Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Iskander · 05-20-2013, 09:28 AM

Ruah is understood in the sense of ‘Presence’ [the actual presence of Hashem] and ruah hakodesh would be a more explicit form indicating the ‘presence of holiness’.

Once the divine presence is isolated as a concrete temporal divine manifestation , which is what ruah means and also the resident presence in the Holy of Holies, it would be easy to use a gentile form of ruah hakoseh [Holy Spirit] to claim that one is speaking in the Presence of Hashem [God]

In Judaism, the messiah is often understood as pre-existing and waiting in Heaven for the time to come and redeem the nation of Israel.

The Christian Trinity of one God with three manifestations is not all that alien to Jewish thinking.

semiopen · 05-21-2013, 07:06 AM

It's possible to argue this the other way.

How the Trinity Impacted Judaism — via Kabbalah

Quote:

There’s a very respectable school of Jewish scholarship that sees the influence of the Trinity on Judaism in the Sefirot. I first learned about it in a graduate seminar with the late intellectual historian Amos Funkenstein. He taught that the Sefirot actually emerged in the early Middle Ages as a sort of Jewish retort to the Trinity, a case of rabbinic one-upsmanship: You got, what, three faces of God? Hey, we got 10. Badda-bing. I think Prof. Funkenstein had a more elegant way of phrasing it, if memory serves. But that was the idea.

In fact, the identification of the Sefirot as a Trinity-on-steroids is much older than Funkenstein. As early as the 13th century, the kabbalist Rabbi Abraham Abulafia attacked the Sefirot as a form of polytheism, no better in his mind than the Trinity. In 17th century Italy, Leon of Modena argued that Kabbalah and its Sefirot — which by then had become a central theme in Jewish thought — were a degradation of Judaism’s pure monotheistic ideal.

[linked from BibleInt]

Some of the comments touch on the "traditional" view that the Sefirot are older than the middle ages.

Quote:

The sefirot and Zohar date back to the time of the second temple, contrary to the misguided scholarly view.

Stupid scholars :Cheeky:

Sarpedon · 05-21-2013, 08:55 AM

Unfortunately, Mary never said whether he was circumcised or not.

mountainman · 05-21-2013, 06:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Could the Holy Ghost be Jewish?

//

This articles traces the third part of the Trinity to the Jewish ru'aḥ ha-kodesh (literally, "spirit of holiness") via Philo.

About the attestation for the "Holy Spirit" via Philo:

Quote:

The first figure to do this in either Judaism or Christianity was Philo of Alexandria, an early first-century Jewish philosopher who sought in his Greek works to integrate Judaism with the Hellenistic school of Neoplatonism, which viewed the universe as emanating in stages from the One, the unknowable origin of all things, to the material world. One way in which he did this was by developing the idea of the ru’aḥ ha-kodesh as a distinct spiritual sphere midway between God and man, the realm of “pure knowledge in which every wise man naturally shares.”

Philo turned out to have much more of an influence on Christianity than on Judaism, in which he was a peripheral figure who was soon forgotten. The Christian notion of the Holy Spirit as the third element of a triadic God whose two other constituents are “the Father” and “the Son” — that is, the creator God of the Old Testament and the divine Jesus of the New Testament — derives largely from him, though Philo himself was no more Trinitarian in his approach than were the rabbis.

But the Christian notion of the Holy Spirit as the third element of a triadic God does not really get airplay until after Nicaea, and when it does it appears to be highly influenced by the Platonist philosophy of Plotinus.

εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Toto · 06-02-2013, 04:09 PM

Follow up:

How Greek Philosophy Influenced Both Christian and Jewish Theology

Quote:

Any resemblance between the triune God of Christianity and the 10 sefirot of the God of Kabbalah almost certainly derives from this influence rather than from the workings of Christianity on Judaism. While the concept of the sefirot is non-Unitarian, dividing — as did neo-Platonism and neo-Pythagoreanism — the oneness of the Divinity into a series of gradations descending from the ultimate Source of all things to the material world, it is not Trinitarian.

Yet if truth be told, so complex were the crosscurrents and interactions in the ancient world between Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and late Greek philosophy that it is often difficult to untangle them or to discern what came before what or what had an effect on what. The Hebrew word sefirot in its specific sense of divine emanations — sefirah in its singular form — is a good example. Does it come from the Greek sphaera, “sphere?” Does it have anything to do with it?

The great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem was of the opinion that there was no connection. As he pointed out in a lengthy article, we first find the idea of the 10 sefirot in the Sefer ha-Yetsirah or “Book of Creation,” one of the most gnomically enigmatic of all Jewish texts. . .

semiopen · 06-03-2013, 05:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

Follow up:

How Greek Philosophy Influenced Both Christian and Jewish Theology

Quote:

Any resemblance between the triune God of Christianity and the 10 sefirot of the God of Kabbalah almost certainly derives from this influence rather than from the workings of Christianity on Judaism. While the concept of the sefirot is non-Unitarian, dividing — as did neo-Platonism and neo-Pythagoreanism — the oneness of the Divinity into a series of gradations descending from the ultimate Source of all things to the material world, it is not Trinitarian.

Yet if truth be told, so complex were the crosscurrents and interactions in the ancient world between Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and late Greek philosophy that it is often difficult to untangle them or to discern what came before what or what had an effect on what. The Hebrew word sefirot in its specific sense of divine emanations — sefirah in its singular form — is a good example. Does it come from the Greek sphaera, “sphere?” Does it have anything to do with it?

