Season 2: Episode 4 - Epistemological Breakdown

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Confucius says, to know what you know and what you do not know. That is true knowledge. I'm not sure I'm up to that tall in order, but I do know this. I've got a story to tell. It's a story about the past, but it's taking place here in the present, and my aspiration is to move us toward that future of which we dream. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 4, The Epistemological Breakdown So, the world is shaking under us. And that's because all the essential elements of the early modern experience are in place at this point. And they're more than a bit unsettling. Hey, our maps no longer have edges where dragons guard the unknown. And truth is, though there are plenty of blank spots on this globe that the Europeans are now imagining, they're already envisioned as new lands, new languages, new peoples, mostly while drooling over the spoils of conquest, but that's a story for later.

And the opening of the highways of the seas is slowly knitting together the world into a global experience. And that can be quite dislocating for the average person who still lives in a consciousness with extreme edges. because the question of where am I has never had so many possible answers and the unified religious political paradigms of the Middle Ages are tottering they're going to be replaced by horrific war the rise of multipolar Christianity in the heart of Europe and ultimately the birth of the secular nation state through the 30 years war, that story lies ahead but for now the question of what am I will have a very different range of answers in the political culture which lies ahead. And finally, fueled by the budding scientific revolution and spread by the printing press, knowledge is exploding.

The Renaissance man, that guy who knew so much about everything was to know, disappears so fast that he'll be gone before his legend even has a chance to take hold in people's minds. and now the winds of skepticism are just starting to blow through Europe as information accumulates at an alarming rate and the standards of measures inherited from the ancient world fall gradually by the wayside what we know and what we don't know is going to become a source of quite a bit of doubt and eventually it's going to become impossible to even know what we know, much less to actually know it but for now, Europe is ripe for an epistemological breakdown. That's right, a full-blown crisis about how we know anything and about what the sources and limitations of knowledge just might be.

So, as we progress toward the modern era, it's going to become fashionable to pit science and religion, reason and revelation against one another as sources of knowledge. But once upon a time, and in fact, from the time of Aristotle in the ancient world all the way through the Middle Ages. Reason and Revelation had a fairly comfortable relationship between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. And I hope you will recall, if you've listened to the first series, the last Jewish epistemology that we discussed in any coherent fashion. And that came to us from Rav Sa'adji Gaon, who taught us about the four sources of knowledge, which were really actually three plus one. He said that knowledge comes from sensory perception, intellectual apprehension, you can learn things or logical deduction, you can derive conclusions from that which you know or experience.

Those are the first three. And the fourth was, of course, authentic tradition. Now, the first three, again, what you experience what you learn directly, or what you derive from what you've learned seem to make sense to most people. Authentic tradition is where the rub lies. Now, Rav Sajjah says that authentic tradition, which for him, of course, is the Torah, can be considered a form of immediate knowledge. And in fact, he calls the Torah a report that one can trust. Because, of course, there's another way to learn something. You don't have to do it yourself. You can get it from someone else. And in Rav Sajjah's understanding, the Torah is a source for immediate, certain knowledge, and thus provides a platform, really a foundation on which one can build reasonable thought.

And thus, revelation actually becomes the grounding context for knowledge at all. In other words, the way in which we can know anything is by having the solid ground of revelation and then using your brain. Because he further teaches that rational speculation on questions of God and theology isn't just a good idea, it's one's religious obligation. He quotes Isaiah 40.21 if you want to look it up. Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Do you not understand the foundations of the earth? And apparently if your answer is no, you better get to work. So it was of course in medieval spans we discussed long ago where Rav Sajj's synthesis of reason and revelation really flowered.

There we had rabbis, monks, mystics, jurists all turning to Aristotle and Plato, amongst other Greeks, in their attempt to supply a framework for knowing the world that could incorporate both their experience and the lens of their belief in God's will. But, need I remind you, it didn't end well. And I'm actually not speaking about the violent expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. it didn't end well because medieval thought largely assumes a smooth progression from physics to metaphysics from the world which we know through our senses right up through that portion of existence about which we can only speculate that's right, in theory the medieval world is a harmonious one and in particular in Aristotle's eyes because to Aristotle the goal of knowledge of knowing the world is to get to the point where you understand it so well that you would be amazed if anything were different than it is.

