Wow! What an amud! You've got descriptions of God's entourage, you've got an attempt to harmonize the two main theophanies of the prophets, and you've got kids being consume by fire for knowing/learning too much. Awesome.
What to make of all this? The rabbis seem aware of the danger of these sorts of discussions (hence the Mishnah's rules and the stories of people getting flamed) but they can not look away. They want to forbid the close reading of these texts, but they seem drawn, inexorably, to the job of divining truth from the texts they venerate. They need to know what chashmal means, even though they fear the results of the philological quest. They need to know how many wings, faces etc. the angels near God had, even though they know that human beings were not meant to apprehend such ideas. They fear transgression of the Mishnaic dictate concerning the honor of one's Creator, but they seem to also fear the idea that some portion of the Holy Writ would be left unexamined, unexpounded. The search for truth though God's word knows no bounds.
Awesome.
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1 comment:
Well said.
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