(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Maimonides: A Guide for Today's Perplexed by Kenneth Seeskin

A fairly short, academic but Jewishly-guided synopsis of the arguments in Maimonides's Moreh Nevuchin, the 'Guide for the Perplexed'. Can't remember where I got this rec, probably from rhu, but though this was incredibly slow going and very apt to prompt me to get very sleepy and want to take a nap, (probably helped by the fact that I mostly read this on lazy Shabbat afternoons) I really enjoyed reading it and appreciated the insight into the Rambam's philosophy and its strengths and limitations. Seeskin provides a very strong argument for his interpretation of Rambam's envisionment of the radical unity of God and what that means for the viable methods for knowing God. And I particularly appreciated how Seeskin sees Rambam's conclusion as not representing a fully realized philosophical system, but as a call to constantly seek to perfect one's knowledge of God in the world- a call that is not merely theoretical and abstract but is incredibly concrete as embodied by performance of mitzvot. As I was reading Seeskin, I have also been studying bits and pieces of Mishneh Torah, and it actually does feel like Mishneh Torah and Moreh Nevuchin represent sort of dual keys to each other. Mishneh Torah on its own is a little unsatisfying to study, compared to Talmud, because it occupies a middle ground. It's not Shulchan Aruch, laying out a codification of the laws without citing the derivations: This is what we practice. But it's not Talmud, working out the laws in detail: this is where the laws come from. But Mishneh Torah as a deliberate cipher designed as a guide to perfecting one's knowledge of God through the practice of mitzvot makes sense, and its existence thus provides a guide to living out the life suggested in Moreh Nevuchin.


G is for Gumshoe by Sue Grafton

Not my favorite in the series, because the interlocking mysteries were messy and disjoint and then resolved in a disturbingly neat way, but I enjoyed it enough to keep going. The first time in the series, though, that I felt like the idea of reading 20 of these is daunting, because it was for the first time a little bit of a chore to read.


Currently finishing up NK Jemisin's The Fifth Season, midway through a reread of Gerald Schroeder's The Science of God, and starting George Eliot's Daniel Deronda.

Comments

[batdina]

I will look forward to talking about Daniel Deronda with you when you're further into the novel. Once upon a time I fancied myself a Victorianist (then I read Shakespeare's Sonnets and there went that idea) so I read my way through Eliot and have mostly settled on Daniel Deronda as the most interesting, if not the best of the lot.

I am now off top poke Schroeder and see if it does what I'm hoping from the title.

[seekingferret]

The Scroeder is a bit disappointing so far. It was a very important book to me when I was fifteen and questioning my faith, but the people and texts and ideas he's arguing against are people and texts and ideas I no longer consider particularly threatening to my worldview, so it's a whole lot of "So what?" so far. I guess I can never be fifteen again.

[batdina]

Yes. I glanced at the great database, saw that he had written the big bang book, and realized I knew what the book would be. S'okay. When I used that book last, it was teaching Genesis to a group of ninth graders. It fits there pretty well.

I can never be 15 again either, and that's perfectly okay with me. Then again, some things *were* simpler then: faith, for instance, among other things.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I overheard some ~9th graders talking excitedly about similar ideas during Tikkun Leil this year, and while most of me didn't want to damp their enthusiasm, it now seems really silly to me to pin too much of your emunah on any specific mechanical correlation between the days of creation and the current scientific calculation of the age of the universe. First, because scientists are still gaining important new observations that are adjusting their calculations in ways that might ruin any current correlation as surely as the Rambam's dependence on Aristotelian physics was ruined, but more primarily, because the important question isn't whether or not Bereishis and the Big Bang are correlated, the important question is why Hashem would use such an esoteric, allusive, metaphoric representation of scientific Creation to open a book that is fundamentally not a science textbook. Whatever the purpose(s) of Bereishis, it is not to teach Jews how matter and energy came to be.

But anyway, more on that when I finish the reread.