So the breakdown, this epistemological breakdown, the breakdown in the way in which we know the world, really began for the Jews way back in the Middle Ages. Ravsadja set us to the task of asking hard questions about life, the universe, and everything, and it was he that legitimized the thought of the Greek masters as a useful tool in this process. But the problem is that Aristotle's God is perfect in form and exists unchanging beyond the farthest stars. He doesn't know that there's a universe beyond himself and therefore doesn't care. He didn't create that universe and he certainly doesn't rule over it in the eyes of the Greeks. And we saw in the story of Spain the role that philosophical skepticism played in weakening the ties of the Torah amongst the nobility and the intellectual elite, and we discussed how it played out in the dynamics of the expulsion.

Now, in the life of the exiles going forward, which I promise you, we're going together. I keep saying that. We keep getting stuck in continental Europe, but we will get there. And when we do, we're going to be far more interested in the bitter taste that philosophy left in the mouth of these exiles than we are in its past. And furthermore, in the role that that philosophical rejection if you will, may play in the rise of the Kabbalah as a widespread replacement for philosophy in the ongoing quest to understand the world beyond immediate experience. But for now, a new challenge to the way in which the medievals knew the world is arising, or actually should I say descending from the stars. In 1543, a book was published which didn't just pull the ground out from under Christian Europe, it turned the universe inside out.

I'm speaking about On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, which was published by Nicholas Copernicus just before his death. And in this famous book, he of course asserts a heliocentric model of the universe. To put it simply, he took the Earth out of the center of existence, set the heavenly bodies in rotation around the sun, and introduced the idea that the Earth turns on its axis. now the idea that the earth was at the center of things is probably as old as the first person who looked up and hypothesized that the stars were something more than pinholes in the darkness and there's no reason for us to go into even a brief history of observational astronomy but it's important to note that Am Yisrael and the Christians and Muslims in their footsteps have been staring at the sky as long as we know.

And that's mostly for two reasons. First, of course, is awe and curiosity. And the second was the need to regulate a calendar. So the model for understanding what they saw when they looked up at the stars that the medieval world had inherited from the ancients belonged, of course, to the Greeks. And it was really the second century Alexandrian mathematician Ptolemy who gave Aristotle's notions of a geocentric world, a world in which the earth, immovable, lies at the center, their definitive form. And though it actually appears that heliocentric, the sun at the center ideas, and perhaps even others, these models had existed since ancient times, nevertheless, Tolemy was the foundational framework for how the Middle Ages located itself when it looked up at the stars.

The problem was, though, people didn't stop looking, and they didn't stop noticing new things. And so by the 16th century, Tobey's model of the Earth as an unmoving center of existence had worn pretty thin in its ability to explain the increasingly complex phenomena that were being observed in the heavens. So Copernicus, when he proposed to put the sun in the middle, didn't just replace the Earth. he provided a model to describe the physical reality of the cosmos that replaced antiquity he provided a new way of knowing the world and that would have been fine for Christian Europe in fact it might have been great because the advances in understanding and therefore predicting phenomena should have been good news if it weren't for one little roadblock an epistemological roadblock because Ptolemaic astronomy had been built in at the base of how Christianity understood reality from its very inception.

And in the medieval era, Tolomeo was given a central role in theology and in scriptural interpretation by Thomas Aquinas, that foundational philosopher of Christian Europe and, of course, saint of the Catholic Church. Because he taught that the earth is the unmoving center of creation and it must be so, according to both reason and revelation. And in doing this, he created, or at least reinforced, a situation where an assault on an astronomical theory became an attack on God. And though, at first, Copernicus work actually raised very little controversy I mean he wasn even mentioned at the Council of Trent That was convened only ten years after its publication If you don know what that is it okay We going to talk about the Counter and how the Catholic Church responded to the rising Protestant movement, probably in a couple episodes.

