We Are Not Alone A Maimonidean Theology

Thank you for downloading this free sampler of: WE ARE NOT ALONE A Maimonidean Theology of the Other MENACHEM KELLNER Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah July 2021 | 212 pp. 9781644696132 | $29.95 | Paperback SUMMARY Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed addressed Jews of his day who felt challenged by apparent contradictions between Torah and science. We Are Not Alone: A Maimonidean Theology of the Other uses Maimonides’ writings to address Jews of today who are perplexed by apparent contradictions between the morality of the Torah and their conviction that all human beings are created in the image of God and are the object of divine concern, that other religions have value, that genocide is never justified, and that slavery is evil. Individuals who choose to emphasize the moral and universalist elements of Jewish tradition can often find support in positions explicitly held by Maimonides or implied by his teachings. We Are Not Alone offers an ethical and universalist vision of traditionalist Judaism. ABOUT THE AUTHOR MENACHEM KELLNER is Chair of Shalem College, Jerusalem’s Department of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought (emeritus) at the University of Haifa. He is the author, editor, or translator of two dozen books (including two published by Academic Studies Press) and close to two hundred articles in medieval and modern Jewish thought. PRAISE “Dr. Menachem Kellner offers a perceptive and highly important discussion of Maimonides’ views of the ‘other.’ But the book is not only about Maimonides: it is about us! It is about all thinking Jews who believe in the truth of Judaism while also making room for the legitimate spiritual aspirations of non-Jews. Dr. Kellner is a foremost expositor of Maimonidean thought; he is a deep thinker, an extraordinary scholar, a gifted writer—a humane individual who is both unique and universal.” — Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel, Director, Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals Take 20% off your order when you sign up for our newsletter at www.academicstudiespress.com/newsletter We Are Not Alone A Maimonidean Theology of the Other Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah Series Editor Dov Schwartz (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Editorial Board Ada Rapoport Albert (University College, London) Gad Freudenthal (CNRS, Paris) Gideon Freudenthal (Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv) Moshe Idel (Hebrew University, Jerusalem) Raphael Jospe (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan) Ephraim Kanarfogel (Yeshiva University, New York) Menachem Kellner (Haifa University, Haifa) Daniel Lasker (Ben Gurion University, Beer Sheva) We Are Not Alone A Maimonidean Theology of the Other Menachem Kellner BOSTON 2021 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kellner, Menachem Marc, 1946- author. Title: We are not alone: a Maimonidean theology of the other / Menachem Kellner. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Series: Emunot: Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009319 (print) | LCCN 2021009320 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644696132 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644696149 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644696156 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Maimonides, Moses, 1135-1204--Teachings. | Judaism--Relations. | Universalism. Classification: LCC B759.M34 K449 2021 (print) | LCC B759.M34 (ebook) | DDC 296.3/2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009319 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009320 Copyright © Academic Studies Press, 2021 ISBN 9781644696132 (hardback) ISBN 9781644696149 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644696156 (epub) Book design by PHi Business Solutions Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA press@academicstudiespress.com www.academicstudiespress.com For Jolene—it just keeps getting better Contents Acknowledgements Preface 1. Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed 2. We Are Not Alone 3. Election/Chosen People 4. The Convert as the Most Jewish of Jews 5. Aher—Then, Now, and in the Future: Othering the Other in Judaism 6. Tolerance 7. Christianity Conclusion Bibliography Index ix xi 1 28 42 68 85 105 137 159 167 185 Acknowledgements S everal friends were kind enough to read and comment on the whole manuscript of this book, saving me from error and improving my presentation. I am grateful to Marc Angel, Avi (Seth) Kadish, Eugene Korn, Danny Lasker, Ken Seeskin, and Edwin Slonim. On specific issues I also benefited from the wise counsel of Matanel Bareli, Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Zev Harvey, Yehuda ( Jerome) Gellman, David Gillis, Joel Kaminsky, J. J. Kimche, Eric Lawee, Tyra Lieberman, Yizhak Lifshitz, Diana Lobel, Mordy Miller, Avrom Montag, Abraham Rubin, Chaim Waxman, and, of course, Jolene S. Kellner who never ceases to amaze me. I am also grateful to Lenn Evan Goodman and Phillip Lieberman for their kind permission to cite from the Guide of the Perplexed in their forthcoming translation. Several chapters of this book appeared in earlier versions, as follows: chapter 2, “We Are Not Alone,” in Radical Responsibility: Celebrating the Thought of Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, ed. Michael J. Harris, Daniel Rynhold, and Tamra Wright ( Jerusalem: Maggid Books, 2012): 139–154; chapter 4, “The Convert as the Most Jewish of Jews? On the Centrality of Belief (the Opposite of Heresy) in Maimonidean Judaism,” Jewish Thought/Mahshevet Yisrael (Ben Gurion University Annual) 1 (2019): 33–52; chapter 5, “Aher—Then and Now and in the Future: Otherizing the Other in Judaism,” commissioned for Oxford Handbook of Jewish Philosophy, ed. Yizhak Melamed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022); chapter 6, “Tolerance,” in Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses, ed. Georges Tamer et al. (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, in press); chapter 7, “Thinking Idolatry With/Against Maimonides—The Case of Christianity,” Thinking Idolatry Today, ed. Alon Goshen-Gottstein (Boston: Academic Studies press, forthcoming 2022). