Hebrew Voices #160 – Does God Have a Body?

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Nehemia: So, he thinks carrying on Shabbat is forbidden?

Gabriel: Yes!

Nehemia: That’s fascinating because no Karaite today that I know believes that.

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices, where I am here today with Dr. Gabriel Wasserman, who got his PhD from Yeshiva University in New York and then did a post-doc at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalom, Gabriel!

Gabriel: Hi!

Nehemia: So, we’re going to talk today about a book that you translated. The book is called Levush Malchut, and it’s a response to a query by a king of Sweden, by a Karaite named Mordecai Ben Nisan. So, there’s an entire other section of the book which is a much larger section of Levush Malchut…

Gabriel: There are two more sections.

Nehemia: Yeah, I know, but the second section that I want to talk about, maybe briefly, is the Halachic section. What are some examples of some Halachot? Of Karaite ritual practice that come out in this book that maybe are things that either we wouldn’t know about or they’re just very interesting. What are some things that people can learn from this book? Maybe they’re things that are very well known but it’s confirmed in this book.

Gabriel: Right. So, some of the things are very legitimate.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: Because some are not. Some are… He’ll say, “There's a commandment in the Torah, we follow it and the Rabbanites don’t.” Meaning the Rabbanites do; there are people who violate rules in the community, but there are people who violate rules in all communities.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: It’s like saying, “Muslims drink wine.” Meaning, there are Muslims that drink wine, but if Shiites say, “Sunni Islam allows drinking wine,” that’s simply a lie, right?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: So, some of them… where he says, “The Torah says you can’t take any interest.” This is mentioned many times, and he says, “The Talmudites reject this commandment entirely, they take usury and our sages of blessed memory do not agree with this at all.” So, there’s an old anti-Semitic trope of Jews being usurers.

Now, the Torah permits taking usury from non-Jews. It says, “Your brother you can’t take usury from. From the Gentile you can.”

Nehemia: So, it’s not an anti-Semitic trope, meaning there’s a loophole that allows them to take interest. How is that an anti-Semitic trope?

Gabriel: The anti-Semitic trope that Jews extort, that Jews take exorbitant interest rates…

Nehemia: Ah, so here’s the question of the definition of usury. He’s writing in Hebrew, so he definitely doesn’t use the word usury.

Gabriel: Correct.

Nehemia: He talks about neshekh and tarbit.

Gabriel: Neshekh.

Nehemia: Neshekh, alright.

Gabriel: Yeah, neshekh ve’tarbit, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so in other words he’s seeing the Rabbanites have all these bankers and money lenders, and he’s saying… maybe he thinks you’re not allowed to take it from anybody, not just from non-Jews.

Gabriel: No. The verse says… he says, there’s an explicit verse in the Torah that says, “et hanochri tashich – ve’et achicha lo tashich.”

Nehemia: Alright so, “Lend at interest to the non-Jew, but to your brother you will not lend at interest.”

Gabriel: Right, that is clear.

Nehemia: Depending on the definition of interest or usury, right?

Gabriel: And brother, and father…

Nehemia: Exactly, so there’s a lot of definitions here that we don’t have time to legislate.

Gabriel: Now I think probably what he’s referring to is there are certain circumstances, which I admit I don’t know much about within Rabbanite Judaism, certain loopholes, as you might call them, which allow having a bank, allowing such a thing such as a bank. Modern society wouldn’t be able to function without it, and the bank is not a legal person, and banks function… I don’t know exactly how this works…

Nehemia: Isn’t there heter iska, where you’re actually borrowing from the Beit Din and not from…

Gabriel: Yes, heter iska, yes. So, I do know certainly from living in Orthodox Rabbanite communities that certainly any loan that takes place in any kind of ordinary situation is always… People not only do not take interest but are very careful… if somebody lends me 15 dollars and I come back and I say, “I have only a 20.” They won’t take it and make a point of...

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: So, if he is talking about this heter iska, which again is something I should know more about, but I don’t know more about, it’s limited to various certain circumstances. He should have said so. It is not how he…

Nehemia: I mean, from his perspective…

Gabriel: He says, they completely ignore, he says, they reject this guy… and again, I don’t know what loopholes existed in the Karaite community.

Nehemia: Yeah, I don’t either.