But for now, it didn't make any waves. It wasn't even banned by the Church until much later in 1616. And that was mostly about Galileo. And don't worry, we'll talk about why it was actually Galileo Galilei who fought the great battle of the Copernican Revolution and why it was Sir Isaac Newton who finished it. But for now, in order to understand the shattering blow that this was to the way in which Europeans, perhaps Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike, knew the world, it's worth it to consider the power of Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor, also known as the Law of Parsimony, is a problem-solving principle. Trimitive, of course, to William of Ockham back in the late 13th, mid-14th century, he was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian.

And he taught a very simple principle, that among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected. The law of parsimony. In science, Ockham's razor is used as a guide to developing theoretical models, because simpler theories are preferred to complex ones as they're more testable. So as the Copernican revolution progresses, and really the scientific revolution in general, and science becomes ever more powerful in its ability to explain the phenomena we experience in life, particularly in the stars, the model offered by religion, and, in specific, Christianity's dogmatic insistence on Ptolemaic astronomy is going to appear ever more complex and thus, to many people, ever less tenable.

Now, two more pieces you need to understand in this epistemological revolution and that first one is empiricism. the idea that one roots understanding in their sensory experience and the sort of handmaiden of empiricism which is induction the development of rules that results from seeing particular observed events as instances of a general principle if the sun rises every day and my experience of it is such and it's always the same then I can induce from this that there is a general principle that the sun rises Now, this may sound obvious, but I want you to understand that in the 16th century, empiricism and induction are going to begin to replace metaphysics altogether. Meaning, we won't need to speculate about what we know beyond experience.

We're simply going to be more precise in our observations and then induce the meaning from that. The astronomers of the 16th century were a turning point in what I call the uncoupling of knowledge and tradition, which is a hallmark of the birth of modernity. They said, look up at the sky. Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you see. And then, perhaps, we'll talk about what we believe. And we'll test it to see how well it explains what we might see. And to me, this uncoupling of knowledge and tradition, Don't tell me that told me it was right, and therefore when I look up at the sky, I have to interpret what I see according to his theories. Look through the telescope and tell me what you see, not what you believe.

This process of uncoupling knowledge from tradition is the definition of the epistemological breakdown. And in order to trace its impact on the unfolding of the Jewish story, it's best to start with one of the pillars of tradition. Rav Moshe ben Yisrael Iserlis also known as the Ramah was born in Poland in 1520 a rabbi, son of rabbis and the inheritor of the traditions of Ashkenaz which had migrated to Poland over the last hundred years he is recognized as one of the greatest scholars that that great bastion of Torah ever produced and in his lifetime even became the primary halachic authority for European Jewry The Ramah was also an extremely wealthy man, and when he returned home from Lernian Lublin to his native city of Krakow, in about 1550, he established a large yeshiva where he supported pupils at his own expense.

In 1553, he was appointed as Dayan, as official judge of the religious court. He also ended up serving on the Council of the Four Lands, which is an incredibly interesting institution that we will speak of as we go forward. but the Ramah's great halakhic work his legal masterpiece was known as Hamapa the tablecloth which may sound like a strange name for a legal work unless you know that it was actually written as a gloss to the Shuchan Aruch of Rabbi Yosef Karo Shuchan Aruch means a set table and the Mapa was its tablecloth now the Shuchan Aruch which have no fear we will describe its rise in detail perhaps even in the coming episode. But the Shulchan Aruch based his rulings on three foundational authorities.

The Rambam, that's Maimonides, the Rosh, who I hope you recall we spoke of long ago, Rav Asher Ben Yechil, and the Rif, Rav Alfasi from North Africa. And of the three, only the Rosh carried the Torah of Ashkenaz. He'd inherited the teachings of the Tosavists before fleeing France for Spain. And because of that, the work is largely Spartac in orientation. And therefore, in order to codify and preserve the traditions that had migrated from the German heartland of Ashkenazi culture to the new homeland of Poland, the Ramah wrote the Mapa in which he added the laws and minhagim, the customs of Ashkenazi Jewry, to the structure of the Shulchan Aruch. So I said, we'll discuss the impact and importance of the Shulchan Aruch, and what we call the transition from the age of the Rishonim, of the early authorities, to that of the Akronim, the later, in a more focused manner in coming episodes.

