Moshe Idel, about book "The Kingdom of God on Earth"

"The book "The Kingdom of God on Earth" is focused on two lines: one is the inner Kingdom of God and the second is the rabbinical interest.

You made a kind of synthesis - both this and that are necessary - and from this a kind of manifesto results.

What Christianity meant was the inner part and the Bible and Rabbinism were more interested in the outer world.

This is the synthesis, this is what I see, which was actually the basic concept.

Now let me tell you what I think.

The Christian vision, the internalization, is actually Greek. The Christian vision comes from a vector that sees internal processes.

It is the most important ideal.

Both Plato and Aristotle are thinkers.

They think.

The most important thing is to understand. Christianity is not so interested in understanding, it is more interested in faith, but the common denominator is the inner world. Judaism did not take much interest in the inner world until late.

Philo did, but Philo was excluded from the Jewish heritage by the rabbis.

He does not exist.

Someone who wrote these great books had colossal influences on Christianity.

Philo is not mentioned even once, in all the rabbinic literature, of tens of thousands of pages, although his books were found in Caesarea, in Palestine, in a rabbinical center.

It is impossible that they did not know.

He was excluded because of the emphasis on internalization.

He disappeared from the Jewish tradition for 1500 years, until the Renaissance.

He came back because of the Italian Renaissance.

The Jews discovered it because of the interest of the Christians.

The rabbinic ideal had a different interest from the beginning, compared to the Christian vision and the rabbinic vision is "how I create a society", which also includes Tikkun olam, but the basic idea of the rabbis is very different from the Greek vision.

The basic idea of the rabbis was to create a society - the Greeks were not much interested in that, they were interested in personal perfection.

Greece disappeared as a society.

After they had Plato and Aristotle, with these philosophical ideals, Greek society disappeared.

It has disappeared to this day, because they had another purpose. The rabbis were interested in society.

Common worship.

Everything must be done in common, and this is the basic project of the rabbis.

How do you create a society of Jews, but one that works in reality, not the ideal.

Exact details, how long, how short, at what time, all these things that are not Greek. The Greeks have an abstract ideal, the rabbis did not want that, although they knew that.

There were Greek philosophers in Syria and Palestine, but the rabbis didn't want that because you can't decide inner abstract things in a final way.

What can you decide?

You can decide what the formula is when someone has to say something. You can tell him exactly what to say or not to say or when to say it. It can be discussed and decided. You cannot decide what the soul is, what God is, what the cosmic order is. It's something you can create if you want, but you can't decide.

The rabbis wanted to have a whole that could be precisely controlled, and that is the Talmud.

People discuss and discuss, and in the end there is a majority and it ends.

You can't do that with your soul.

No one can prove whether someone or someone else is right.

So the two ways - I'm talking about rabbinism and about Greece and Christianity - in the Middle Ages, Greek culture and philosophy entered Judaism.

They needed this because they had Greek texts translated into Arabic and they were influenced by Greek introversion via Arabic philosophy, and this created an extraordinarily great tension between the practical, concrete rabbinical vision and the ideal of contemplation.

This tension persists to this day.

The tension between the rabbinical, practical view, where you can give exact instructions, what to do, how to do it, how long, how short, everything can be decided by the majority, it is not decided abstractly and thus can be changed.

However, there are issues that cannot be decided.

For example, when does a Jew pray at the North Pole? It's a different rhythm.

It must be decided once more.

There are specific data of the time from the North Pole or from Finland, so the rabbinical vision is prevalent because it can give specific answers to concrete historical situations.

The Greek view does not have this.

They say they have an ideal, cultivated as you want, but it's important to think, to contemplate, to meditate, so things that are personal and not social.

So, what I see in your book are two alternatives that you presented as Christian and Rabbinic.

For me, Maimonides' vision has also become Jewish, even if he is of Greek origin and high Jewish culture - half Greek, half Jewish.

Because the Jews were not interested in the inner life. The Talmud is a big book, thousands of pages, where you can find details about any ritual.

There is not a single page in the Talmud that speaks of God.

There is no such thing.

At most you can find two or three lines.

You find nothing about what the soul is.

It does not matter what the soul is, but what you do.

I'm not saying that the rabbis didn't have a vision of what the soul is or what God is, but that was something private.

Each rabbi had his ideas that he didn't bring up, because they were something personal, so in the Middle Ages, when the internalized contemplative ideals came in, there was quite a confrontation. Maimonides, who was a rabbinic genius, was excommunicated.

His books were burned, although he was a rabbinical genius and everyone said he was a rabbinical genius, but it happened because he introduced the mental part and created two poles.

Not all, but there were important rabbis who excommunicated him. This tension has remained until today. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was an Israeli, Maimonidean philosopher who was a kind of prophet.

He was against the Cabal.

This is what I saw with my own eyes, how Maimonides reappeared in Israel and contemporary Judaism is in this oscillation between Rabbinism, which wants to give you specific instructions, and the Greeks, for whom there is no such thing.

This is how I see your book.

It intervenes in a contemporary oscillation that has remained until now.

This tension is current.

I had years when I was talking to Leibowitz who was a Maimonidean, and he was yelling.

It is not a theory.

I have defended Kabbalah as a legitimate form of Judaism that you cannot abrogate.

This tension still exists and is actually a cultural war between two axes.

The concrete social axis and the abstract inner axis. The two axes are not so easy to connect. Maimonides tried to do this, but they immediately realized that he was bringing a different world into the bosom of Judaism and excommunicated him.

He was excommunicated more than once.

It was a controversy in which they excommunicated the study of philosophy, including Maimonides, many times.

Throughout history there are some great moments of polemics against him, so this has remained very current.

There are all kinds of poles that appear, more Maimonides, less rabbis.

This has remained a Jewish problem to this day."