Gabriel: I don’t know. A friend of mine read this book and he said, “If everyone’s living on absolute basic subsistence and there’s a really limited economy, yes, I understand how you can have no equivalent of heter iska. But if there’s any kind of economy, there’s got to be something.” There’s got to be something, and again, are there banks? And he says, “I don’t know, but again, it would be interesting to see… are there banks in Eastern Europe? Are Karaites putting their money in it?” Certainly, the way he’s presenting it does not reflect general Rabbanite practice. I can guess that he’s referring to the heter iska, but again, I don’t know…

Nehemia: Are you saying that heter iska was a rare thing in the Middle Ages?

Gabriel: This isn’t the Middle Ages. Yeah.

Nehemia: The Early Modern Period, whatever… or even today, is it such a rare thing?

Gabriel: I don’t know. I don’t think it’s so common. It’s done in certain circumstances. It’s certainly not done when people just give loans to each other.

Nehemia: Small private loans, you’re saying, it’s not done.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: But we don’t know if he’s talking about small… alright, in any event. So, from his perspective, probably, or possibly, this loophole, he then spins that into, “They completely ignore it.”

Gabriel: Again, if he wanted to describe heter iska and tell you why he thinks it’s illegitimate, that would be fine, that would be totally fine.

Nehemia: So, this would be like saying, in the context of a polemic, I don’t know if that’s his responsibility.

Gabriel: Well, no. Because with some things, like he says, and I think that this is legitimate, he’s talking about carrying on the Sabbath.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: He says, “Carrying on the Sabbath is forbidden.” And the Rabbanites say, “Carrying on the Sabbath is forbidden.”

Nehemia: So, he thinks carrying on Shabbat is forbidden?

Gabriel: Yes!

Nehemia: That’s fascinating, because no Karaite today that I know of believes that.

Gabriel: Really!

Nehemia: Really.

Gabriel: Okay. So, he says, “But the Talmudites have permitted carrying by way of the public domain in wide open spaces and borders by tying strings and cords to delineate borders of the nations.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: Whatever, “to delineate borders”. “Borders of the nations” is because he uses a biblical expression, “le’ader gevulot amim,”, it’s a pun on something in Deuteronomy.

Nehemia: Okay. That’s what’s called the eruv, which is…

Gabriel: It’s called an eruv; I want to read my footnotes on this.

Nehemia: Okay, yeah.

Gabriel: “This is a reference to the Rabbinic practice of eruv. Note that the theological basis behind Rabbinic eruv is not to turn a public street into a private domain, but rather,” again, this is what it’s supposed to be, “but rather to mark certain areas that are already private domains, though in joint ownership of a few people.” Like in an apartment co-op, “Thus, for example, within a shared courtyard or apartment building, it should theoretically be permitted to carry from the residences into the hallways or into the courtyard, and vice versa,” because there’s no public domain, you’re just going from one private domain to another.

Nehemia: Let me stop you for a minute, because some of the audience is completely confused.

Gabriel: Okay.

Nehemia: So, in Rabbinical Judaism, there’s this idea that on Shabbat the type of labor that’s forbidden are these 39 specific acts, and one of those is carrying from a private domain to a public domain, or a public domain to a private domain. And there were four types of domains in ancient times. So, eruv makes it so that you can carry outside. That's de facto what it does, right?

Gabriel: De facto, but de jure what it’s saying is, “Gee, you’ve got two private domains. We both live in an apartment building and I have my apartment and you have your apartment, and they’re adjacent,” and let’s say we have a door between them or we have a shared hallway, it’s not the street that I can carry... so that we’d say, “In theory, that should be permitted anyway,” but because it’s too similar to carrying in a public domain, Rabbanite Halacha says that you shouldn’t do it unless you put up some kind of… this thing called an eruv.

Nehemia: So, I live in Dallas right now and there’s a string around the Jewish neighborhood, and it’s not just shared spaces, it’s public streets.

Gabriel: So, I go on, “Later on, some Rabbinic groups came up with the idea that even public streets are not truly public domains in the Halachic sense,” because of some argument, “and therefore they allow the creation of an eruv of even larger communities, enclosing whole streets or even cities. Other Rabbinic groups consider this to be a blatant violation of the Sabbath, and this is often a point of great, bitter contention, conflict, between different Rabbinic groups today, not just between Karaites and Rabbanites.” This sentence that he wrote, you could have seen in any Rabbinic work.

