Parashat Shelach 5786 – 06/13/2026
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.
Bamidbar 13:1-15:41
Rambam now turns his attention to the phenomenon of things being created in time. Now one might ask why creation in time is such a big deal. Anything that comes into being, comes into being at a particular time, lasts for some time, and passes from existence at a later time. But what it appears that Rambam’s long-term aim is to consider whether the universe as a whole is eternal, or if it were created at one particular moment in time. Modern physics has something to say on this issue, but let’s look at Rambam’s exposition first:
It is clear that everything produced in time has of necessity an efficient cause that causes it to be produced after not having been existent. This proximate agent must either be a body or not a body. A body, however, does not act through being a body; rather does it accomplish a particular act through being a particular body. I mean through its form. I shall speak about this in what shall come after.
This proximate agent, which produces in time the thing that is produced in time, may itself also be produced in time. This, however, cannot go on to infinity. For of necessity there is no doubt for us that, if there is a thing produced in time, we finally must come to something eternal and not produced in time that has caused that thing to be produced in time.
The beginning point of the discussion is the fact that whatever has been created in time must have been something that itself was created in time, or else something eternal and uncreated (which to Rambam means Gd of course). Rambam asserts that this string of beings creating one another cannot stretch back infinitely, and that at the end of the line must be something that is eternal. I find this argument unconvincing. If time is infinite in both directions (forward and backward) then there is no reason why objects could not be created and destroyed continually, each of them lasting a finite lifetime and each one having sprung from some other object and giving rise to other objects. On the other hand, if the universe were created in time, then there certainly is a beginning point past with nothing can go, and we have to have recourse to something that is transcendental to time.
Now Aristotle held that the universe is uncreated and eternal, which flies in the face of Jewish tradition, which holds that Gd created the universe 5786 years ago. It would seem that Rambam is baking this result into the premises he is going to use, but before we go too far down that rabbit hole, I doubt that a fine philosopher such as Rambam would do something like that. But let’s follow the argument further.
It has been made clear in natural science that every body that acts in some manner upon another body does this only through encountering it or through encountering something that encounters it, if this agent acts through intermediaries. For instance, this particular body, which at present has grown hot, was heated either because a body of fire had encountered it or because fire had heated the air and the air surrounding that particular body had heated it; thus the proximate agent that has heated that particular body is the hot air. Even a magnet exerts an attraction upon iron at a distance through a force, spreading out from it in the air, which encounters the iron. For this reason this particular fire does not exert an attraction at every distance, whatever that may be, but only at a distance in which the air between it and the thing heated undergoes a change through the instrumentality of the force of the fire.
This description is remarkably prescient about our understanding of modern physics. Local action – the immediate influence of one object on another, is, on the surface, the simplest form of interaction between bodies. Think of billiard balls hitting one another, or Rambam’s example of a body directly on a fire. (If we break these interactions down to the molecular level, we find that “contact” is not as close as it appears, but of course in classical times that data was not yet available.) There is also “action-at-a-distance” interactions. Sometimes the intermediary is physical, as in the case of the hot air that heats the object which is removed from the fire. (Incidentally, the difference between “directly on the fire,” known as “kli rishon” / “primary vessel” and “heated indirectly by the fire,” known as “kli sheni” / “secondary vessel,” has halachic implication in the laws of Shabbat and kashrut. Whether this is what Rambam had in mind here, I can’t even speculate.)
The other form of action-at-a-distance is more subtle. Rambam describes it as a “force spreading out from it in the air.” Nowadays we would call that a field, in this case the magnetic field. In fact, fields were invented as a mathematical trick to explain action-at-a-distance, by providing an intermediary where none was apparent. It was only some time later that physicists discovered that in fact these fields could vibrate, and these vibrations could propagate through space and time, carrying energy and momentum with them. The fire emits electromagnetic radiation (coordinated vibrations of the electric and magnetic fields) which can travel to another object, where those vibrations are absorbed, along with their energy, heating up the object. On the subatomic level, we have particles interacting by the exchange of virtual photons (quanta of the electromagnetic field) or the quanta of other fields, as we see when we look at Feynman diagrams. Fields, which were merely a mathematical trick, have become real, and all interactions, including with fields, have become local.
