Do We Need the Torah?

IF OUR ULTIMATE DESTINY is defined in terms of intellectual perfection, which involves knowledge of the sciences and metaphysics, and if such knowledge is attainable through human reason, as Gersonides firmly believed, then one could well wonder why a divine revelation, in particular the Torah, was given. Gersonides’ whole enterprise of showing the philosophical provability of the fundamental truths of metaphysics, as they pertain to our true happiness, reveals his complete confidence in the powers of reason. Was Gersonides, then, a ‘pure philosopher’, one who, like Spinoza, believed in the absolute autonomy and sufficiency of philosophy? Was his adherence to Judaism just a formal, or nominal, expression of familial and ethnic loyalty, which afforded him a safe place in an acknowledged tradition? After all, in the Middle Ages one could not just write ‘non-affiliated’ on one's identification papers.

These questions resonate with the venerable problem of the contrast and perhaps conflict between human reason and divine revelation. Already in the Talmud some of the sages warn us of keeping our speculations within definite limits, and in particular of refraining from enquiring into deep and lofty questions pertaining to cosmology. The famous story of the four sages who entered Paradise, only one of whom returned whole, is another expression of the rabbinic reluctance to engage in metaphysical and cosmological speculations, which in one case at least led to heresy. Similar reservations were expressed by early Christian thinkers, even those who were philosophically trained. Tertullian, for example, enunciated the loaded question: ‘What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?’, implying that philosophy and revelation have nothing to do with each other. A little later Augustine recorded his tortuous journey from Neoplatonic philosophy to Christianity, which began with a confession of his dissatisfaction with philosophy and his ultimate salvation through faith in divine revelation.

However, with the gradual and ultimately successful assimilation of Greek philosophy and science, first in the Arabic-speaking world and then later in the LatinWest, it was no longer possible to dismiss philosophy as dangerous, irrelevant, and superfluous. An honest reading of Plato, Aristotle, or Plotinus revealed that the Greeks too were interested in some of the same questions as the theologians and that their answers could not be rejected out of hand.