But for now, just know, this is the pivotal legal work of the modern era. And, within 15 years of its first publication, every subsequent edition of the definitive work included the Mapa actually embedded in the text. If you really want to know how great the Ramah's reputation was as master of the law, of tradition, and how wide the impact of his legal writings were, then you simply need to look at his tombstone. And you will find there the exact same epitaph as you will find on that of the Rambam, Maimonides. Memoshe ad Moshe lo kam ke Moshe. Now, from Moshe to Moshe there was none like Moshe. When it came to Moshe Maimonides, the Rambam, that meant from Moshe Rabbeinu, from Moshe our master who gave us the Torah to the Rambam.

But here, it actually means from Moshe Maimonides, to Moshe Isilus, from the Rambam to the Ramah. But, as fascinating as I find it, we're not actually interested in the details of the law at this moment. What I want to get at is how the shifting foundations of knowledge affected the Ramah, and how he, in turn, helped Am Yisrael come to know the world in the early modern era. And for this, we need to touch on a lesser-known side of his teachings. Because in addition to his devotions to the law, the Ramah was also a student of philosophy and of the stars. Torah Ta'olah is a philosophical and Kabbalistic work which the Ramah wrote that correlates the structure of the temple and the sacrifices with current astronomical theories.

And in it, the Ramah says clearly that the aim of man is to search for the cause and the meaning of things. This is a sentiment that Aristotle and the Rambab would surely support. the Ramah also wrote an unpublished commentary on a contemporary astronomical work known in Hebrew as Mahalach HaKochavim the course of the stars now in and of itself this is hardly shocking since from the time of the Rambam when he codified the laws of the sanctification of the new moon back in the 12th century the study of the heavens has been an integral part of the legal discussion but nevertheless the Ramah's interest in science seemed to go beyond the purely legal, technical, and was not well received by everyone.

Because perhaps his greatest contemporary was his relative Rav Shlomo Luria, also known as the Maharshal. Sorry if you're not used to these acronyms. You'll get there. So the Maharshal was a great legal master in his own right, and a well-known thorny personality. We'll see more of his combative stance when we delve deeper into the story behind the Shulchan Arach. But for now, suffice it to say that his absolute devotion to the Tamu, to the words of the sages as the sole legitimate source of knowledge, caused him to look quite critically at any other foundation for understanding the world. And when the Maharshal saw the Ramah's willingness to consider the words of Aristotle in his halachic decision-making process, and how he was willing to include certain elements of philosophy, history, and science in the curriculum of his yeshiva, he remarked sarcastically that next the students of the Ramah would be composing prayers in honor of Aristotle.

And then he sent him the following message. You are turning to the wisdom of the uncircumcised Aristotle. Woe unto my eyes that they've seen such a thing. This is a sin for such a prince in Israel. Now, the Ramah's reply is quite instructive. First, he dismissed his cousin's complaint as a rehashing of old news, which didn't really deserve a reply. Because the argument about learning Greek wisdom in the mind of the Ramah had been resolved by the great Rashba several hundred years ago in the time of the ban on the works of the Rambam. If I've lost you, go back and check out episode 21 from season 1. but for our purposes you just need to know the Ramah asserts that the sages I quote only feared the study of the cursed Greeks like the books of physics together with the metaphysics however they did not forbid the study of the words of the scholars and their investigations on the essence of reality and its natures on the contrary through this the greatness of the creator of the world may he be blessed is made known our sages declared concerning the one who knows how to calculate the cycles and planetary courses, but does not do so?

