I read Gersonides’ discussion regarding divine knowledge with much interest, as it is so against the tenor of common Orthodox Jewish belief regarding God’s omniscience. Looking around the Orthodox world today, I think we can safely declare Maimonides the victor in his position of God’s absolute knowledge, even with all his mystery regarding the nature of God’s knowledge.
As I continued through the chapters, I thought to myself, this is well and good, to say that God is ignorant of particulars, but this cannot possibly be aligned with the Torah. In fact, like we saw last time in class when it came to divine attributes, Gersonides accuses Maimonides of falling prey to theological needs, rather than philosophical truths. Indeed, he does so again somewhat backhandedly when he writes at the very beginning of our section (116), “Now that we have philosophically proven that Maimonides’ counterargument against the objections of the philosophers is not satisfactory - it is evident that the dispute with them should be philosophical and not from the Torah…” This implies, again, that Maimonides was making a purely Torah argument without philosophical basis at all, which is quite interesting.
So when I came upon the last chapter for this section, how Gersonides plans to accord the Torah with his philosophically proven (to him anyway) theory that God knows the generalities and not the particulars, I knew I was in for a treat. As I expected, his proofs from the Torah are hardly proofs, and most interesting of all is that he makes no recourse for the Talmud or any other rabbinic work, since I doubt he could. I cannot think of a single passage of the Talmud that could support this theory.
But even if there was, he explains why he stuck to biblical passages - he wanted to show that the Torah does not necessarily disagree with it. He says, there is no reason to deny a valid theory, and in fact (136) “it is proper to interpret these passages according to the philosophical understanding, so long as none of the fundamental principles of the Torah are destroyed.” (I’m fairly curious if Gersonides explicitly states what he believes the “fundamental principles of the Torah are.” At least, we can see what he was fighting for was important to him, so things like free will and prophecy seem fundamental to him.) And interestingly, he marshalls Maimonides as a support for the concept that divine knowledge could be only general, or at least it doesn’t contradict the Torah. I expected him to find support in Maimonides for the idea that you need not deny a philosophical principles if it doesn't contradict fundamental principles, which Maimonides explicitly says regarding creationism and the Torah, but I think Gersonides found that as obvious, and didn’t feel the need to look to Maimonides for that.
I say this all as a preamble for an interesting thing I found, where there seems to be a convergence between Gersonides and Maimonides on one particular verse - that of Psalms 33:15. It is: “He who fashions the hearts of them all, who discerns all their doings.” Gersonides argument seems to be (and this is why Feldman italicized it) that the verse says multiple times, “all”, in order to show that all of this happened at once, in that God knows the generalities and the the particular occurrences. He writes, (135) “In this way God considers all their deeds, i.e. simultaneously, not in the sense that His knowledge refers to the particulars as particular.”
This is a pretty weak interpretation, as I’m sure he was aware. I think there was a reason he needed to figure out an interpretation of this passage. I think he saw something in rabbinic literature and he wanted to answer for it. Perhaps, he knew of a passage of Maimonides about that piece of rabbinic literature, and wanted to show he could answer it. I think that’s why he put this here, and why he offered something, anything, so that he could respond.
I refer to Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2, and Maimonides’ Commentary to the Mishnah there. The Mishnah states, “On Rosh Hashanah, all the world passes before Him like Bnei Maron, as it says, (Psalms 33:15) ‘He that fashions the hearts of them all, that considers all their doings.’” Well, there you have it. A fairly explicit rabbinic passage that speaks of God as if God knows particulars. The Talmud seeks to interpret “Bnei Maron”, all interpretations that conceive of God peering into every person individually, on their own. And to prove it, the Mishnah uses the very verse that Gersonides seeks to use to its opposite. So this is one hurdle that perhaps Gersonides sought to overcome - the rabbinic interpretation. By leaving out any rabbinic sources, and showing why the Torah doesn’t contradict his theory, he implicitly says that the rabbis could be wrong about this. This isn’t a problem - Maimonides says this several times.
However, perhaps Gersonides was responding to something Maimonides says there. Maimonides writes, (I’m translating from Kafih’s version) “The simple meaning of this language is clear as you can see, but the secret of its topic is undoubtedly very difficult.” What did Maimonides find difficult to explain?
Many have attempted to explain this. Perhaps more well-known is Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller in his commentary to the Mishnah, Tosafot Yom Tov, where he writes that the thing that bothered the Rambam is the concept that God looks at each person individually to judge them, yet the Talmud also says that God does this all in one glance. These are impossible and paradoxical statements, and therefore difficult to understand. I saw that Abravenel, on Emor, suggests that Maimonides couldn’t understand why there is such a thing as Rosh Hashanah for judgement is judgement day is every day, not one day a year. Rav Kook writes in several places (I saw one quoted in Tov Ro’i on the Talmud Rosh Hashanah 16a) that Maimonides had a hard time understanding how the passage of time, viewing each person individually, could be related to God.
But I think this is just one more time that Maimonides was saying that we cannot understand the nature of God’s knowledge. He writes this in several places, for example, Laws of the Foundation 2:10, Repentance 5:5, and it’s almost his go-to to explain all of the problems he encounters with his theory of God’s absolute knowledge. By throwing this out there, he is just trying to get more traction to his declaration of the differences in God’s knowledge to our own. That is, that the Mishnah shows us God must have knowledge of particulars, but we can’t fathom the nature of it.
Gersonides explicitly frowns upon this “move”. He writes (132) “It is evidently not necessary for us to accept the difference between divine and human knowledge postulated by Maimonides.” So what does he do? He reinterprets the verse to its complete opposite, in order to render Maimonides’ comment, and the plain meaning of the Mishnah, obsolete. Perhaps that explains why he introduces this interpretation that seems quite weak.
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