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these articles for cheerfully granting permission to include my revisions of them in this book. Preface I would like to explain why I wrote this book, and how I came to write it. In order to do so, I shall tell a story. I am what may be called an evolved and evolving feminist. When asked to exemplify changes in the world in which I used to live and the world in which I now live, I show people the bentscher distributed at the “wedding reception of Mr. and Mrs. Menachem Kellner” a bit more than fifty years ago. I can hardly imagine agreeing to such language today. As an evolved and evolving feminist, I was very pleased when a group of younger people in my community, led by a halakhically serious young woman, decided to hold a “partnership” minyan once a month, on the eve of the Sabbath when the new moon is announced (Shabbat mevorkhim). In this service, complete with mechitzah (separation between men and women) and male hazzanim (cantors), the only feminist innovation was that women would lead that part of the service (from their side of the mechitzah) which has no halakhic standing—known as kabbalat Shabbat. The reaction of several rabbis in the community (individuals who serve informally and with great dedication) was immediate and vociferous. The leaders of the feminist initiative then decided to invite Israel Prize Winner Rabbi Professor Daniel Sperber of Bar-Ilan University, a distinguished rabbi and professor with impeccable Orthodox credentials, to come and speak to the community. Rabbi Sperber came and gave a lecture to a large and supportive crowd. His main point was that indeed almost all contemporary Orthodox rabbis (especially in Israel) oppose “partnership” minyanim on both halakhic and policy grounds. However, if, despite that opposition, one was interested in finding rabbinic warrant for the initiative, it could be found. Rabbi Sperber showed that halakhah and tradition are not as monolithic as the rabbinic opponents of the “partnership” minyan claimed. He further showed that several of the “innovations” to which they objected were not actually as innovative as they thought. xii We Are Not Alone One of the local rabbis (an IDF reserve officer and holder of a PhD in Jewish thought from an Israeli university), a particularly fine individual, attended the lecture, spoke in response to it the following Sabbath, and took the trouble of visiting many of the families (such as ours) to explain his opposition to the initiative and his response to Rabbi Sperber. I thought then and think now that our rabbi, a family friend and someone whom I admire, largely misunderstood what Rabbi Sperber said. Our rabbi’s response was that while Rabbi Sperber might have a point in strictly historical terms, halakhah should be determined by leading authorities (in Haredi-speak, gedolim) and not by “outliers.” In my eyes, this boils down to an argument for conservatism in religious affairs. (The fact that several of the rabbis he cited are individuals about whom I have serious reservations did not help his cause.) This conservatism may or may not be a good policy (I personally do not think that it is) but it is not a policy that can be refuted as such (since it expresses values, not facts). However, in my eyes, it is conservatism in this case which drives halakhah and policy, not the other way around. (I should point out that my rabbi friend sees the entire story very differently and that the “partnership minyan” continues—the debate about it died down.) How is this story relevant to this book? I fully admit—sadly, not cheerfully—that in the eyes of many Orthodox and certainly Haredi rabbis, gentiles have no worth and purpose in and of themselves; they are, in effect, only static, background noise to the real business of the universe. For Haredim the business of the universe is the study of (a narrow aspect of) Torah. For many of those rabbis who identify as religious Zionists, the business of the universe often appears to be the study of Torah (somewhat more broadly construed) and the settlement of the whole biblical land of Israel. While these views are widely held by leading rabbinic authorities today, they are not the whole story by any means. The Jewish story contains other voices, some of them quite prominent; one of those voices is that of Moses Maimonides, arguably the most prominent rabbinic authority since the Talmudic era. It is my use of Maimonides that explains what I am trying to do in this book. A reader content with the Judaism ordinarily presented these days in most traditionalist Jewish circles should not read this book—she or he will not like it one bit. However, a reader who wishes to remain within the traditionalist Jewish world—widely or narrowly construed—and who also affirms that all humans are fully created in the image of God, and have intrinsic worth in God’s eyes, will find a measure of support for her or his views. Just as Rabbi Sperber pointed us to voices that provide halakhic warrant for our feminist initiative, Preface I hope to show that a modified Maimonideanism provides a warrant for the Judaism expressed in these pages.1 Let me further explain what I am attempting to do. R. Sa’adia Gaon (882–942) wrote his Beliefs and Doctrines for those Jews whose faith was troubled by apparent conflicts between that faith and contemporary science. He also addressed fellow Jews who desired to turn their beliefs into reasoned doctrines. He did not address his book to people who had no such problems; persons content with their received faith did not need his book. Similarly, this book is not addressed to people who are content in their Judaism. It is definitely addressed to those Jews made uncomfortable, or even occasionally embarrassed, by so much of what passes for “Torah-true” Judaism today. I hasten to point out that while Maimonides appears in every chapter of this book, I do not for a moment pretend that the historical Maimonides would be happy with all the conclusions which I reach. However, I would like to think that were he among us today, and knew what we know today, he would be willing to sign off on many of my conclusions. Of course, I am not alone in that view. From the Rabbi of Lubavitch to the “Rabbi of Leibowitz” and in between, all contemporary Orthodox spokespersons (well, almost all) claim Maimonides for their own (this even includes the authors of the scandalous Torat ha-Melekh, on which see chapter 1 below). That said, one of the issues addressed tangentially in this book is one with which I am confident the historical Maimonides would agree: that all human 1 Concerning my use of the term “Judaism,” I realize that historically Jews have not understood themselves as a religion similar in structure to Christianity and Islam. Leora Batnitzky maintains that arguing over the issue is a mark of Jewish modernity. See her How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). Avraham Melamed has shown that dat (religion) is a term applied by Jews to what came to be called “Judaism” from at least the fifteenth century. See Abraham Melamed, Dat: Me-Hok le-Emunah—Korotav shel Minu’ah Mekhonen (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz Ha-Me’uhad, 2014). A quick check of the Bar Ilan Global Data Base confirms this (ibn Ezra’s usages appear to be ambiguous in this regard). The implications of this are vast, but not our point right now. I have argued that Maimonides may have been the first Jew to use the term dat in a way similar to the way in which we use the term “religion” and that he certainly had a notion of what we today would call “Judaism” even if it never