Winter 1984 - 1985 - Quarterly Review

QUARTERLY REVIEW, WINTER 1984
all Israel at Mt. Sinai and therein lies their special place in Judaism. We
shall, therefore, give attention to some of the Ten Commandments
individually.
"I am the Eternal, your God, who took you
out of the land of Egypt." (Exod. 20:2)
It is the normal course of traditional Jewish thought to express itself
in community or group terms. "All Israel is responsible for one
another" (BT Shebucot 39a) is typical of this pattern of thought as is
the thoroughgoing use of "we" throughout the liturgy. No doubt it is
this tendency of thought that raised the question, "Why were the Ten
Commandments spoken by God in the singular form?" (Pesikta
Rabbati, 21). Many answers have been suggested, but one of the best
of them is that at Sinai God appeared to each individual differently. To
one, God seemed to sit; to another, God seemed to stand. Yet another
perceived God as a youth, while someone else received the revelation
of God as an old man (Pesikta Rabbati, 21). This is not a claim that God
is any one of these, 2 but rather a statement about the need of people to
personalize their experience of God and Judaism's belief that God
agrees to such personalization.
This stance has made Jewish thinking very uncomfortable about
"defining" God too closely. Indeed, it would be considered arrogant
to try to do so. Who are we, mere mortals, to close the divine infinity
into measurements we have set? How do we dare tell others that our
vision of God is the only true vision? In this regard it is interesting how
R. Abrhaham b. David of Posquierres responded to Maimonides's
dogmatic statement that those who believed God has a shape or form
of any sort were heretics (Maimonides's Code, Laws of Penitence,
3:7). He stated:
Why does he call such a person a heretic? How many greater and
better persons than him [Maimonides] accepted such a notion
according to what they saw in biblical texts and even more so from
what they saw in some Jewish lore which confused their minds?
R. Abraham did not believe in God's corporeality, as he himself states,
but neither did he believe that anyone had the right to classify those
who did as heretics. The divine reality appeared to great and good
people in many ways. It was unfair to characterize others' views as
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