This formulation is, of course, hundreds of years later than Rambam, and doesn’t really touch on Rambam’s main issue, that of creation in time. We will pick up the thread next week, Gd willing.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Shelach
This parashah begins with Gd telling Moses “Shelach Lecha “Send for thyself,” spies to explore the Land of Canaan. Literally, “Shelach Lechah” means “send for thyself” (Gd tells Moses spies are not necessary to enter the Promised Land but, if he wishes, he may “send for himself”) but we can take it to mean “go to thy Self,” the Universal, Unlimited state of our awareness. This view implies that people should experience the state of awareness in which transcendent and details are experienced as expressions of the Single Whole – the Self is experienced as integrating the desert in which they were with Infinite Lushness. Canaan (“Synchronicity”) symbolizes the state of awareness in which the barrenness of material existence is raised to All-Pervading Love and Joy and the individual and the community are restored to Wholeness, Oneness. At this level, everyone is Inside, no one is outside and so spies cannot exist.
When we look at the parashah this way, we can infer that of the twelve “men of distinction” who were sent to spy on Canaan, Caleb and Joshua saw the land of Canaan from the perspective of their Universal Self – (Torah says Caleb saw it with a different spirit than the other spies): Therefore, they naturally, spontaneously perceived the land as Gd declared it: a land of Integration which was given to the Children of Israel, a land which they could easily enter with Gd’s protection.
The other ten leaders of the tribes did not perceive from this level: they perceived from the restricted level of the surface of awareness, the boundaries; they perceived as if they were still slaves in Egypt (“Mitzraim”: restrictions) and so they perceived themselves and the Children of Israel as being weak, unable to prevail against the might of the people of the land.
It is commonly said (Zohar and Midrash, according to Rav Yehuda Berg of the Kabbalah Center) that the spies gave a false report and that they did so because they were afraid to lose their distinction; they were afraid to enter a land without restrictions, in which everyone would be a person of distinction. But perhaps the logic I present above – which seems consistent with what Torah says – is valid. They perceived from the level of restrictions and so they did not have the unrestricted Holiness needed to enter the Holy Land.
From this standpoint, the sending of spies into Canaan was a test of the people’s readiness, holiness, to enter the Promised Land. They failed the test and so Gd chose to delay the entrance until all those who lacked holiness had passed away and the rising generation and newborns would have sufficient holiness to enter Canaan.
We can also look at this symbolically: One example is that the twelve tribes may represent the twelve pairs of ribs connected to the backbone (Jacob, the father). The failure of the tribes was equivalent to being unable to draw nourishment from the backbone: i.e., they had no backbone and therefore were afraid, no matter what Gd said to Moses. The forty years waiting was the time it took to re-connect the ribs to the backbone, to have direct experience of the integrated, whole Self of their father, Jacob, and of Gd, the Supreme Father, and so to regain the nourishment needed to be confident, to trust in Gd.
The parashah ends with Gd saying, “I am the Lrd, your Gd, who took you out of the land of Egypt to be your Gd. I am the Lrd, your Gd.”
And this echoes with Gd’s words earlier in Torah, “Be thou holy for I am holy.”
It is our opportunity through our spiritual practice, especially our daily routines, to deepen our experience of the transcendent inside and outside our individual personalities, and to integrate them both into our daily lives and the lives of our community, the world, the Universe, Gd., thus becoming Holy as Gd is Holy and to experience every place as Holy Land, the Land of Canaan, the place of Freedom, the Promised Land: then the Promised Land is wherever we are, around us, inside us, everywhere.
Baruch HaShem