occurred to him to use the term. See below, chapter 4 and my other studies cited there. Daniel Boyarin’s recent Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2018) is relevant and has a long discussion of Judah Halevi but ignores the much more relevant Maimonides. For an important corrective to Boyarin, see Melamed, Dat, esp. 41–51. See also Howard Kreisel, “Maimonides on Divine Religion,” in Maimonides after 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence, ed. Jay Harris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 151–166. xiii xiv We Are Not Alone beings are actually and fully created in the image of God. I have addressed that subject in a number of works, among them: Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People and Gam Hem Keruyim Adam: ha-Nokhri be-Einei ha-Rambam. This issue is of crucial importance. Hermann Cohen often pointed out that the doctrine that all human beings are made in the image of God, have a common source in God, makes the notion of humanity necessary. No longer are humans defined essentially in terms of tribal affiliation. Translating this ideal into reality is an unfinished project, but an ideal that we must surely pursue. There are two further and interrelated issues in Maimonides’s thought that are not directly addressed in this book, despite their relevance. My friend and colleague David Gillis and I have written a book which addresses two topics, which might well be included in the present volume had we not already written that book. That book is called Maimonides the Universalist: The Ethical Horizons of Mishneh Torah (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020). In the context of the book’s chapters that analyze the closing paragraphs of each of the fourteen volumes of the Mishneh Torah, we address the following question: to whom is the Torah ultimately addressed—all humanity (kol ba’ei olam) or just Israel? It is our claim that Maimonides follows the school of R. Yishmael, as opposed to the school of R. Akiva, and holds that ultimately the Torah is addressed to all human beings. This reading of Maimonides and his understanding of Judaism also subserves the second topic that might have been taken up in this book, namely, Maimonides’s intellectualist and universalist account of the messianic era, the topic of chapter 14 in Maimonides the Universalist. For Maimonides the Torah will indeed become the patrimony of all humanity by the time the messianic era reaches full fruition. In chapter 1 below, I show that—again for Maimonides (Guide iii.32)— ideal Judaism is the intellectualist, ethical, and universalist Judaism of Abraham, not the particularist and ritualistic Judaism of Moses. That Judaism, according to Maimonides, is a concession to human frailty. Human frailty being what it is, we cannot do without the Torah of Moses, but we can live our lives in pursuit of the Abrahamic ideal. This idea will come up in several of the chapters of this book. Abrahamic Judaism failed with Abraham’s great grandchildren (the grandsons of Jacob/Israel, almost all of whom were idolaters in Egypt), and failed again with their descendants after Marah (Exod. 15) and the golden calf. This is the “Abrahamic” nature of the theology outlined in this book. This issue, too, will be taken up in the chapter 1 below. Preface The Abrahamic component of Judaism, addressed to the whole world, and anticipating a messianic fulfillment also addressed to the whole world, is under assault. This is hardly surprising only two generations after the Holocaust in a world in which Jew hatred (often disguised as “anti-Zionism”) is again on the rise, among ruffians and among the denizens of academic lounges alike. Just as renewed Jew hatred must be resisted, so must the resultant Jewish assault on the Abrahamic ideal be resisted. A word about my own stance. I think of myself as a classic liberal. In today’s “woke” and (allegedly) “progressive” environment that would mean that many would see me as conservative. Be that as it may, a central focus of this book is to present a universalist version of Judaism (whatever that might be) that conceives of all human beings as being fully created in the image of God (whatever that might mean). This version of Judaism refuses to condemn as false or immoral other religions or cultures (so long as they do not advocate or practice violations of natural morality). The Judaism I describe and defend in this book is rationalist and hence pre-postmodern: truth does matter. I admit that there is no such thing as “Judaism”—there are only Judaisms; this book presents one of many competing Judaisms and shows its rootedness in the historical traditions of the Jewish people. Jews to the right of me, religiously and culturally, will say (and have said) that I am trying to force my liberal notions on a Judaism that is itself not at all liberal. I am tempted here to make a series of ad hominem rebuttals: Talmudic law reflects foreign influences, not just in terminology; Judah Halevi’s views on the special nature of the Jewish people have been shown to have roots in Shi’ite thought; Kabbalah is a form of (partially) Judaized Neoplatonism; Jewish “orthodoxy” is a response to modernity; contemporary “Kookian” notions of the special nature and mission of the Jews reflect Romantic notions of people (volk) and land; Haredi notions of da’at Torah are as much Catholic as they are Jewish (some would argue they not Jewish at all). However, to argue in this fashion—as if to say: “You, too!”—is to bring myself down to the level of a politician. Instead, I take it as a given that the Jewish tradition contains both universalist and particularist elements, rationalist orientations and mystical spirituality, elite religion and folk religion. Notice what I have just done: universalist/ rational/elite versus particularist/mystical/folk. I admit my crime: by nature and upbringing, I gravitate to the liberal end of the spectrum. Does that affect the way I understand the Jewish tradition? Undoubtedly. Does it make my positions Jewishly illegitimate? Only if I cannot reasonably ground them in the historical texts of Judaism. It is the point of this book to show that I can do that. xv xvi We Are Not Alone Moreover, reading Jewish texts through specific lenses has a long history. Talmudic rabbis presented biblical figures as if they were themselves Talmudic rabbis, and some of them may even have believed their own aggadah that the patriarchs obeyed all the 613 commandments (including those laws innovated by the rabbis themselves). Maimonides and other medieval Jewish philosophers treated prophets and Talmudic rabbis as if they taught philosophy. Medieval Kabbalists turned the second-century Rabbi Shim’on Bar-Yohai into a Kabbalist, and even made him the author of the Zohar. Hasidim turned Moses (and perhaps Adam) into the first Hasidic rebbes. Contemporary Haredim seems to believe that Jews have always been Haredim (and always dressed like Polish gentry). The difference between what I do in this book, and what has always been done in the Jewish tradition, is that I am self-conscious about it. That, however, is a very big difference. Being self-conscious about what I am doing in our historical epoch is more than simply being self-reflective—after all, seeking to be aware of ourselves and of what we are doing is hardly a new activity. Nevertheless, our reflexivity is a function of historical self-consciousness. After Marx and Freud among others, we are, or at least can be, aware of ourselves in new ways. This new self-awareness means that we look at our own traditions from the inside and the outside simultaneously. This is characteristic of academic scholars of the Jewish tradition, but of course, not only of them. Once we look at the Jewish tradition both from the inside out and from the outside in, we become aware of the fact that we keep faith with the tradition out of choice. It is common to call converts to Judaism “Jews by choice” but nowadays all Jews are actually Jews by choice. I am not sure that this is altogether unprecedented in Jewish history. Certainly ceasing to be a Jew without actively converting to another religion may have been impossible between the time of Philo (whose nephew was an officer in the Roman army which destroyed the Second Temple) and of Josephus on the one hand, and the time of Spinoza on the other. Thus, for two millennia, Jews have not been Jews by choice in the sense in which those of us lucky enough to live in our world are. There is another relevant point that must be raised: Jews whose texts I study in this book largely saw themselves as being in direct communication with God. Even on as simple level as that of Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye, Jews felt themselves able to talk to God, not about God. I am not sure how many Jews today, at least those who live both inside and outside, can achieve that level, or even try to achieve it. In light of all the above, a difficult question must be raised: Is there any issue in which tradition trumps liberalism? It is of no use to turn the question Preface towards Jews whose philosophic and cultural tendency is towards conservatism and ask them, is there any issue in which tradition trumps conservatism? Let Jews of a conservative temper wrestle with that one. Trying to look at the matter honestly, I have a hard time finding some area in which Jewish tradition trumps my liberal sentiments. Of course, I regret cases of intermarriage, but do not feel that I have the right to tell people who love each other not to marry. That does not worry me: I am convinced that my liberal sentiments reflect my Jewish background and studies. In other words, without subjecting myself to the sort of courageous self-analysis of a Freud (and we all know how successful that was) there is really no way that I can disentangle my Judaism from my liberalism. In what follows I hope to present my understanding of what Judaism ought to be and invite others along for the ride. I do so with no pretensions of being an authoritative voice—but I hope to be a convincing one. Now, a word on how I came to write this book. I did not intend to write it. Over the last few years, I have been invited to contribute articles to journals and collective volumes. I suppose I should not have been surprised that in many cases the articles that I wrote all had something to do with a subject that is often at the front of my mind, and always at the back of it. I refer to the fact that so many Jews—despite all the evidence to the contrary—believe that Jews simply by virtue of their birth are in some intrinsic fashion distinct from and superior to non-Jews. To my mind, this view borders on the irrational, and is fundamentally immoral, not to mention that it contradicts the opening chapters of the Torah. However, it was only while writing the last of these articles (chapter 3 below, on the notion of the chosen people) that I realized that all these articles dealt with aspects of the same issue: how Jews should see themselves and see others. This book is more than simply a collection of related articles, but less than a book written from scratch, as it were, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The chapters cohere (and I have worked hard to make them do so) but they can also stand alone (after all, several of them began their lives as independent essays). Together they do make one argument: we the Jews are not alone in God’s universe. xvii CHAPTER 1 Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed 1. JEWISH VOICES REJECTED B y way of introducing the issues raised in this chapter, I shall quote a close friend who recently wrote to me (about the subject matter of this book). He wrote: “I’m also put in mind of the rabbi whose lessons I have attended for many years, whom I greatly like and respect and who can be truly eye-opening on bible, prayer, Talmud, and anything else, but who has a blind spot about nonJews, whom he thinks God doesn’t care about.” Another telling incident demonstrates this point. When a friend of mine was a scholar in residence at a prominent modern Orthodox American synagogue years ago, he taught the passage at end of “Laws of Slaves” in Mishneh Torah in which Maimonides emphasizes that Jews and gentiles are all created equal by God and formed “in the same womb,” that is, there is no essential difference between Jews and gentiles.1 In the synagogue, there was a sophisticated Torah scholar in his twenties who was also the son of a prominent yeshiva head. He protested this purported equality, and stayed with my friend for almost an hour after the Sabbath arguing that Maimonides did not say this because he could not have said it. The belief in Jewish superiority was an essential part of the young scholar’s personal sense of Jewish identity. He had formed this identity under the influence of his parents, their peers, and his peers. The text was merely secondary and after the fact. When he saw the text, he was forced either to distort it or to deny its importance. After my friend proved to the young Torah scholar that the universalistic interpretation was correct by citing numerous other Maimonidean texts in the Mishneh Torah and in the Guide of the Perplexed, this product of the best modern Orthodox 1 On this passage, see Menachem Kellner and David Gillis, Maimonides the Universalist: The Ethical Horizons of Mishneh Torah (Liverpool: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2020), chapter 12. 