What I Read in August 2011

Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights. I’m not sure why I stayed with this book – all 450 pages of it – since I didn’t like it very much. By the author of The Finkler Question, it is a lengthy exploration of the lives of English Jews as observed and experienced by a disenchanted caricaturist (literally, he draws cartoons) in his middle years.

Charles H. Manekin, On Maimonides. This serves as a companion piece to Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides and is a much tougher read. I comment on the two books, along with one of Maimonides’ perplexities in Maimonides Maimonides.

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimajaro. Since I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, I thought I would give Hemingway’s this collection of his short stories a try. Too male and too mannered for me, but I enjoyed The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber because of what happened to Macomber after he shot the buffalo.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. Sarah, of A Rat in the Book Pile, and I have been reading this together and cross-posting in both of our blogs. So read and comment at either place:
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part II
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part III
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part IV

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse. Despite the grisly title, this is not a grisly book. It is a typical Maigret story. The Inspector considers a crime, he tries to understand the criminals, he eats a bit, he drinks a lot, he solves the mystery.

Martha Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. Not too modern any more, this biography. Published in 1977, it is a feminist take on Alcott’s sometimes difficult life. More comments may follow as I proceed with my Alcott project.

Emile Zola, The Masterpiece. Considered the most autobiographical of his novels, in The Masterpiece Zola gives us the lives of writers and artists in 188s Paris. We learn of the price of success, as well as the costs of failure.

Maimonides Maimonides

This fall I will be co-leading in a course – Believe It or Not – in which we examine various sources of belief. I intend to speak about Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, born 1138). He interests me as a subject because of his efforts to reconcile philosophic truth with revealed truth, as in the Torah.

To learn about the man, I started with Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides. Nuland is a physician, best known for his book How We Die. After some historical and biographical background, Nuland passes rather rapidly over philosophy and theology to report on Maimonides’ medical opinions – not what I was looking for. I need some apparent conflicts between philosophy and revelation as a basis for discussion.

In Charles H. Manekin’s On Maimonides, I find an example:

With respect to creation, however, Maimonides and his philosophical authorities are on opposite sides of the fence. For his most admired authority, Aristotle, held that the world always existed in the way it does now, that it did not come into existence after not existing. Moreover, Aristotle’s conclusion seemed to follow inexorably from principles of his science….

Aristotle’s science was based on the concept of the celestial spheres and is outdated, but the issue is still relevant. If the findings of science seem to conflict with the revelations of your religious tradition, what can you believe?

Maimonides, faced with Aristotle’s opinion that the world is eternal, had to consider the opening verse of Genesis:

 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In my edition of the Bible, the note says

 Verse 1 is a majestic summary of the story of Creation: God is the beginning, nay, the Cause of all things.

This note seems to evade the eternity question. Surely if the Hebrew word actually means beginning, then it indicates a definite point in time and therefore “the heaven and the earth” did not exist previous to that. Seeking the translation of the Hebrew, I consulted knowledgeable in-laws and received this response from Cousin Isaac.

I think I can help a bit, starting with literal translation. The closer we get to Maimonidean philosophy, the further we’ll get from anything I can say anything useful about.

“In the Beginning” is a valid basic translation of “Bereishit,” according to traditional interpretations. That’s essentially how Onkelos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkelos) translates it in his authoritative, tradition-based Aramaic translation. The root of the word, I think most would agree, is R.A.Sh. (as opposed to B.R.A in the next word), which means “head.”

The next word, “Bara,” is I think universally taken to be the verb “created,” with the subject being God and the objects being the heaven and the earth.

I’m pretty sure that traditional normative Jewish belief and interpretation of this verse is indeed that God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else, and that the Universe did not exist until He created it, as reported here.

That is what Maimonides thought also, and he stood his ground, Aristotle to the contrary. So God is eternal, but the universe is not eternal, since it had a beginning and to be eternal is to have no beginning or end. Now we drill down to a deeper problem with language. We assign words to concepts we do not really understand and which therefore we cannot define with other words. As Cousin Isaac says, ”God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else”.  If I understand (!) Maimonides, we can say a stone or a man exists, but to say God exists draws on a different sense of exists. The stone or the man may cease to exist, so existence contrasts being with non being. Ceasing to exist is not possible for God because God is eternal. But then again, eternal is just a word we use. Since it doesn’t apply to anything we have experienced, we cannot conceive of its meaning.