Nehemia: Okay. So let me tell you a little interesting story. Israel doesn’t have a separation between church and state. The religious leaders in Israel, whether they’re Muslim or Catholic or Orthodox Jews, they get their salaries from the State of Israel. That comes out of taxes. And the rabbis from the Rabbinical community were getting paid more than Karaite religious leaders, and this went all the way to the Supreme Court. I think the Karaites were getting 88 percent of the amount of what the Rabbanites were getting, something like that.

Gabriel: What were the Christians and Muslims getting?

Nehemia: I think also probably 88 percent, I don’t know. So, this went all the way to the Supreme Court of Israel, and the court ruled, “Well, you Karaites don’t need as much money because you don’t have certain burdens that the Rabbanut, the Chief Rabbinate, spends its money on, and one of the major things it spends its money on is the eruv.”

Gabriel: Ah!

Nehemia: And so that extra 12 percent is to cover the eruv. So, this is actually an official institution of the Rabbinical establishment in the State of Israel. You’re saying any Rabbanite could have written that. I don’t know if that is really true.

Gabriel: Listen, listen. In my community in New York, there was no eruv here for many, many years because the rabbis opposed it; the rabbis of one of the communities in the neighborhood, who is very powerful. Eventually in 2006, rabbis from other communities in the neighborhood got together and they eventually put one up. So, in the communities that follow the rabbis that opposed it, you’d go to any of their synagogues and there are big signs, “This is to remind everybody that an eruv absolutely cannot be constructed in the streets of New York City.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Gabriel: “That any carrying is completely illegitimate. Absolutely do not carry anything into the synagogue or out of it.”

Nehemia: Wow!

Gabriel: Oh, yes. And it’s a real… if you’ll pardon the term, boundary line, because that’s what it is, between communities. And this is what he’s saying; that it’s just a blatant violation of the Sabbath. That because what the eruv was meant to be was as I said. It’s so that you could carry from one person's apartment to another, which should be permitted anyway.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: The eruv was meant as a stringency to allow what was already permitted, not as a leniency to allow what was forbidden.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying today in 2022 there's a lot of Rabbinical Jews who are opposed to eruv.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: And so here, this Karaite in the early 18th century who’s opposed to eruv and accuses the Rabbanites of doing it, this could also be internal Rabbinical argument. Although it sounds like he didn’t know that. It sounds like the Rabbinical Jews who lived in his area used eruvs and he wasn’t aware that there was any opposition.

Gabriel: Right. It’s not at all clear what he knows and doesn’t know.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: And certainly, when we get to part three where he’s talking about beliefs, then he’s attacking all sorts of beliefs, that again, you could have seen within the…

Nehemia: So, what’s an example of that? What are some of the beliefs he’s attacking?

Gabriel: He doesn’t like the book Shi’ur Qomah. Shi’ur Qomah is a very stringent... you've heard of it, yes?

Nehemia: Absolutely.

Gabriel: Did it come up in your work with the Tetragrammaton? Or you just knew of it.

Nehemia: No, no. Qirqisani talks about it, and other Karaite authors.

Gabriel: Do you know who else hated Shi’ur Qomah and thought that the book was absolutely terrible and should be burned? Maimonides.

Nehemia: Okay. So, in a sense, Maimonides… this is my take on his history. I think Maimonides, and Saadia Gaon, and folks like that were a way of Rabbanites saying, “You know what? Those Karaites are right. If we want to shore up our defenses we have to speak out, and rather than defending what they’re right about, if you can’t beat them join them. And that will take the wind out of the sails of the Karaite argument because we’ll agree with them because they’re right anyway.”

Gabriel: Maybe, but you’d have to see who first critiques Shi’ur Qomah… It’s not really a Rabbanite work anymore than it’s a Karaite work.

Nehemia: Really!

Gabriel: What? Yes.

Nehemia: Shi’ur Qomah is not a Rabbanite work?

Gabriel: I wouldn’t say so. It’s a Jewish work.

Nehemia: Alright. So, tell everybody what Shi’ur Qomah is.

Gabriel: And I do want to say what it does do, I believe, but I’m not even sure if it makes use of the names of Rabbanite Rabbis. If so, it’s pseudepigraphic, because these are rabbis who lived a lot earlier.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: It’s not 1st century work. It’s not like giving names of later rabbis, Rabbi Ishmael and Rabbi Akiva, who became heroes of mystical texts with no connection to Mishnah and Talmud. The names are used, and this text… I don’t want to say that it’s not used by Rabbanites but I would totally not be surprised if you found a group of Karaites that was really into Shi’ur Qomah.