The great scholar of Kabbalah Gershom Scholem was of the opinion that there was no connection. As he pointed out in a lengthy article, we first find the idea of the 10 sefirot in the Sefer ha-Yetsirah or “Book of Creation,” one of the most gnomically enigmatic of all Jewish texts. . .

Still the sister article that I posted pointed out that

Abraham_Abulafia

Quote:

Much less concerned with the theosophy of his contemporary kabbalists, who were interested in theories of ten hypostatic sefirot, some of which he described as worse than the Christian belief in the trinity,

As someone hanging around in mid 13th century Spain, the guy's opinion has to be worth something.

He's famous for attempting to convert the Pope - this story seems a little farfetched -

Quote:

... he went in 1280 to Rome, in order to effect the conversion of Pope Nicholas III on the day before the Jewish New Year, 5041. The pope, then in nearby Suriano, heard of it, and issued orders to "burn the fanatic" as soon as he reached that place. Close to the inner gate the stake was erected in preparation; but not in the least disturbed, Abulafia set out for Suriano and reached there August 22. While passing through the outer gate, he heard that the pope had died from an apoplectic stroke during the preceding night.

semiopen · 06-03-2013, 05:30 AM

From page 2 of Toto's link regarding the sefer yetzirah

Quote:

Written, most probably in the third century C.E., by an anonymous author, the “Book of Creation” begins with the statement that God “engraved” the universe with “32 mystical paths of wisdom,” which are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and “10 sefirot of nothingness [b’limah].”

Scholem writes in Origins of the Kabbalah

Quote:

Concerning the origin and spiritual home of this work, which numbers only a few pages, divergent opinions have been voiced, although to date it has been impossible to come to any reliable and definitive conclusions.

This uncertainty is also reflected in the various estimates of the date of its composition, which fluctuate between the second and the sixth centuries.

Maybe it's just me, but when I see a guy pick the third century when he could just as easily have picked the fifth or sixth, this tells me that he may have an interest in avoiding possible Christian contamination. This is consistent with the thrust of the article.

andrewcriddle · 06-03-2013, 02:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by semiopen

From page 2 of Toto's link regarding the sefer yetzirah

Quote:

Written, most probably in the third century C.E., by an anonymous author, the “Book of Creation” begins with the statement that God “engraved” the universe with “32 mystical paths of wisdom,” which are the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and “10 sefirot of nothingness [b’limah].”

Scholem writes in Origins of the Kabbalah

Quote:

Concerning the origin and spiritual home of this work, which numbers only a few pages, divergent opinions have been voiced, although to date it has been impossible to come to any reliable and definitive conclusions.

This uncertainty is also reflected in the various estimates of the date of its composition, which fluctuate between the second and the sixth centuries.

Maybe it's just me, but when I see a guy pick the third century when he could just as easily have picked the fifth or sixth, this tells me that he may have an interest in avoiding possible Christian contamination. This is consistent with the thrust of the article.

The sefer yetzirah itself is unlikely to have been influenced by Christianity, whatever may be true of the interpretations of this enigmatic work by the Kabbalists.

Andrew Criddle

semiopen · 06-03-2013, 06:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by andrewcriddle

The sefer yetzirah itself is unlikely to have been influenced by Christianity, whatever may be true of the interpretations of this enigmatic work by the Kabbalists.

Andrew Criddle

That seems the most likely.

It should be kept in mind that the Sefirot in the

Sefer_Yetzirah changed as time went on.

Just another pointless anecdote -

The Bahir: Illumination

was by Rabbi

Aryeh_Kaplan who was amazing in inspiring American Jews, including myself.

Some of his book jackets go on about his master's degree in physics, claiming he was named one of the brightest young physicists in the US. This has always puzzled me because, in that field it seems you are pretty much shit unless you have a doctorate, so I've wondered who would have bothered to do give him such an apparent honor.

Quote:

He earned his bachelor's degree in physics - with highest honors - at the University of Louisville in 1961[6] and a master's degree in physics at the University of Maryland.

I just sort of wonder if he paid to be listed in some Who's Who in Physics scam.

Anyway, Kaplan wrote the above book on the Bahir (which is sort of a cousin to Sefer Yetzirah) to which

Gershom_Scholem commented in

Origins of the Kabbalah

Quote:

Aryeh Kaplan, The Bahir: Translation, Introduction and Commentary (New York, 1979) is worthless and does not contribute anything to an understanding of the book.

One has to believe Scholem knew crap when he saw it, I can't imagine any rivalry between the two. A few years later, both were dead. Kaplan's Bahir still gets 4.5 stars on Amazon

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05-20-2013, 09:28 AM	#11
Iskander Veteran Member Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: United Kingdom Posts: 3,619	Ruah is understood in the sense of ‘Presence’ [the actual presence of Hashem] and ruah hakodesh would be a more explicit form indicating the ‘presence of holiness’. Once the divine presence is isolated as a concrete temporal divine manifestation , which is what ruah means and also the resident presence in the Holy of Holies, it would be easy to use a gentile form of ruah hakoseh [Holy Spirit] to claim that one is speaking in the Presence of Hashem [God] In Judaism, the messiah is often understood as pre-existing and waiting in Heaven for the time to come and redeem the nation of Israel. The Christian Trinity of one God with three manifestations is not all that alien to Jewish thinking.

05-21-2013, 08:55 AM	#13
Sarpedon Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Minnesota, the least controversial state in the le Posts: 8,446	Unfortunately, Mary never said whether he was circumcised or not.

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