Of him the prophet says, but they regard not the works of God, neither had they considered the works of his hand. So the Ramah is actually echoing Rav Sa'adiyah's position that acquiring knowledge is an obligation. And he opens up the field of science for the Jews, and it's hard to believe in today's day and age when Zionists like to brag about how many Jews get the Nobel Prize, that once upon a time, Jews were hardly leaders in the scientific world, he opens up that possibility with the primary argument that one can separate physics from metaphysics The study of nature from the speculation on what lies beyond it And this disassociation as we already saw is a hallmark of the role that science is going to play in birthing modern consciousness.

Remember, look through the telescope, tell me what you see, and then we'll talk about what you believe. Don't give me a theory that dictates what you see. it's going to be a primary justification for the study of science by Jews and as we said, empiricism is simply the notion that all knowledge is derived from sensory experience a view shared by Aristotle however, as we also saw medieval thought was beholden to the actual conclusions which Aristotle told me had drawn from their observations to the point where an empirical approach to astronomy in early modernity actually became theologically threatening. But now the Ramah is uncoupling the traditional metaphysics of the ancient world from what he sees in the sky.

Now the Ramah also defends himself by claiming that basically everything he learned from the Greeks he actually absorbed via the Rambam, who himself had taught the following very important idea in the Guide for the Perplexed in the third section in the 14th paragraph. You must, however, says the Rambam, not expect that everything our sages say respecting astronomical matters should agree with observation. For mathematics were not fully developed in those days, and their statements were not based on the authority of the prophets, but on the knowledge which they either themselves possessed or derived from contemporary men of science. now I can't help but wonder if this claim of the sages partial fallibility managed to calm the concerns of the or added fuel to his fire because though it may seem obvious that the sages when it came to astronomy were simply working with the best science that they had and therefore one should not be bound by their statements and conclusions this chink in the armor of emunat chachamim of our belief in their words as the source of knowledge will become a time bomb planted in Jewish epistemology, gradually but progressively undermining the way in which the Jews know the world.

And as the pressures of modernity on traditional society in general rise, and in particular in a few centuries when the emancipation comes, the idea that the words of the sages are the foundation of all knowledge is going to become increasingly definitive of Jewish identity, to the point where today I've met people who will tell me that God planted the bones of dinosaurs in the earth in order to test my faith. Something that my geology professors were definitely not in agreement with. So we'll see that what seemed obvious to the Rambam and the Ramah can actually lead in many different directions. Now, the Ramah is hardly an example of the complete uncoupling of knowledge from tradition. that lies on our horizon.

Because as we see in the second chapter of Torta Ola, he makes a somewhat defensive maneuver, and says, if the objection is raised that the opinions of our sages are based on tradition, which may be the case, I do not see it as a reason to refute them. We hold fast to tradition, says the Ramah, even if that tradition seems to be at variance with reason. However, if there's any possibility of finding a compromise and of interpreting the words of our sages in such a way that they do not contradict rationality and even come close to it, it is a good and desirable thing to utilize that possibility. So the Ramah himself seems to have been holding the rope at both ends. He honored the rational, but he revered the sages, and he set himself to the task of reconciling the two.

But I can tell you personally that you know a teacher really by his students. David Gantz, who will become known as both a historian and astronomer, was born in Germany in 1541, and apparently had a thirst for knowledge from a very young age. In his early years, he absorbed all the Torah he could from the Yeshiva to Bonn in Frankfurt, but eventually his desire for more drew him to that great wellspring of Torah in Poland and he made his way to the Yeshiva at Krakow and there sat at the feet of the Ramah for several years imbibing not only the law but also an interest in the stars Gans records his excitement that quote my master and rabbi who raised me and guided me as a father his son the eminent rabbi Moshe Isserlis may his memory be blessed also discussed astronomical problems in a brilliant manner in several passages of his book, Torah to Ola.

So it must have seemed natural to Gantz that when the time had come to move on from Krakow, the next stop on his quest for knowledge of the Torah and of the world in general would be the great city of Prague. I say next stop, but apparently he made a pit stop to stay with his father-in-law in the city of Nordheim. Now it's not known how long he stayed exactly, but it is known that apparently it was long enough to master a Hebrew translation of Euclid's geometry which he found there just to give you an idea of how sharp this guy really was. So Dudley Gans arrived in Prague around 1564 just as the city was rebounding from an expulsion order against all the Jews. But the truly exciting phase of his story really begins in 1581 when the Emperor Rudolf II moved the capital of the Holy Roman Empire from Vienna to Prague.

