Israel and Humanity - The Many Aspects of God's law

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V.

The multiple aspects of the divine law.

Cosmopolitanism in the promulgation of the Mosaic law appears from the rabbis, not only in the plurality of languages used, but in the ideological form itself in other words It is manifested in the idea as in speech. The latter, while it is open to every people in its special language, also offered to every individual in adapting to the particular nature of his mind, that the religious idea is multifaceted to make itself accessible to different degrees of intelligence.

Before giving the formula rabbinic conception, see how its roots have grown into the ground theologically. The principle from which it follows that every man is like every race is naturally disposed to welcome the truth in a certain way rather than another yardstick, to consider a particular side. It is so, we said, the idea of God itself which every people n'entrevoit a special face, so that the Supreme Being can not be fully understood, we will not say by all humanity, far from it, but by all intelligences past, present and future.

This ability determined, the engineering of the race, that power is personified what theology calls the rabbinic name sar the prince, the guardian angel of each nation and the objective point of view, it is these various notions of God are for different people and their deities, which are close to one another in a higher synthesis, become, for the worship of humanity as a whole, the true God. That is how human unity is the condition and the subjective factor of the divine unity. The polygon of the divine law, if allowed to speak, the many aspects of the word Sinai, is the consequence of this principle extended to religion as a whole. Each race, and it borrows the idea of God as it is able to grasp, is also the religion that best suited his temperament and his mentality to some metaphysics with symbols and sublime rituals that derive from these are those whom Jesus called the children of light to other anthropomorphic animal figures with its sacred allegory and its incarnations; to these profound speculations and mysteries; to those superstitions and barbaric cults.

One can observe every day the same two ideas being presented simultaneously to many minds, they not perceive them the same reports: "It sometimes happens that the organization of the brain is such that it captures only reports mathematics. It is not the same reports on the fine arts and morality, some men do not notice them. The various reports that more or less penetrating minds, minds more or less sophisticated perceive between the same ideas, though they should be also present, complete proof against the opinion of some modern metaphysicians that the perception of relations is a new act Our faculty of Philosophy smelling ". And just as a city can take different forms, depending on whether one looks at this or that side, and is somehow multiplied by the different perspectives, so too, says Leibniz, "sometimes by the multitude infinite simple substances, as there are so many different worlds that are, however, that the varied perspectives of a single universe, according to the various points of view of each monad ". Finally we see philosophers Catholics themselves acknowledge the correctness of this principle, even in religious "faith in a spiritual truth, Mariano says, presupposes differences, she even called and generated. Unity in diversity is strong, concrete, real. A unit indiscriminately, indifferent, inert, is clear proof that faith, spirit, truth, or are off sick. But it is not true of Catholicism and its unity, its truths live and realize ".

These are the rational bases of the plurality or metaphysical aspects of the revelation at Sinai. Let us see now in his rabbinic formula: "The text of the Torah, the sages tell us, is composed of six hundred thousand letters (sixty myriads) is the number of Israelites at the time of Moses who was six hundred thousand, c ' is to say that every Jew seized the Act and has attached by one of his letters. " Elsewhere we read these important words that we have already had occasion to quote: "Fifty gates of intelligence have been created in the world and when God taught the Law to Moses, it shows on every point forty-nine faces or sides different for the permission or legal purity and forty-nine other sides in favor of legal impurity or prohibition paradoxical: "Since each prohibit and the others allow, read- us in the Talmud, you could say: How will I be he can learn the law? The truth is that while some prohibit and the others allow all these opinions are words emanating from the living God, one God made them all, one pastor proclaimed them all in the name of the Lord of all things, Blessed be He ".

The same ideas are found in many other forms. Thus the face of God is to take a particular phrase in that part of the law he communicates to Moses there is a severe majesty when he teaches the Torah text and expresses the contrary, when comes the turn of the Mishna, the effort to make himself understood, he finally takes on a spiritual joy when he transmits haggadic part of the Oral Law. Sometimes it is a language and all special ways that God speaks to adopt as the elderly or young people, men, women or children, proportioning his education in the intellectual capacity of each of its listeners. Sometimes it is a particular form of the divine word, so it seemed that every Jew speaking to him personally. Elsewhere we are told that all Jews who come to the world until the end of the world were present in spirit to these large foundations Sinai so that everyone could receive the consignment which had fallen to his share, which is what the rabbis called "the share that each soul was given on Mount Sinai." The converts themselves, who come from time to time aggregate to the Jewish communion are not excluded from this general distribution, for, says the Talmud, although they do not exist, the mind ( mazal < / i>) attended the grand assembly of Sinai.

We anticipate the objection that we can do here the reader is that if the doctors of the Synagogue showed universalistic, claiming that God to reveal himself, spoke languages other than Hebrew, he is not the same in their study of the content of revelation itself: while it shows only the Jewish particularism, as in the passages quoted above, there is no question that the Israelites only. But when once established the system of Rabbis who tends to the word of a universal speech Sinai, it is clear that all they then add their events to better determine can not be less general. When we say for example that the Act has seventy faces, we can not doubt that it does not fit in their thinking to seventy nations that comprise them from humanity.

In addition, the various languages that were used, according to doctors, to send the word of the Sinai to the knowledge of the Gentiles, assume some varieties of interpretation of Revelation. Each idiom in effect has a special ability to make things from the point of view rather than another and any translation, however faithful it may be, leads, like it or not, to highlight certain aspects of leaving the original in some other shade as much a language is easier to express how happy such a such feelings or ideas or, as it is powerless to bring in others that seem incompatible with his special genius .

Finally, the presence of the souls of the Sinai proselytes is quite instructive in itself and there is no reason to believe it is only in the minds of rabbis, proselytes of justice, that is to say, those who are fully converted to the Law of Moses and not as proselytes of the gate or Noachides simple, since we know that Judaism also recognizes the existence of some legal and others.

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