Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine by Diana Lobel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine by Diana Lobel Nahem Ilan Diana Lobel. Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. xix + 216 pp. Diana Lobel is an accomplished scholar of medieval Jewish thought, especially the Sufi elements to be found in Jewish thought in Spain and Egypt. In the present book, she focuses on the approaches of Maimonides and his son, Abraham Maimonides, to the Divine Name and to the possibility of an encounter between mortal and material man and an abstract and eternal God. This is a complex and challenging issue, on both the philosophical and religious levels, and herein lies the importance and the value of the didactic structure of the book. Most of the chapters are brief, each concluding with a clear and concise summary. The book consists of two parts, each made up of seven chapters. In the first part, Lobel compares the father’s and son’s positions concerning the Created Light, the Created Word, and the experience of revelation at Mount Sinai. In the second part, she discusses the phrase ʾehyeh ʾasher ʾehyeh (Exodus 3:14) and the meaning of the Tetragrammaton YHWH in their writings as they relate to the concepts of Eternity and Necessary Existence. In the introduction, Lobel points out that “while Maimonides describes an intellectual process including studying the rules of logic and inference, Abraham emphasizes a spiritual, pietistic process of purification of the heart and mind, without the goal of scientific study of creation” (xvi). And indeed, Abraham Maimonides [End Page 460] adopted a distinctive Sufi position.1 Lobel’s journey begins with Abraham Maimonides’s commentary on the story of the cleft of the rock (Exodus 33:22) and the language with which he emphasizes its visual dimension.2 Inter alia, she compares Abraham’s view to that of his father and of Al-Ghazali. In the second chapter, Lobel discusses the esoteric dimension of Maimonides’s interpretation of the Created Light. In the third chapter, she compares the approaches of Maimonides and Abraham Maimonides to the pillars of smoke and fire, and among other things, examines Judah Halevi’s position regarding the question of God’s presence. In the fourth chapter, Lobel analyzes Abraham’s approach to the Created Light in the preparation for the Sinai event (Exodus 19), observing that “the purpose of the light is to teach something about the divine” (42). Here, too, she demonstrates the affinity between Abraham and Al-Ghazali and the stark difference between father and son, noting that “for Maimonides, a key component of intellectual worship is contemplation of ‘the divine science,’ which includes physics and metaphysics, the natural order through which God governs the universe” (52). In the fifth chapter, Lobel elucidates Maimonides’s stance on the theophanic dimension of the events at Mount Sinai. In the sixth chapter, she compares Maimonides’s view with that of Rabbi Abraham he-Ḥasid, one of Abraham’s teachers, concerning the Created Word at Mount Sinai, as these are reflected in Abraham’s commentary. She demonstrates how he integrates some of the approaches of his two great teachers and emphasizes that in his time, the pietists of Egypt believed that the experience of prophecy lay within their reach as well. The first part concludes with a comparative discussion of the views of Maimonides and Abraham concerning the role of the Created Light in the story of the Israelite nobles’ vision of God (Exodus 24:9–11). The final sentence reads thus: “In his comments to Exodus 19:24 and 24:11, [Abraham Maimonides] suggests that only select individuals can have a glimpse (yalmaḥuhā) of the exalted ideas suggested in his [End Page 461] commentary. Since he is the author of this commentary, Abraham seems to be suggesting that he himself has had glimpses or intuitive flashes of these intellectual and spiritual secrets” (85).3 The phrase ʾehyeh ʾasher ʾehyeh presents us with a linguistic, hermeneutical, and intellectual challenge, especially in its link to the Tetragrammaton, as surveyed briefly by Lobel in the introductory section (chapter 8) to the second part, and in the following chapter, where she demonstrates how Onkelos, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan...