge.
Rambam closes out his discussion of this first (and favored) opinion by discussing the reason that we are unfamiliar with the nature of time, and are unable to even describe what that nature is. The conclusion that he comes to is that time is an “accident subsisting in an accident.” To review, an “accident” is a quality of an object that is not essential to it. For example, roundness is essential to a ball, but color is not – you can have a blue ball or a red ball or any color ball, without it’s being any more or less a ball. Most accidents pertain to a body, an object, like our ball. Time, however, which comes out of motion of some object. But the state of motion of an object is itself an accident, as the object can be moving in any direction, or it can be stationary. So time is an accident with another accident as its substrate. Since the substrate is an accident that is in motion, it is constantly changing, and it is this change that disallows us from perceiving the nature of time. This is Rambam’s argument. I think the bottom line on this is that we act within time. Action means change, and change is what gives rise to our sense of time, as we have discussed. We are so embedded in time that our thinking process (a process itself is something in time) cannot extricate itself from temporal thinking. In higher states of consciousness, where our awareness is settled in eternity, above time (and space), we experience the world differently, and time takes on a different aspect.
I would like to add one thing about time, from the perspective of physics. We experience that time has a direction. We are born, grow older and hopefully wiser, but we never grow younger. A seed grows into a plant, but a plant does not shrink back into a seed. On the other side, a flower that is cut from its plant will fade and decay, but a decayed flower never brightens up and becomes colorful and fresh again. Yet the underlying laws of nature are symmetrical with respect to time reversal – you can run the film forwards or backward, and on the microscopic level it will look perfectly fine either way. Where does the “arrow of time” come from?
The answer is that it comes from our inability to perceive the interactions of individual particles. The time and space scales are way too small. What we can perceive, is the collective behavior of the system as a whole, and that behavior is statistical. Since “dead,” disorderly, randomized structures are statistically more likely to occur, as we have discussed in these essays some time ago (see Pesach 5781), a system where the individual constituents are constantly moving about, and which starts in a highly structured state, will quickly become unstructured, while an unstructured system will not spontaneously become highly structured in any finite amount of time. This gives us an “arrow of time,” even though the underlying processes are time-symmetric. Of course the expansion of the universe also gives us an “arrow of time,” and it is by projecting that expansion back that we get to the beginning of time and the point of creation.
We’ll continue with the other two views of the universe in time, beginning next week, Gd willing.
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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.”
As I began to think about “devarim,” words, I began to think 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.
And as I begin to think, 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 Ezekial’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 my mind the Kabbalistic 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; Yetzirah; 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, is 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 experience a lot of protection and a lot of Fulfillment.
Thank You, Gd, for all You do.
Thank You!
Thank You!
Thank You!
Baruch HaShem