2 We Are Not Alone education gave up on Maimonides and said it really didn’t matter what Maimonides said because he (and presumably “the Torah world”) had decided in accordance with the views of Judah Halevi anyway. His prejudice was so deep that he preferred the opinion of the non-halakhist Halevi to that of the greatest halakhist in Jewish history! One need not adopt the extreme views to be discussed below to believe, in effect, that we Jews are alone in the eyes of God.2 It is my point in this book to show that texts and traditions offer us a more universalist alternative. The voice of Rabbi Shlomo Aviner is heard loudly and clearly in the world of contemporary Orthodox Zionism in Israel (dati-leumi), the community in which I live. This is thanks to his many books, lectures, internet activities, and especially the multitude of “Sabbath leaflets” (alonei Shabbat) to which he contributes.3 Although considered a political hawk, R. Aviner broke with many of his rabbinic colleagues, and counseled soldiers to obey orders in connection with the Gaza withdrawal of 2005. This independent stand aroused considerable controversy in the world of Orthodox Zionism, earning R. Aviner many enemies.4 Aviner’s voice is not the only voice heard in the dati-leumi community (for which I am grateful), but it is a voice that echoed widely around the world. One of the issues to which R. Avner often returns is the special nature of the Jewish people. Thus in the pamphlet Itturei Kohanim 174 (Sivan, 5759) we find him writing: We are the chosen people, not because we received the Torah, but, rather, we received the Torah because we are the chosen people.5 This is so since the Torah is so apt to our inner nature. Each nation has a special nature, character, public psychology, unique divine character, and the Master of the Universe formed this special nation, This people which I formed for 2 3 4 5 It is no comfort, and in my eyes wholly irrelevant, to point out that many Christians and Muslims believe that they are alone in the eyes of God. But there are some good jokes on the subject. Rabbi Aviner was born in France in 1943 and made aliyah in 1966. He earned degrees in math and engineering and is an officer in the IDF reserves. After his aliyah, Aviner studied at Yeshivat Merkaz Ha-Rav Kook in Jerusalem and is a disciple of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook (1891–1982). R. Aviner is the rabbi of the West Bank settlement Bet El and head of the yeshiva Ateret Kohanim in the Muslim quarter of the Old City. On Aviner, see Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), esp. 59–64. Here R. Aviner reflects Judah Halevi’s Kuzari ii. 56. Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed Myself, they will tell My praise (Is. 43:21). There are … those who claim against us that we are ‘racist’. Our answer to them is … if racism means that we are different from and superior to other nations, and by this bring blessings to other nations,6 then indeed we admit that we differ from every nation, not by virtue of skin color, but from the aspect of the nature of our souls [ha-teva ha-nishmati shelanu], the Torah describing our inner contents.7 In this typical passage, Rabbi Aviner presents his position in the clearest possible fashion and takes issue with his opponents. Let us look more closely at his words. The people of Israel are the chosen people (am segulah).8 Why and how? R. Aviner relates to two possibilities: the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob received the Torah and in consequence became the chosen people, or, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were they only humans capable (mesugalim) of receiving the Torah. Receiving the Torah was a consequence of their already having been the chosen people (am segulah). In so doing R. Aviner accomplishes several ends: he admits (barely, it seems to me) that there is controversy on the issue (as indeed there is—we shall see below that his view is that of R. Judah Halevi [1075–1141], as opposed to the view of Maimonides [1138–1204]); takes a stand on this controversy; and hints that the opposing view ought not to be taken seriously, since he does not deign to argue against it. R. Aviner continues and insists that the Torah is appropriate for the inner nature of the Jewish people—“Each nation has a special nature, character, public psychology, unique divine character, and the Master of the Universe formed this special nation—This people which I formed for Myself, they will tell My praise (Is. 43:21).” In making this claim he reifies the notion “nation” and establishes that there are nations defined and demarcated one from the other 6 7 8 How does Israel bring blessings to other nations? In his commentary on Halevi’s Kuzari 4 vols. (Bet El: Sifriyat Hava, n.d.), 1:108, R. Aviner writes: “The Torah is the greatest divine light, and it belongs only to Israel, and from Israel drops of sanctity drip to each and every nation, according to its stature and state [inyano].” See also his response to a question on the internet “Why should we be a nation?” See: http://www.havabooks.co.il/article_ID.asp?id=632. My thanks to Rabbi Dr. Ronen Lubitch for bringing this source to my attention. For the Kabbalistic background to this passage, see below, note 18. Based on the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, this expression shows up only 113 times in the entire body of Jewish literature covered by the database. Most date from in the Middle Ages. The term literally means “treasured nation.” 3 4 We Are Not Alone by their inner natures.9 In so doing, he adopts the views of nineteenth-century German Romanticism and foists this ideology on Judaism.10 The Jewish people, he teaches, have an inner nature unique to it, a nature to which the Torah is particularly appropriate.11 A number of things follow from this: R. Aviner takes a position in a tannaitic debate over whether the Torah was ultimately intended for all human beings (kol ba’ei olam) or just for Israel.12 He further raises a metaphysical problem with the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism: How can a person whose inner nature is not Jewish receive the 9 It is not surprising that individuals who can be considered part of Aviner’s circle are attracted to what used to be known as voelkerpsychologie—understood as inquiry into the (socalled) psychological makeup of nations. See, for example, Haggai Stammler, “Psychology of Nations: A Forgotten Field,” Moreshet 15 (2015): 209–224 (Hebrew). 10 In this, R. Aviner follows in the footsteps of his teacher, R. Zvi Yehudah Kook; R. Zvi Yehudah follows in the footsteps of his father, R. Abraham Isaac Kook (to a great degree), and Rav Kook in turn appears to follow in the footsteps of his teachers, Hegel and other Romantic thinkers. On this intellectual pedigree, see Shlomo Fischer, “Self-Expression and Democracy in Radical Religious Zionist Ideology” (PhD diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007), esp. 66–126, 217–234. For a recent and very useful English-language study of the elder R. Kook, see Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). On Rabbi Z. Y. Kook, see Gideon Aran, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Land: The Spiritual Authorities of Jewish-Zionist Fundamentalism in Israel,” in Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, ed. R. S. Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 294–327; Shai Held, “What Zvi Yehudah Kook Wrought: The Theopolitical Radicalization of Religious Zionism,” in Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism, ed. Michael Morgan and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 229–55; Motti Inbari, Messianic Religious Zionism Confronts Israeli Territorial Compromises (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–36; Dov Schwartz, Challenge and Crisis in Rabbi Kook’s Circle (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2001; Hebrew); Don Seeman, “God’s Honor, Violence and the State,” in From Swords into Plowshares? Reflections on Religion and Violence, ed. Robert W. Jenson and Eugene Korn (https://www.amazon.com/Plowshares-into-Swords-Reflections-Religion-ebook/dp/ B00P11EGOE 2014), Kindle ed.; and Don Seeman, “Violence, Ethics, and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought,” JAAR 73, no. 4 (2004): 1015–1048. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) founded what became the Israel Chief Rabbinate and is to this day the revered, dominant figure in Orthodox Religious Zionism, especially that branch which continues to see the creation of the State of Israel as “the first flowering” of messianic redemption. 11 I tried to translate Rabbi Aviner’s usages back into rabbinic Hebrew with no success. His ideas, I submit, largely come from outside the Jewish tradition and cannot easily be traced to rabbinic texts. 12 On this debate, see Menachem Hirshman, Torah Lekhol Ba’ei Olam: Zerem Universali BeSifrut Ha-Tana’im Ve-Yahaso Le-Hokhmat He-Amim (Tel Aviv: Ha-Kibbutz ha-Meuhad, 1999) and “Rabbinic Universalism in the Second and Third Centuries,” Harvard Theological Review 93 (2000), 101–115. Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed Torah?13 He also forces himself to adopt a particularist stance concerning the messianic era: if the Torah is appropriate only for those whose inner nature is Jewish, then the essential difference between Jew and Gentile must be preserved in the days of the messiah. R. Aviner thus once again takes a stand in a controversial matter, without even admitting that there is a controversy on the issue.14 Aviner’s view here is that of Halevi, but it is not clear that he realizes Halevi’s view is not the only one in the tradition.15 Rabbi Aviner is not only the rabbi of a settlement in Samaria, and not only the founder and head of a yeshiva deeply identified with the hopes for the actual construction of a third Temple, he is also a man of the wider world. Born (during the Holocaust), raised, and educated in France, he holds academic degrees, and served as an officer in the IDF. He knows what sort of an outcry his words are likely to arouse, and hence hastens to assure us that he is not a racist, at least not in the accepted sense of the word. His self-confessed racism is not biological—Jews come in all skin shades. No, his racism is spiritual. Jews are indeed superior to other nations, but their superiority is 13 I am aware of the many solutions offered for this problem. For Rabbi Aviner (and before him Halevi, not to mention the authors of the Zohar), conversion presents a problem. For Maimonides, in contrast, conversion is not a problem that needs to be solved. Once, while teaching an introductory course in Judaism at a leading university in the US, I mentioned the possibility of conversion to Judaism. Two of the students, both of them daughters of Baptist ministers, were surprised and asked, “How is it possible to choose to be chosen?” Apparently, it is Halevi, and not Maimonides, who is taught in Baptist Sunday Schools in the USA. 14 See Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on Judaism and the Jewish People (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991); Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006), chapter 7 (henceforth: Confrontation) and “Maimonides’ True Religion— for Jews, or All Humanity?” Me’orot 7, no. 1 (2008), http://www.yctorah.org/content/ view/436/10/. I wonder how R. Aviner would react if he heard me pointing out to my students that the patriarchs and even Moses (before Sinai) were, at most, Noahides, not Jews. It may be that sensitivity to that point stands behind the rabbinic aggadah—apparently rejected by Maimonides—that the patriarchs fulfilled all the commandments. On the patriarchs not observing the commandments of the Torah, see Kellner, Confrontation, 76–77. See further, Gerald Blidstein, “R. Menahem Ha-Me’iri: Aspects of an Intellectual Profile,” Journal of Jewish Thought & Philosophy 5 (1995): 65–66 and (rather surprisingly), R. Yehudah Amital at https://www.etzion.org.il/en/yaakov-was-reciting-shema. Compare further Commentary on the Mishnah, Hullin 7:6 and the discussion in Kellner and Gillis, Maimonides the Universalist, 58. 15 On Halevi on proselytes in the messianic era, see Daniel J. Lasker, “Proselyte Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Thought of Judah Halevi,” Jewish Quarterly Review 81 (1990): 75–91. 5 6 We Are Not Alone connected to their unique Jewish souls, souls whose “operating instructions” are written in the Torah. This superiority brings nothing but blessings to all other nations. I think fairness demands that we point out that Aviner is doing himself a disservice here. There is no doubt that he accepts the possibility of conversion to Judaism.16 Thus, despite what he says about himself, he cannot be a racist in any contemporary sense of the term. He seems to be using “racism” here as shorthand for essentialism.17 R. Aviner is willing to accept the consequences of his position on Jewish superiority. In a book aimed at soldiers in the Israeli army, he writes: Death is ritual impurity [tum’ah] since its essence is the diminishment of the divine vitality in created entities. The measure of ritual impurity matches the measure of the departure of this divine vitality. Gentile graves in an enclosure do not cause ritual impurity according to the basic law [ikkar ha-din] since their souls are not so holy and the difference between their bodies without a soul and their bodies with a soul is not all that great. Therefore the departure of the soul in their case does not constitute so terrible a crisis. … Jewish graves do impart ritual impurity since their souls are holy; however, their bodies without a soul are not holy and, therefore, the departure of the soul is the terrible crisis of the departure of the divine vitality from the body—and this constitutes the ritual impurity of death.18 According to this horrifying text, the difference between a live Jew and a dead Jew is immense; the difference between a live Gentile and a dead Gentile is much smaller.19 Rabbi Aviner neither says nor even implies that the killing of 16 See, for example, http://www.havabooks.co.il/article_ID.asp?id=1185. 17 Further on this, see Kellner, Confrontation, 26–31. 