Saturday 26 April 2014

Maimonides and the many [Rabbinic] heresies

Maimonides [Rambam] is the most famous Rabbi and legal authority, post -Talmud. He calls many groups "heretics", and that includes those who reject the man-made oral law. however, he says some interesting things which, if he uses the logic he was so renowned for, would also classify the entire rabbinic enterprise as heretics.

Thus, in his Hilchot teshuva Ch.3:8 he writes:

"one who says that though the Torah came from God, the Creator has replaced one mitzvah with another one and nullified the original Torah, like the Arabs [and the Christians]."

It just so happens that this is precisely what the rabbis do throughout the Talmud, and say explicitly in Erubin 21b - with regards to their new laws.  They also do this in their rewriting of   the Torah into a new Testament, namely the Oral Law. Rambam himself is guilty of this in his slavish  assent to most of the absurdities of the Talmud - with the exception of his rejecting its astrology and superstitions.
Thus, he rewrites the laws of purity in his laws of Mikvaot, changing the meaning of the words the Torah uses, and converting them to the new concept of immersion in a Mikveh - a rabbinical invention.

It is also interesting, and tragic, that Maimonides correctly states in the previous halacha of Teshuva, that "one who accepts the concept of a ruler, but maintains that there are two or more" is  a "Min" i.e. a sectarian heretic.  The Kabbalah, which Maimonides tried nipping in the bud, has a polytheistic system of sefirot, as well as a dualism, where they claim there are 2 gods, the "god" that has the Holy name, to whom they pray, and a higher "god" with No Name, to which it is forbidden to pray. this is stated explicitly in R' Haim of Volozhin's Nefesh haChaim.  He was the primary student of the Vilna Gaon, and the founder of the Lithuanian Yeshiva Orthodoxy.

However, one does not need the intellectual prowess of Maimonides to see that Kabbala is heresy and polytheistic. And even the huge IQ of Maimonides does not give him immunity of falling into his own definition of heresy, by his assent to the New Rabbinic Testament which he calls the Oral Law.

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