[Avodah] One is Hashem in Heaven

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 10:16:22AM -0500, Zev Sero wrote (on another thread):
> But the shamayim is higher than that.  Even taking the literal view
> that shamayim is a physical object directly above a flat disc-shaped
> earth, its distance is the same as the earth's diameter, which is far
> more than a mile or two.  It's inconceivable that they could have
> built a wall all the way up to touch the shamayim.

I have two problems with this:

First, shamayim is from eish umayim, whereas the shell around the
universe, the raqi'ah, is of more solid stuff "hammered flat" (thus
the name).

Second, I don't think identifying "shamayim" with the shell fits the
machloqes R' Yehudah and Rush Laqish on Chagiga 12b. R' Yehudah says
there are two heavens -- shamayim ushemei hashamayim.

Raish Laqish names 7: vilon, raqi'ah, shechaqim, zevul, ma'on, makhon
and arvos.

Vilon is visible during the daylight hours only. Sounds to me like the
blue or gray "thing" overhead.

The raqi'ah is the only other shamayim we can see, and it's where we can
find the sun, moon, stars and mazalos. So it would appear to include the
shell that holds the kokhavei sheves as well as the as the transparent
ones that hold the kokhavei lekhes. (Reish Laqish lived /after/ Chazal
accepted from the Greeks that the kochavei lekhes are fixed to their
respective spheres, rather than roaming around a single one.)

Zevul hold Y-m shel maalah and "banah beisi beis zevul lakh".

Ma'on holds the mal'akhim who sing shirah (at night).

Makhon is the otzar in "otzaro hatov", and holds qelalos (like destructive
dew) away from the world.

Arvos is the treasury of tzedeq, michpat, chesed, chayim, shalom,
berakhah...


I'm making this up, but it's not absurd to say:

R' Yehudah -- there are two threnesses: the one over our heads, and
the non-physical

Reish Laqish -- there are 7: the sky, space, and 5 levels of spirituality.

In both the Rambam's metaphysics as well as that of the meQubalim they
didn't consider physical vs spiritual to be a clear dicotomy so much as
a progression. In Qabbalah, each world causing the world below; in the
Rambam, Hashem causing the highest class of mal'akhim who in turn are the
cause of those in the next class and so on down to the galgalim (in Reish
Laqish's raqi'ah) and the world beneath the sun. In both cases, things
get less and less daq until you get chomer. (And even within chomer,
there is eish, avir, mayim and aretz, each more gas and presumed to be
at equilibrium at a lower place than the previous element.)

So it could very well be that they took this machloqes amora'im to
be about this very issue. R' Yehudah held that there is physical vs
spiritual existences. Reish Laqish describes gradations.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One doesn't learn mussar to be a tzaddik,
micha at aishdas.org        but to become a tzaddik.
http://www.aishdas.org                         - Rav Yisrael Salanter
Fax: (270) 514-1507