18 Aviner, Me-Hayil el Hayil (5759), 230, cited by Yosef Ahituv, “State and Army According to the Torah: Realism and Mysticism in the Circles of Merkaz Ha-Rav,” in Aviezer Ravitzky, ed., Dat u-Medinah ba-Hagut ha-Yehudit be-Me’ah ha-Esrim ( Jerusalem: Israel Democracy Institute, 2005), 466 (Hebrew). For a view similar to that of R. Aviner, see R. Hayyim ibn Attar (c. 1696–1743)’s popular Or Ha-Hayyim on Lev. 20:26 and Numbers 19:2. For Zoharic sources see Zohar, Genesis, Hayyei Sarah, 131a and Genesis Va-Yehi, 220a. 19 Compare R. Aviner’s words in his commentary on the Kuzari (part 1, 136): “In that we are the segulah of humanity, we are also the heart of humanity. We are more human than the others.” See also p. 302. For others who hold this view that Jews are “more human” then Gentiles, see below, note 28. Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed a Gentile is a light matter, but will all his readers understand that?20 It is not my intention here to protest rabbinic irresponsibility, but, rather, to illustrate a certain, unfortunately widespread, view concerning the inner nature of the Jewish people.21 Further, a propos R. Aviner, one of the very many weekly newsletters distributed in Israeli Orthodox synagogues (at least in the non-haredi world) is Ma’ayanei ha-Yeshuah (Wellsprings of Salvation—Is. 12:3) whose very title betrays its messianic orientation. The leaflet (at sixteen glossy pages per week, one of the biggest of such pamphlets) is associated with the late Chief Rabbi Mordecai Eliyahu, his son R. Shmuel Eliyahu of Safed, R. Shlomo Aviner and R. Yaakov Ariel of Ramat-Gan. Not untypical of Ma’ayanei ha-Yeshuah’s editorial stance is a statement that created a certain uproar in Israel. In its edition of 18 Tevet 5771, an editorial was printed responding to criticism leveled against Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu—who had issued a ruling forbidding Jews to rent or sell property to Arabs. The editorial asked rhetorically if those rabbis who had criticized Rabbi Eliyahu would also refuse to participate in the concentration (rikkuz) of Amalekites in death camps (mahanot hashmadah). Given that the unsigned editorial also takes an (irrelevant) swipe at the “primitive religion which has strangled the world for 2010 years,” it is fair to assume that the author of the editorial is Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, whose obsession with Christianity is well known and well attested.22 20 Bear in mind that this text is addressed to teenaged inductees into the Israeli army. Aviner himself rejects this implication of his writings, in a criticism of the book Torat Ha-Melekh. See further in Tessa Satherley, “‘The Simple Jew’: The ‘Price Tag’ Phenomenon, Vigilantism, and Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh’s Political Kabbalah,” Melilah 10 (2013): 67 21 See Shabbat 86b for the view that non-Jews are rendered gross by the fact that they eat gross things. (One wonders about non-Jewish vegans or Jews who eat nonkosher food.) One is tempted to see this rabbinic statement as support for a “nurture” as opposed to “nature” approach. See below, note 28, for sources that emphasize the ontological inferiority of non-Jews. 22 R. Aviner was a close disciple of the late R. Zvi Yehudah Kook, and is an associate of R. Tzvi Thau (born 1937). All three of these highly influential rabbis are strong believers in the doctrine of innate Jewish superiority. Aviner is a man revered by thousands of disciples and reviled by hundreds of enemies. His obsession with Christianity is well known and well documented (see below in chapter 7). For a good example of his obsession with Christianity, see his article on an alleged “secret Vatican document” concerning Catholic support for the final solution in, not surprisingly, Ma’ayanei Ha-Yeshuah, no. 403, 28 Sivan, 5769. When I sent a letter of protest to the editors of the leaflet, R. Aviner replied to me that the “document” was an example of “literary license” on his part. 7 8 We Are Not Alone R. Aviner is by far not the most extreme exponent of the view that Jews are by their very nature different from and superior to non-Jews. With respect to shockingly extremist views, let us examine one notorious example: Torat ha-Melekh purports to be a disinterested and entirely theoretical halakhic discussion of the circumstances under which it is permissible to kill Gentiles. The authors, Yizhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur of Yeshivat Od Yosef Hai in the West Bank village of Yizhar, start their discussion from the (largely uncontested in the halakhic tradition) assumption that the sixth commandment only outlaws the killing of Jews.23 They go on from there to the astounding (and wholly unsupported in the halakhic tradition) assumption that the lives of Gentiles who are not “resident aliens” have no meaning and no legitimacy. Having “established” that, they then spend more than 200 pages misusing Maimonides to examine the (for them limited) circumstances under which it is not permissible to kill Gentiles. One example of their twisted conclusions: that it is reasonable to assume that it is permitted (and perhaps required) to kill children “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”24 Torat ha-Melekh appeared with the approbations (haskamot) of four rabbis: R. Yizhak Ginsburgh (author of Barukh Ha-Gever, a book memorializing Barukh Goldstein, the murderer of Muslim worshippers in the Cave of Makhpelah Mosque in Hebron on Purim day, 1994),25 R. Zalman Nehemiah Goldberg (who later withdrew his approbation), the now late R. Ya’akov Yosef, son of R. Ovadiah Yosef (former Israeli chief rabbi and leading light of the Shas Party), and R. Dov Lior, rabbi of Kiryat Arba near Hebron, who explicitly stated that the subject matter of the book is rather relevant (dai aktuali) to our day and age. 23 Which does not mean, of course, that the murder of Gentiles is permitted! Rather, punishment for such offenses is handed over to God, whose punishment is much surer than that of human courts, given the well-known restrictions on the possibility of capital punishment in Jewish courts. See Maimonides, “Laws of the Murderer,” i. 1 and ii. 10. 