If there is nothing there, why shouldn’t anything Go?
No! There is nothing there!
Though writing had been invented by the Mesopotamians – the Sumerians, to be exact – circa 3,200 BCE, it is not known whether Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could write.
It is not even known whether these three – Abraham, his son Isaac and Isaac’s son, Jacob – actually existed; but for Rabbinic Jews they did! Not only did the Jewish Forefathers exist for Rabbinical Jewry, it is their, the Patriarchs’, God that the Rabbinical Jews recognized as the God of all succeeding generations.
But who was the first Prophets’ God?
There could not have been any written or oral records describing this God as these records were passed down from generation to generation. How could Moses have written – or so he is purported to have done – the first books of the Tanach, pertaining to Adam and Noah then Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, without at least oral records? Yet the Torah – the written record – and the oral traditions, as recorded by the Mishnah, do not mention any attributes of God. There is, of course, mention of three attributes – God is Eternal, the Creator and Lawgiver – in the Gemara; but the Gemara is merely a commentary (with comments about the Mishnah) – not a written record of the oral tradition. Even if these attributes are an authoritative deduction from the text of the Mishnah, the author proffers the theory that it may be said that these attributes may be incorrect.
So, again, the writer would ask: who is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?
The answer must be that nobody knew and no-one knows.
So why shouldn’t anything go?
Why shouldn’t the theories of Philo, Spinoza, Maimonides and all succeeding Abrahamic religionist theologians and philosophers be potentially right? Who is to say that Moses and his successor Prophets, Jewish, Christian or Islamist, were wrong?
Rabbinic Judaism would have us believe that some prophets and thinkers were right and that others were wrong.
Spinoza, the 17th century Jewish philosopher and his proposed theory of God, are perhaps the most prominent of the thinkers and their theories rejected by Rabbinic Judaism, which led to a Cherem being declared against the then not-so-famous thinker.
The Bet Din deciding for a Cherem to be imposed, must have known something that possibly no-one knows: who, what, why, where and when God was and is.
Spinoza himself claimed to have known the answers to these questions. The writer, however, proposes that it is possible that he may not have known the answers.
Yet, precisely because it may be possible that he, Spinoza, knew the answers to the aforementioned questions, the time has now come for the rescission of the Cherem.
If God existed and exists, if Moses existed and, furthermore, if the writer is allowed to speculate and say that there were written records and oral traditions that were passed down to Moses which Moses perhaps rejected, he may have rejected just such a description of God – a description coinciding with that presented by Spinoza.
Why shouldn’t anything go?