Now, Rudolf was somewhat of a character. Though he'd been raised in the Catholic court of Spain, he was tolerant of Protestantism, something which at this point was not a given, and even other religions, including Judaism. In fact, it seems he largely withdrew from Catholic observance in his own life. There were more exciting things, more exciting fields of knowledge to the emperor. Astrology and alchemy were both regarded as mainstream scientific fields in his Prague, and Rudolf was a firm devotee of both. Apparently, he spared no expense in bringing Europe's best alchemists to his court in his lifelong quest to find the Philosopher's Stone. For all you Harry Potter fans out there, and in his youth, the famous French physician and seer Nostradamus actually prepared a horoscope for Rudolf, dedicating it to him as prince and king.

And in many ways, historians will tell you that Rudolf's interest in learning and the occult, which caused him to gather so much knowledge into Prague helped seed the scientific revolution of the coming century. Furthermore, the astronomers Tycho Bray and Johannes Kepler both attended his court. And as the court astronomers, the emperor Bray and Kepler pushed the boundaries of scientific knowledge and their work eventually resulted in Kepler's three planetary laws. Now I'm not going to drag you back through 9th grade earth science, don't be scared. But you should understand that these were the first natural laws ever formulated, meaning the first laws which purported to be mathematically precise, verifiable, universal statements about physical phenomenon.

This is the type of science that you can't argue with. And that's a new way of knowing the world. Now, Devin Gantz apparently spent his early years in Prague pursuing his passion for the stars over Torah, and learning from these masters in particular. In his astronomical work, which was actually published posthumously, Nehmad V'Naim, Gans reports that he had, on three separate occasions, spent five days in the observatory of court astronomer Tycho Bray, and had met Bray's assistant, Johannes Kepler. It was actually at Bray's request that Gans translated parts of the Alphonsian Tables from Hebrew into German. These were tables, which perhaps you remember from an episode long ago, that were used to compute the position of the sun, moon, and planets relative to the fixed stars.

They were essential for navigation and had actually originally been compiled in 1252 by a commission of Jewish and Muslim scholars for, you guessed it, King Alfonso X. He was the wise, if you recall. He was also the great supporter of translation. him. Columbus actually relied on an updated version of these to cross the Atlantic. But it was really more than just the stars that had attracted David Gans to Prague. And the city was the center of Torah as well as science. Because in 1588 Rav Yehuda Lao Ben Bitzalel also known as the Maharal returned to Prague and Gans became one of his many students. now the Maharal's stature in Torah rivals that of the Ramah and his life has actually become the stuff of legends most people, if they've heard of him at all associate the Maharal with the stories of the Golem, that scary creature made of clay which defended the Jews of Prague from all their enemies at his behest and by the way, it's the Emperor Rudolf who's the ruler in many of the legends of the Golem of Prague, fitting to his occult reputation.

Now, although these stories may have actually been a later development in the retelling of the life of the Maharal, no matter how you slice it, they point to the fact that in his lifetime, the Maharal was already known as a master of the mysteries of the Torah. And not only in his lifetime. The Maharal gave us a great inheritance in Torah through his many works, something I can testify personally to the incredible nature of his thought, the clarity of his writing and the power of his works. Because the Maral is known as the teacher who gave us Torah tenista and l'shon nigle. He gave us the hidden Torah in a revealed language. It's actually graspable to the extent that that's true. Now, it's because of his mastery of the inner wisdom of Torah that the Maral will also give us a critical tool in the ongoing attempt by Am Yisrael to know the world both through tradition and science.