Nehemia: Shi’ur Qomah? I would doubt that. Kabbalah… yes there were definitely Karaites who got involved in Kabbalah, especially in later periods.

Gabriel: I would not be surprised.

Nehemia: So, tell us what Shi’ur Qomah is.

Gabriel: Shi’ur Qomah is a text that gives dimensions of the various parts of the Godhead, the arms, the legs, the eyes, all of which by the way are mentioned in Scripture. It says, “God’s hands did” whatever, “God’s eyes…”

Nehemia: In a sense it’s a Midrash on Song of Songs.

Gabriel: Song of Songs, right.

Nehemia: Where there’s Solomon and his lover, and then the body parts are described, so Shi’ur Qomah says, “Well, how big were they?” In reference to God.

Gabriel: Right.

Nehemia: Okay. And this was really low hanging fruit for a Karaite to criticize the Rabbanites on, because the idea, to a rationalist, is abominable that God not only has a body but that we could talk about the size of his arm and the size of his leg and the size of his nose.

Gabriel: Correct. But do you have to be a rationalist to be a Karaite? Certainly not later.

Nehemia: No, I think there were Rabbinites who, like I said, jumped on the bandwagon because they were like, “These guys got a point.”

Gabriel: Yes, but I said, “Do you have to be a rationalist to be a Karaite?”

Nehemia: Ah, no.

Gabriel: Not in all periods.

Nehemia: But we’re talking about in the 8th century and the 9th century, when definitely the Karaites were rationalists. Maybe not all of them.

Gabriel: Maybe not all of them. Again, I think this is more a rationalist-non-rationalist mystic split…

Nehemia: And I think that Rambam or Maimonides at one place talks about that fool who says, “God has a body.” I once heard that he was talking about Rashi.

Gabriel: Well, no. He almost certainly hadn’t heard of Rashi, so definitely not.

Nehemia: Oh, so… Alright.

Gabriel: So, Maimonides in his youth, I believe it’s about Shi’ur Qomah that Maimonides in his youth says, “It’s a really weird text and it must be metaphorical.” And then later in his life, he said, “This is just garbage.”

Nehemia: Okay, interesting. Alright, so you’re saying that the Karaites are criticizing Rabbanites for things that the Rabbanites themselves criticized other Rabbanites for?

Gabriel: Yes!

Nehemia: Okay. That’s really interesting.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Nehemia: Are there any things there that he criticizes that are very unexpected?

Gabriel: Ooh! Let me tell first some of the things that are expected, because your audience might not know them.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: He talks about the fact that Rabbanites don’t allow cooking any milk with any meat, any meat in any milk. And he says, “We Karaites don’t hold by this. We say that you can’t cook meat in the milk of the mother of the animal that gave birth to that animal.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: And he says, “And we’re very careful about this. We don’t even use the same pots. We have separate pots,” which is something I’ve never heard from other Karaites sources. “We have separate pots. When we know the milk came from a specific animal, we don’t use that pot.”

Nehemia: A specific individual animal, not a species?

Gabriel: Correct, correct.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: A specific individual animal.

Nehemia: Alright.

Gabriel: Because Rabbanites famously won’t use the same pot for any milk.

Nehemia: Any meat and any milk, right?

Gabriel: Correct.

Nehemia: So, if there’s any milk, whether it’s from a goat, a cow or a sheep, and it’s touched a pot, they won’t use that pot for any meat…

Gabriel: If it’s been cooked in a pot, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. That’s interesting. That actually kind of reflects the rural world that he came from.

Gabriel: That you know.

Nehemia: Because I couldn’t tell you which sheep my sheep’s milk came from, or goat’s milk came from.

Gabriel: Correct, correct.

Nehemia: Because actually, they were getting their milk directly, I guess. It must be…

Gabriel: Yeah, clearly.

Nehemia: … from animals who they knew by sight or by name… probably not by name.

Gabriel: Either that, or… I mean that’s clearly what’s going on.

Nehemia: Or they’re just making this whole thing up.

Gabriel: Either that or they're getting special Karaite stamps saying, “This milk came from Bessie.”

Nehemia: It could be.

Gabriel: Unlikely.

Nehemia: Unlikely, but it could be.

Gabriel: I think they were living in smaller towns, as I said. What was it that the king of… or the duke of the area, the prince, the son, the king wanted to make this city into something, and it was a dump.