24 Yizhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, Torat ha-Melekh: Dinei Nefashot bein Yisrael le-Amim (Yizhar: Yeshivat Od Yosef Hai, 2010), 207. I originally wrote these words under the shadow of the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar (11 March 2011), perpetrated by two Palestinian teenagers who agreed with Torat Ha-Melekh’s reasoning, but applied it to Jews. 25 On Ginsburgh, see: Shlomo Fischer, “Radical Religious Zionism from the Collective to the Individual,” in Kabbalah and Contemporary Spiritual Revival, ed. Boaz Huss (Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2011): 285–309; Motti Inbari, Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009); Raphael Sagi, Radicalism Meshihi Be-Medinat Yisrael: Perakim Be-Sod Ha-Tikkun Ha-Meshihi Bi-Haguto Shel Ha-Rav Yizhak Ginsberg (Tel Aviv: Gevanim, 2015); Satherley, “‘The Simple Jew’”; Seeman, “God’s Honor, Violence, and the State”; and Seeman, “Violence, Ethics, and Divine Honor in Modern Jewish Thought”: 1015–48. Jewish Voices Rejected; A Jewish Voice Affirmed The claim that the book is a disinterested theoretical discussion is given the lie by this approbation.26 The publication of the book created a furor in Israel, leading to the arrest of one of its authors on the charge of “incitement.” Rabbi Lior was “invited” by the police to answer questions concerning his approbation of the book, an “invitation” he declined. Rabbi Goldberg withdrew his approbation for the book; he is reported to have said that it contains errors in Jewish law and things which the human intellect cannot accept (ein lahem makom ba-sekhel ha-enoshi). In light of the police investigation into the rabbis who wrote approbations for the book, fifty leading rabbis in the “Zionist-Religious” community organized a protest meeting in Jerusalem’s Ramada Hotel (18 August 2010). They claimed not to be supporting the book Torat ha-Melekh itself, but protesting limitations on the freedom of speech of rabbis implied by the police investigations. Statements for and against Torat ha-Melekh continue to show up on blogs and in Israeli newspapers.27 26 Some of the “pearls” found in this book include the claim that the existence of a Gentile who is not a “resident alien” (and in this day and age, no Gentiles can achieve that status) “has no legitimacy” (Torat ha-Melekh 43); Jews and Gentiles share nothing in common, but, in effect, belong to different orders of reality (ibid., 45); a Gentile who violates one of the seven Noachide commandments (stealing, for example, even something of slight value, or, in the eyes of the authors of the book, undermining Jewish sovereignty over any part of the Land of Israel) is to be executed without advance warning or due halakhic process. The Jew who witnesses the act can serve as judge and executioner (ibid., 49–51); and so it goes in depressing and blood-curdling detail. Torat ha-Melekh’s views are based on readings of Kabbalistic texts mediated through the teachings of Rabbi Y. Ginsburgh, cited as direct inspiration by the authors of the book. I regret to note that the idea that Jews and Gentiles do not share the same human essence is also found in circles that identify with modernity and enlightenment, far from R. Ginsburgh and his morally twisted views. See, for example, Hershel Schachter, “Women Rabbis?” Hakirah: The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 11 (2011): 19–23. On p. 20, R. Schachter, distinguished professor of Talmud and Rosh Kollel at Yeshiva University, writes, as if it is totally uncontroversial: “Hashem [God] created all men B’Tzelem Elokim [in the image of God], and Bnai Yisrael [ Jews] with an even deeper degree of this Tzelem Elokim—known as Banim LaMakom [Children of the Omnipresent].” I hasten to add that R. Schachter (who bases himself here, apparently, on a [mis-] reading of Avot, iii. 14) would be horrified to have his views connected to Torat ha-Melekh. I cite him only as an example of the casual way in which many Jews assume some sort of ontological divide between Jews and Gentiles. Further (and unfortunate) expressions of his views may be heard in the following lecture: http://www.torahweb.org/audioFrameset.html#audio=rsch_050204. For the text of Avot iii. 14, see below, chapter 5, note 43. 27 For one of many studies on Torat ha-Melekh, see Avinoam Rosenak, Sedakim (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2013), 166–174. Shortly after Torat ha-Melekh’s appearance, I organized a conference about the book at the University of Haifa. All of the speakers but one were going to 9 10 We Are Not Alone There is much precedent for these views about the nature of the Jewish people in the Jewish tradition, but such views were never made the basis for policy proposals as has happened over the last generation.28 As important, they are far from the only views to be found. To that we now turn. 2. GOD AND ABRAHAM: WHO CHOSE WHOM? According to Maimonides, God’s choice of the Jews was actually a consequence of Abraham’s discovery of God and not an historically necessary event. It is worth paying close attention to Maimonides’s description of Abraham’s career, as presented in the first chapter of “Laws Concerning Idolatry.”29 In this chapter, Maimonides presents what might be called a natural history of religion. The Bible presents its readers with an implicit problem: Given that Noah and his immediate descendants knew God, how did the world become entirely criticize the book. The sole exception was one of the book’s authors. I thought it only fair to let him respond to the half-dozen critics who were going to speak. Inviting him was enough to arouse such a furor on campus that the then president of the university decided to cancel the event. An early example of “cancel culture.” 28 For studies of Judaic particularism, see Moshe Hallamish, “The Kabbalists’ Attitude to the Nations of the World,” in “Joseph Baruch Sermonetta Memorial Volume,” ed. Aviezer Ravitzky, special issue, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 14 (1998): 289–312 (Hebrew); Elliot Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jerome Gellman, “Jewish Mysticism and Morality—Kabbalah and its Ontological Dualities,” Archiv fuer Religionsgeschichte 9 (2008): 23–35; Hanan Balk, “The Soul of a Jew and the Soul of a Non-Jew: An Inconvenient Truth and the Search for an Alternative,” Hakirah—The Flatbush Journal of Jewish Law and Thought 16 (2013): 47–76; Hartley Lachter, “Israel as a Holy People in Medieval Kabbalah,” in Holiness in Jewish Thought, ed. Alan Mittleman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 137–159; For some particularly hair-raising examples of Jewish particularism run amok in the writings of the Maharal of Prague ( Judah Leib ben Bezalel Loewe, 1525–1609), see Derekh ha-Hayyim III.14 (end of the chapter), Gur Aryeh on Exodus 19:22, Nezah Yisrael, chapter 3 and Tiferet Yisrael, chapter 32. These studies and texts all deal with Judaic particularism in kabbalistic contexts. For philosophic contexts, see Hannah Kasher, Elyon Al Kol ha-Goyyim: Tsiyyunei Derekh baPhilosophiah ha-Yehudit be-Sugiyat ha-Am ha-Nivhar (Tel Aviv: Idra, 2018); and Menachem Kellner, “On Universalism and Particularism in Judaism,” Da’at 36 (1996): v–xv. See further, Jonathan Garb, “The Conversion of the Jews: Identity as Ontology in Modern Kabbalah,” forthcoming in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Religious Responses to Modernity (Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities/Berlin Brandenberg Academy of Sciences, December 2015). 29 For a helpful discussion of this text, which supports the reading I am about to give it, see Lawrence Kaplan, “Maimonides on the Singularity of the Jewish People,” Da’at 15 (1985): v–xxvii. Thank you for viewing this free sampler of We Are Not Alone. To purchase this volume, please visit www.academicstudiespress.com or your book supplier.