Now, I said earlier that when originally published in 1543, Copernicus' work made few waves. Few, but not none at all. Because in the Tischredden, which is a record of Martin Luther's dinner table conversations, the following is recorded. There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the Earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon. just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship, and might hold that he was sitting still while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that's how things are nowadays. When a man wishes to be clever, he must needs to invent something special, and the way he does it must needs to be the best. The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down.

However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still, and not the earth. Now this reference to Joshua if you not familiar is speaking about Yahushua chapter 10 12 Givon Shemesh begivon dom The sun stands still over Givon And it takes us to the heart of our matter Because Luther's words are not just an issue of pedantic literalism in text reading. Well, he told the sun to stand still, not the earth to stand still, therefore, you know, Coperticus has to be wrong. No, no, no. They're uncovering a question of what is possible in the eyes of science, and how I can reconcile that possibility with the nature of revelation. Now, you should know that the Maharal is not the Maharshal.

I warned you about these acronym names. Far from rejecting science, in Netiva Torah, the Maharal takes an even stronger stance than the Ramah did in labeling science as a legitimate source for knowledge of the world. We should pay attention to what the scholars of the nations have said about what is below the sphere of the moon, because they were scholars of the natural world. Study of the sciences that focus on reality and the order of the world is certainly permitted. They are like a ladder to ascend to the science of the Torah. It seems clear, furthermore, that the Maharal was aware of the changing nature of science in his day. After all, David Gans was both his student and a student of Taika Bray.

And maybe, just maybe, Kepler himself attended that legendary meeting between the Maharal and the Emperor Rudolf, which Gans reports. So how then, did the Maharal reconcile Copernicus with the Book of Joshua? And the answer is, he didn't. In the second introduction to his great work, Gevurot Hashem, the Mighty Acts of God, the Maharal actually addresses our dilemma directly. He's speaking about miracles, and miracles particularly in the context of whether the sun could have really stood still over Givon. And after taking the task every thinker, past or present, frankly, future, for their failure to grasp the greatness of God, the Maharal hones in on the Raul Bagh, that's Gersonides, and his assistance, and his insistence, that two opposites cannot exist with respect to the same subject simultaneously.

It's a classic scientific empirical approach. This is either a table or an elephant. It cannot actually be both. And Amarell says that this is simply not true. He says that, in fact, the sun could both stand still for Joshua and still be bound by Kepler's laws of planetary motion. for Joshua and his people who needed the unnatural miracle the sun stood still but for the rest of the world who did not require the miracle they experienced its natural course the Maharal says that the sun only moved for the people outside of Joshua's horizon but within his horizon there was a miraculous event because the Maharal sees no need to reconcile the miraculous with the mundane. He says that they occupy two separate and parallel planes.

And he furthermore says that which one one occupies is all a matter of their perspective. In essence, the moral is telling us that the way in which science knows the world is legitimate and truthful in its own right, as is the way in which the Torah knows it. The problems arise when one tries to collapse these two phases of reality into one, and especially if you should try to evaluate one according to the other. In another of his works, the Maharal vehemently attacks the Italian rabbi and historian Azaria Derasi for doing just that. because De Rossi in his work Meorinayim took great liberties to correct what he saw as gross errors in rabbinic chronologies and how did he do so? well in light of the academic understanding of history available in his time he used science to judge the Torah and he justified himself with the words of the Rambam that we saw earlier which claimed that there was no need to accept rabbinic statements about astronomy as fact Only, Durasi went much further, and that's kind of the hallmark of the 16th century and of the time to come.

For him, rabbinic statements about history, chronology, and nature, which conflicted with a scientific understanding, could be rejected out of hand in favor of contemporary scholarship. He scoffed at the words of the Ramah that I quoted above, that enjoined one to uphold the words of the sages whenever possible. Now, the Maharal had no patience for this attitude, and he rips De Rossi's work. But we need to understand the basis of his rejection of De Rossi's position. This is not simply a stance of what I would call frumkite, of rigid religiosity that refuses to legitimize any standard of knowledge outside of the words of our sages. The Maharal tells us that both the astronomer who was bothered by the sun standing still for Joshua and this historian, who's troubled by rabbinic chronology, share the same methodological failure.

