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In this episode of Hebrew Voices #230 - A Deeply Human Jewish God, Nehemia talks with Dr. Avi Kadish, a Medieval Jewish Philosophy expert and a Modern Day Masorete, discussing his work on producing an extremely accurate Tanakh text, the human-like character of Elohim versus the Aristotelian Greek view of some past Rabbis, and the part Christian texts played in one scholar's deeper understanding of Torah.

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Avi Kadish: What it means is that God does have corporeal aspects. That God is found, in some way, within a physical group; not born in a human body but dwelling amongst the people of Israel. It means that this is an extraordinarily human god with a very complex personality.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Avi Kadish, who I am going to term a modern-day Masorete. Shalom, Avi.

Avi: Shalom.

Nehemia: Avi works on a project which, I’m probably going to mispronounce the name, or misstate the name: Miqra al pi ha-Mesorah; no, I think I got that right, which is also known as M.A.M. It is the Hebrew text of the Tanakh, of what Christians call the Old Testament, that you will get when you go to Wikitext. And I’ve known about this for a long time, but didn’t think it was very serious because, you know, Wikipedia, right? Who takes that seriously? But I found out a little bit more about it, and I was blown away, that this might be one of the most accurate renditions of the Hebrew text of the Tanakh in digital format in the world. So, Avi, shalom.

Avi: Shalom, good to be with you, Nehemia.

Nehemia: Avi, so this isn’t your day job. What do you do as your profession, that, I think, in a sense prepared you to be able to do this as sort of a side project?

Avi: My profession is somewhat related but didn’t really prepare me to do this. I was a school teacher. And around the year 2000, or 2001, actually, I was invited to do a doctorate with Menachem Kellner in medieval Jewish philosophy at the University of Haifa. And for the past dozen or so years I’ve been teaching at Miklhelet Oranim, which is a teacher’s college in Kiryat Tiv’on in the north of Israel. It’s south of Haifa. I teach there in the History Department and in the Bible Department. In the Bible Department, I teach medieval Jewish exegesis. In the History Department, I teach Jewish thought, Jewish history, and even sometimes areas of general history.

Nehemia: What was the subject of your PhD?

Avi: What was the subject of my PhD? I’ll give you the formal subject and what it means. The formal subject was Rabbi Shimon Ben Zemach Duran, who was an exile from Spain to North Africa in 1391. And he is a central figure in the world of halakha, but also in the world of Jewish philosophy.

Nehemia: He was from Mallorca, wasn’t he? Wasn’t he…

Avi: His family…

Nehemia: He was from one of those islands.

Avi: He himself was not.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avi: And so, he wrote a book of Jewish philosophy that’s less well known. A lot of the works of Jewish philosophy were what you might call books of principles. Meaning, it’s philosophy, but the topics are organized according to a system of dogma, or principles of the Torah. And he wrote the least well known of the books of that genre.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: And that’s what I did. That’s the specific topic. The actual topic, which I do believe has a connection to Bible and to Mesorah, to some degree, or to at least to why the Bible is important, is that I believe that medieval Jewish philosophy is really a conflict or a debate between the god of Aristotle and the God of Abraham. Or, to put it differently, between a view of the world which is about relationships and meaning and goals, versus a view of the world which is about nature and causation and science, in modern terms.

Nehemia: Wow. So, you’re saying Aristotle had a god of science. Or maybe science was his god, in a sense?

Avi: Or best to say that Aristotle’s god works according to its nature.

Nehemia: What does that mean?

Avi: It has no will.

Nehemia: Okay, so, I don’t want to use big words here, but basically, this idea of the apathetic god; is that what we’re talking about? In other words, like, it’s a god who doesn’t really love, because that would mean it would change. And it’s not really angry because that would mean it would change, because a second ago it wasn’t angry. Is that kind of what we’re talking about?

Avi: Yeah, and that’s not the god of the…

Nehemia: That’s Maimonides’s god too, though, isn’t it?

Avi: It’s either Maimonides’s god, or Maimonides perhaps had some sort of revision of that god. In either case, even the moderate… there’s a radical Maimonides and a moderate Maimonides. Even the moderate Maimonides wasn’t so moderate.

Nehemia: Okay. Maybe we’ll do a different episode about Jewish philosophy, because that is fascinating. But how did that prepare you for working on the Hebrew text of the Tanakh?

Avi: It did not.

Nehemia: Oh, it didn’t? Okay.

Avi: It did not prepare me for working on the text, but it made the topic important. Okay?

Nehemia: Why? Why did it make it important?

Avi: Why? Well, I’ll put it this way. You have a wide range of viewers, I understand. So, I really do believe that Jews and Christians can learn a lot about their own traditions and their own faiths by meeting the other faith. Okay?

Nehemia: Okay.

Avi: And