JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

drinking, no bathing, no anointing, no sexual intercourse; but
the righteous sit with crowns upon their heads and enjoy the
splendor of the Shekhinah” in the following manner: “‘crowns
upon their heads’ means the survival of the soul by virtue of
the survival of knowledge, the two being one and the same
thing; ‘enjoying the splendor of the Shekhinah’ means taking
delight in the intellection of the Creator, even as the holy
ḥayyot and the other angelic orders delight in their comprehension
of His existence.” Maimonides, it should be noted,
distinguished between the World-to-Come, which is an incorporeal
state, and Paradise, which is a place here on earth.
The treatise known as Perakim be-Haẓlaḥah (“Chapters on
Beatitude”) has been wrongly ascribed to Maimonides, but it
expresses views similar to his. Affirming that felicity is possible
in this world and the next, the treatise distinguishes between
the ecstatic experience of prophecy and the ultimate felicity
of the soul’s union with God in the next world. Prophecy is
described as the stage of human perfection at which the rational
soul, like a polished mirror, reflects the light of the supernal
world. At this stage one is happy, though one’s joy is
tempered with the fear of God. Prophecy can be reached only
after a search for wisdom and after subjecting the senses to a
rigorous discipline. Imagination functions at this level under
the complete control of the intellect (cf. Maimonides’ letter
in Koveẓ Teshuvot ha-Rambam, 2:39b, where the same motif
is quoted in the name of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s commentary
on Ex. 23:20). The ultimate felicity, on the other hand, is the
reward which all righteous may expect in the next world according
to the measure of their worthiness. The author adds
that this view of the afterlife is in agreement with the views
of the philosophers, whereby he seems to refer to al-Farabi
(in his earlier works) and Avicenna. The author assures his
reader that every man can rise to a rank close to Moses’ (for
which there is a parallel in Guide, 3:51), and, echoing neoplatonic
traditions, he states that ultimate felicity consists in the
union with God following the purification of the soul and its
illumination by the supernal light.
The meaning of beatitude and its implication for Jewish
culture became a hotly debated issue, constituting the
so-called Maimonidean Controversy of the 13th century. Its
first phase (1202–4) concerned the fate of the human soul after
death and the resurrection of the body; the second phase
(1232–35) was about the composition of Jewish education; the
third phase (c. 1290) pertained to the allegorical interpretation
of the Torah; and the fourth (1303–5) to the validity of astrology,
the discipline that most captured scientific naturalism, in
traditional Jewish society. All of these debates were aspects of a
larger question: what is the necessary and sufficient knowledge
for the attainment of the ultimate end of human life defined
as beatitude? The debates were exceptionally acrimonious
because what was at stake was the salvation of the individual
soul, a topic hotly debated not only among Jews but also between
Judaism and Christianity. As Jewish rationalism spread
in Spain, Provençe, and Italy during the 13th century, Jewish
philosophers differentiated between two orders of felicity: one
beatitude
in this world and one of a still higher degree in the hereafter.
This distinction is found in Shem Tov ibn *Falaquera’s Sefer
ha-Ma’alot (ed. L. Venetianer (1894), 15–19), where the “true
happiness of the soul at its ultimate perfection” is said to lead
to the eternal life. Invoking the notion of a twofold felicity,
*Hillel b. Samuel in his Tagmulei ha-Nefesh (Lyck, 1874) states
that humans, through the perfection of the moral and intellectual
virtues, may achieve a rank even higher than that of
the angels, but the beatific vision becomes possible only after
death. The perfected human is then illumined by the “eternal
light,” rises from rank to rank, and at the end is granted the
vision of God. This state, in Hillel’s view, is the meaning of
Paradise (ibid., 23a–24a). Hillel’s analysis of ultimate felicity
manifests a familiarity with and influence of Christian scholastic
discourse, especially of Thomas *Aquinas.
Jewish philosophers who accepted *Averroes’ epistemology
either openly or implicitly denied the validity of the belief
in individual immortality. Thus, for example, Samuel ibn Tibbon
appears to subscribe to Averroes’ doctrine of the unity of
souls, when in his Ma’amar Yikkavu ha-Mayim (ed. M. Bisliches,
Pressburg, 1837) he says of the soul which has become
perfect and separate from matter at death that it conjoins with
the agent intellect, and that “they become one single thing,
for now the soul becomes divine, of a superior and immortal
order, like the agent intellect with which it is united” (p. 91).
It may be assumed, especially in the light of his commentary
on Ecclesiastes, that Ibn Tibbon speaks here of a “total fusion”
which leaves no room for individual survival (see G. Vajda,
Recherches sur la philosophie et la Kabbale (1962), 27 n. 3).
*Levi b. Gershom, on the other hand, upheld the notion of individual
immortality and of individual degrees of bliss in the
hereafter. In his Milḥamot Adonai (1:13) he says that the “degrees
of the happy ones” vary greatly according to the degree
of unity achieved by the acquired intellect in its conception
of the intelligibles. The degree of bliss in the hereafter – identified
by him with Paradise – depends on the degree and type
of knowledge achieved while on earth.
Traditionalist Reaction
The pronounced intellectualism of the philosophers’ concept
of beatitude provoked a great deal of indignant protest from
the traditionalists who regarded the life of piety rather than
intellectual pursuits as the gateway to eternal felicity. The
kabbalist Jacob b. Sheshet *Gerondi (in his Meshiv Deva rim
Nekhoḥim; see Vajda, op. cit., 110–1) attacked Samuel ibn Tibbon’s
interpretation of the ladder in Jacob’s dream as an allegory
of man’s intellectual progress. The Zohar was profoundly
concerned with ultimate felicity and could be viewed as a dramatization
of an ethical theory about the intrinsically good
life as well as an implicit polemic against the systematic discourses
of the rational philosophers. For the Zohar the Torah
itself is considered as the source of the well-lived life in this
world and the blissful life of the World-to-Come. Unlike the
philosophers, for whom cognizing intelligibles culled from the
observation of nature leads to enlightenment, for the Zohar,
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 3 239