Because the Torah, he says, is about the essence of things, while science relates to that which is visible and perceivable. Notice, perceivable. He says of the scientists, I quote, in the final analysis he can never know the truth of a thing. He can never know its essence. He will only know that it existed in such and such a way, but this can never be called science. And that's because to the Maharal, only the Torah penetrates to essence and can offer knowledge, which is certain. And if one reads the words of the sages from the perspective of the scientists, he'll miss their meaning altogether. Now this is not to say that science doesn't offer knowledge. On the contrary, we saw his words in support of knowing the world from the scientific perspective.

It's simply that the Maharal says, the words of the Torah alone and the words of their science alone. Torah L'Chud, Mada L'Chud. Now, there's a lot to chew on in this parallel structure that the Maharal offers us. of the idea that within one horizon of perspective, the world, that it just goes according to its natural law. But within another horizon of perspective, there's what he calls a guidance of the world which lies beyond the natural. And in particular, one should contemplate it in light of the challenges that post-modernity has brought to the very notion of scientific certainty and knowledge. But for now, I need to wrap up this episode. I'm running on. So I want to return to Duffet Guns. So do you believe me now about the epistemological breakdown?

The new astronomy is rocking our physical conception of the world, and this in turn is challenging how we know what we know at all. We saw that the Ramah took a tentative step towards science, though he did it while keeping tradition firmly in front of his eyes. and nevertheless this move toward the rational was just enough to ignite David Gantz's passion for knowledge in pursuit of the astronomical and so he became not only the Ramaz student but the student of Bray and Kepler as well but of course he was also a disciple of the Maharal and the Maharal's vision of parallel epistemologies of a world in which knowledge and even experience reality can shift according to one's horizon, according to their perspective, had a profound effect on Gantz.

I can say this with certainty, because David Gantz wasn't just a student of the Ramah, or the Maharal, or Bray and Kepler. He was the author of one of the most widely read books of the Jewish world in the early modern era, though few remember his name. It was a work of history known as Tzemach David, the Sprout of David, and it presents a picture of Jewish and non-Jewish history which run in parallel. Unlike De Rossi, who it appears he was not shy to draw on, Gans avoided the problems of rabbinic and contemporary chronology by simply keeping them separate. Sounds familiar, right? Separate except in one respect. And I want to end with this. The general history section in Semach Tavid is arranged neatly into four empires.

Four empires which we spoke of long ago in the first episode of the Jewish story about the book of Daniel. Remember Daniel? It's a story about a boy, far from home, who has a dream. A dream about the empires of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Edom. Now, God saw the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, of which, of course, the Prague of his day was the capital, as the continuation of the ancient Roman Empire, which the rabbis had associated with Edom. And in structuring his general history section, according to the vision of the book of Daniel, he was actually able to ground non-Jewish history in a framework of meaning derived from the Bible. Now, you should know, Tzevuch David was published at least ten times between the end of the 16th century and the middle of the 19th, and it was continually updated in each republication.

And in his introduction, Gans says that most men today wish to learn the Torah standing on one foot. And he adopted Hillel's tolerant approach by offering Tzermach David as an answer. It wasn't simply a history book. It was a way in to knowing the world through the Torah. because Gans understood that knowledge is not about the accumulation of information. Knowledge is not founded on what you know, but rather on how you know the world. And he understood, furthermore, that for Am Yisrael, we know the world through our story. I want to thank all the people who give their hard-earned money to make this show possible. And I'd like to ask you to join them now. You can go to my Facebook page, Ralph Mike, you can find the link there.

You can send me an email at ralphmikefoyer at gmail.com, or you can go directly to my page on Patreon, www.patreon.com, and find my M. Foyer page, and hit the Donate button for a little per-podcast support. I'd like to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me a platform to reach so many people. I'd like to thank the Pardes Institute P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for making an opportunity to touch the hearts and minds of so many Jews out there I'd like to thank Suom Yaakov because it's my home and I'd like to thank you for listening I'm Rav Mike Boyer and this is The Jewish Story