[Avodah] How did Abraham Discover God? The Experiential Approach

[Seth (Avi) Kadish via Avodah]

Rav Micha, thank you so much for bringing new attention to this essay. I
hope people will benefit from it in their avodat Hashem.

Regarding Rav Carmy, I can only say baruch shekivanti. What he said in
so few words is exactly what I meant. I have to admit that in all my
years at YU I never remember being struck by an approach like this,
and it certainly wasn't stressed. Both I (and seemingly the people
around me including my teachers) seemed to stress other approaches much
more. God as a being with whom a Jew or Israel has a very personal and
experiential relationship is something that I hardly remember. Even if
we studied Kuzari I don't think we fully got the point back then. But
it could also be that I wasn't ready for it then, such that even if it
was actually there (perhaps from Rav Carmy) I simply don't remember it.

The sequel to the "Illuminated Fortress" essay took me a very long
time, during which I learned a tremendous amount. But it is now done,
and will be published IYH this Spring. Rather than the website where
the introduction appeared, it will be published in an academic journal
(something that I simply had no choice about doing for professional
reasons, otherwise I would be out of a job, but I am still quite sorry
it will not be immediately available to the public online).

In my opinion, this is a topic where academia and Torah coincide: The
sequel is about nothing less than how to best understand the single most
important machlokes rishonim in medieval Jewish thought, namely: Why did
the Rishonim after the Rambam write new books of ikarim, and what were
those books meant to convey? That is a real academic question in the
historical sense, but it is also a Torah question in the very best sense.

The official abstract follows (the title is "Jewish Dogma after
Maimonides: Semantics or Substance?"):

    The medieval Jewish discussion of dogma is generally understood as a
    debate about definitions and hierarchy: what exactly is an "obligatory
    belief" and what does that status entail, which specific ideas qualify
    as such, and how do various dogmas relate to each other in terms of
    their dependencies or inner groupings? Modern scholars and traditional
    students of the literature share this conception of the debate,
    and thus reduce the medieval argument about dogma to the level of
    semantics. It is not a substantive debate about the very nature of
    the Torah, but rather a discussion of secondary significance about
    how to best describe a shared conception of the Torah. In this view,
    systems of dogma are about nothing more than the taxonomy of belief.

    Such an attitude assumes that Maimonides' famous list of the "thirteen
    foundations of the Torah" reflects a conservative stance (regardless
    of his wider agenda). This paper argues, to the contrary, that his
    dogma is best read in context as a natural reflection of radical
    formulations found in his pre-Guide rabbinic writings. It further
    argues that the great Iberian critics of Maimonidean dogma understood
    it in exactly this way and rejected it as such, offering meaningful
    alternatives in its place. They designed their alternative systems
    to reflect their views about the nature and substance of the Torah,
    not just to address the semantics of dogma.

Kol tuv,
Seth (Avi) Kadish