Nehemia: Alright.

Gabriel: I mean, maybe, it would work! So that’s one thing. Or, we talked about lulav, where he says, “The Rabbanites understand these four species as species that you use to do a separate mitzvah,” a separate commandment from sukkah, that you pick them up. And he says, “We Karaites don’t do that. We build the sukkah with them.” But he has a problem, because in his community they don’t build the sukkah with them, neither do they use them to pick up and shake, nor do they...

Nehemia: Does he say that?

Gabriel: So, he says, “U’mi’pneh she’ein ha’devarim nimtza’im be’eilu aretzot.” “Because these species are not found in our lands, they,” the Rabbanites, “permit violation of the Sabbath and eating of forbidden foods in order to obtain.”

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Gabriel: So, listen to my footnote. Again, part of the fun of this book is my footnotes, because I unpack it. As you say, “What on earth does that mean?” So, I write, “This claim is very strange. Presumably, he means that Rabbanites go through countries where it is impossible to observe the Sabbath or obtain kosher food, just to obtain these species. However, in fact no Rabbanite rabbis would approve of such behavior. Rabbanite Halacha does not permit even carrying the species to the synagogue on the Sabbath because it would be carrying, let alone eating non-kosher food in order to obtain. See also Tosefot Yom Tov commentary on the Mishnah by Yom Tov Lipmann Heller,” who lived in Prague in 1579 -1564, “on Mishnah Rosh Hashanah.” The Mishnah there states that one may not violate any of the restrictions of the festival in order to obtain a shofar, and Heller notes that the same applies to obtaining the species of vegetation for Sukkot.

Now, it is possible that there were rogue people whose business was to obtain the four species for Sukkot, who then had to then leave those countries and had to get to countries where it was impossible to observe the Sabbath or to get kosher food. The most famous such country being Spain, because Spain had expelled its Jews hundreds of years later and it was a very Catholic country, and any kind of observance, public observance, certainly, of Judaism, was punishable probably by death. And we know that Jewish businessmen who went there definitely did violate the Sabbath and eat non-kosher food when they were there. We know this went on.

Nehemia: Where do we know that from?

Gabriel: What?

Nehemia: Where do we know that from?

Gabriel: I know it from graduate school, from Professor Elisheva Carlebach’s class on Early Modern Judaism.

Nehemia: But do we have a text where there’s some merchant who talks about, “Well, I went to Spain, and I had to eat pork because I didn’t want them to kill me.”

Gabriel: I think so, but I told you where I heard it from.

Nehemia: Okay.

Gabriel: You can google Elisheva Carlebach. So, did it go on? I’m not saying it didn’t go on. However, if it did go on, I don’t think he would have known about it very well, because we know, unlike, certainly in Egypt and in the Byzantine Empire, the Jews in Eastern Europe, the Karaites and Rabbanites, really didn’t interact that much. The communities were separate, and so I really don’t think this is the kind of thing he would have had direct knowledge of. I’m not saying it didn’t go on. I have no idea what went on. It might go on today.

Nehemia: Let me ask this question, and I don’t know the answer to this. When there were Jews, for example, traveling on the Silk Road or engaging in international mercantile activities, how did they observe Shabbat? And maybe it’s just a question to ask rather than to answer.

Gabriel: I don’t know, it’s a really good question. But you know what? There’s a parallel today. Jews go on business to the Far East, let’s say, and these are Jews who are observant in their lives at home. So, they want to observe the Sabbath, they want to get kosher food. Some of them will seek out… usually there’s a Chabad House.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Gabriel: Which is… how do I explain what a Chabad House is? A Chabad is one Hasidic sect which has made Jewish outreach a big point of what they do, and they set up houses all around the world where people can get kosher food and keep the Sabbath. But there are probably plenty of places in the Far East where there is no Chabad House.

Nehemia: Do you know where the largest annual Passover Seder in the world is?

Gabriel: It’s in… what’s it called?

Nehemia: Kathmandu.

Gabriel: Kathmandu, that’s right.

Nehemia: And it’s held by Chabad.

Gabriel: You’ve probably been there, right?

Nehemia: I’ve been to Kathmandu, but not for Pesach.

Gabriel: Yeah, not for Passover.

Nehemia: This has been wonderful. Thanks so much, Gabriel, for joining us. And this has been a wonderful conversation, not the kind of conversation the audience would normally have access to, so I really want to thank you.

Gabriel: Thanks.

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