Parashat Ki Tetze 5785 – 09/06/2025
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.
Devarim 21:10 – 25:18
Rambam continues his exposition of the tenth premise, that anything imaginable is possible. He states, “For whatever thing of this kind they assume, they are able to say: it is admissible that it should be so, and it is possible that it should be otherwise, and it is not more appropriate that one particular thing should be so than that it should be otherwise.” He gives the example of the sultan, who always rides through the market on his horse. It is certainly conceivable that he could walk through the market, although such a thing has never been seen in living memory. In the same way, one could conceive of fire moving downward and earth moving upward to the heavens, although such a thing has never been seen at all.
Now the difference between these two cases is that the sultan is a human being and can make choices, and his horse could step in a prairie dog hole and break its leg, and the sultan would be forced to hoof it himself. This is not the case with inanimate objects or systems, which are subject to the laws of nature, with no free will involved. However, as we discussed, if we are going to allow for Gd to have complete free will in creation, we must admit the possibility of everything we might imagine, and I think this is what the Mutakallimūn were aiming at.
Rambam now gives us a deeper understanding of the position of the Mutakallimūn by recording a possible conversation between them and a philosopher:
The Mutakallim said to the philosopher: Why is it that we find this body, which is iron, is endowed with extreme hardness and strength, while being black; whereas that other body, which is cream, is endowed with extreme softness and looseness, while being white?
This is of course a trick question. The Mutakallim wants to probe what is the nature of composite (i.e. macroscopic) objects. By composite I mean objects that are composed of many atoms. The Mutakallimūn posited the existence of atoms that are “pure substance” and that have different properties somehow laid on top of them (“accidents”). It is not clear how macroscopic objects are composed of the atoms, since they don’t appear to interact with one another. Rambam has dealt with this issue previously, as we have seen.
The philosopher’s answer:
The philosopher replied to him: Every natural body has two species of accidents: those that are attached to it in respect to its matter, such as those making man healthy and ill; and those that are attached to it in respect to its form, such as man’s feeling of wonder and his laughing. Now the various kinds of matter found in bodies that are in the stage of ultimate composition differ greatly because of the forms, which particularize these various kinds of matter, so that the substance of iron becomes different from that of cream and so that each of these substances has attached to it the differing accidents that you see. Thus strength subsisting in the one substance and softness subsisting in the other are accidents that follow from the difference of their forms, and blackness and whiteness are accidents that follow from the difference of their ultimate matter.
The philosopher’s answer is that macroscopic objects are not simply composed of generic atoms, but rather are extended bodies having different kinds of substances. This is couched in the language of accidents – with some accidents being more accidental than others. Some accidents apparently inhere in the substance – iron is essentially hard – while others inhere in the form – this piece of iron is black; another might be reddish. If I understand it correctly, the “accidents” that inhere in the substance are really not accidents at all – they are part of the essence of that material. In this sense, the Mutakallimūn are more consistent than the philosophers in distinguishing between substance and form (the accidents that specify generic substance into something specific.
Rambam goes on the make this point explicit:
In effect he [RAR: i.e. the Mutakallim] said: There does not exist at all, contrary to what you think, any form constituting a substance so that a variety of substances is thereby brought about. On the contrary, everything that you consider as a form is an accident – as we have made clear from their assertion in the eighth premise. Then he said: There is no difference between the substance of iron and the substance of cream, the whole being composed of atoms similar to one another – as we have made clear from their opinions set forth in the first premise, from which, as we have explained, the second and the third follow necessarily. Similarly the twelfth premise is required for establishing the existence of atoms.
I think this about exhausts the discussion of substance and accidents. Whether we think there is only one generic substance and that forms are overlays upon it, or some spatio-temporal section of it, then I think we miss the richness of understanding that we have from a more modern approach. The duality between form and substance is reflected in modern physics as the duality between “matter” and “force.” Matter is the substance, and forces cause matter to interact to form macroscopic objects and systems of objects – that is, the forces give form to the matter.
With modern Unified Field theories however, the line between forces and matter has been blurred. Both force fields and matter fields are aspects of the Unified Field, and the interaction between the two are really the self-interaction of the Unified Field. Both form and substance are actually just patterns of vibration of the one Unified Field.
Vedic Science takes this understanding over to the realm of consciousness. We have been used to thinking of consciousness as part of a duality – subjective and objective, inside and outside, mind and matter / body. Vedic Science shows us that in fact, everything is Consciousness, pure, infinitely silent yet infinitely dynamic Consciousness, interacting with itself, and giving rise to all matter and form.
This is of course the reality of higher states of consciousness. In waking state we have to categorize and systematize all experience. The Greeks were masters of this, and Rambam applied the same approach to Jewish Law, being among the first to synthesize the corpus of Biblical and Rabbinic thought and literature into a coherent system. All subsequent halachic thinking is based on this system. The purpose of this system, however, is to raise our consciousness to the level where we flawlessly recognize the system by which Pure Consciousness manifests in nature, because it is the same as the structure of our own consciousness.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Ki Teitzei (“When you go out”)
The parshah instructs: “to battle against thy enemies and the Lord shall deliver them into thy hands…”
This is a reminder that, literally, in battle, victory goes to those whom Gd supports; symbolically, that in any area of life, to be successful we need to align ourselves with Gd’s will. Battle is never really battle: it is Wholeness restoring a part to its reality as a vibration of Wholeness.
This parshah gives at least 74 mitzvot, ways to align with Gd’s Will, out of the 613 given in Torah (chabad.org) and some unifying themes on the material level are kindness, integrity and purity – all themes which we can strive to live in our lives today in our marriages, business relations, relations with strangers. In the Full sense the theme is always: Wholeness is always expressing itself through us, through all souls, so as to restore Full Awareness to us.
The opening illustration is in the case of the beautiful captive a soldier desires to take to wife.
The captive is to be given time to grieve and then marriage can take place. This is kindness.
If the soldier wishes to divorce the wife, then she shall be set free, not sold for money, not treated as a slave. This is kindness and integrity – she has been the wife, the relationship was entered into honestly (at least by the soldier – the woman’s rights have not been considered) and also honest relations: she not be treated as property, as a business commodity.
What does it mean symbolically? To me, “go out to battle” means, symbolically to extend Wholeness into specific details, desires, that have not yet become directed to Wholeness, absorbed in Wholeness.
A beautiful captive is a desire that is very appealing but doesn’t seem on the face of it to be aligned to our desire for Wholeness, for return to Primordial Oneness. It is a desire that needs to be given some time before we would act on it: perhaps after a while, we will see that the desire can fit into the routine things we do every day to deepen our experience of Wholeness and to spread it into areas of our life, of life in general that it has not yet reached.
I wish for all of us that we will enjoy the ability to divorce, to let go desires that are not aligned with Gd, to transform the ones that have possibilities into ones that actually help us align with Gd, (“take them to wife”) and that we will arrive at a state where we experience that everything is Wholeness; there is no going out, there are no enemies, there is no battle, there are no captives and all the world is experienced as our Self, the Self – Gd.
Baruch HaShem.