How Rambam Sees God in the Sunset

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Photo: one of the many sunset photos I took this past Hawaii trip

How Rambam Sees God in the Sunset
I just returned from my annual trip to visit Popo (my 97-year-old grandmother) in Hawaii. Whenever I’m there, I do my best to trek out to the shoreline every evening to watch the Hawaiian sunset. It’s not just the aesthetic beauty which makes a sunset like this such a special experience. Rudolph Otto, a 20th century theologian and philosopher of religion, used the term “numinous” to mean “arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring.” I’m sure I’m not the only one who has felt this numinous quality in a sunset. The question is: What does Judaism have to say? Just because this feeling is real doesn’t automatically mean that this is a valid religious experience in the Torah’s eyes.
My initial thought was that perhaps such experiences fall under the headings of ahavas Hashem (love of God) and yiras Hashem (awe of God). The Rambam defines these two experiences in the Laws of the Foundations of Torah 2:2:

What is the way of loving and fearing God? When a person contemplates (misbonein) His great and wondrous works and creations and sees from them His infinite and incomparable wisdom, he immediately loves, praises, and extols and is filled with a tremendous desire to know the Great Name, as David said, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God” (Psalms 42:3).

And when he reflects upon these same matters, he immediately recoils back with fear and dread, knowing that he is a small, insignificant, unenlightened creature standing with a frail and puny mind in the presence of Perfect Knowledge, as David said, “When I behold Your heavens, [the work of Your fingers, the moon and stars that you have set in place, I exclaim:] ‘What is frail man that You should notice him, [and the son of mortal man that You should take note of him?’]” (Psalms 8:4-5).

Are the feelings described by the Rambam here identical with the numinosity felt by the average person? Seemingly not. According to the Rambam, ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem are the emotional states which result from cognitive activity: tevunah (theoretical understanding) and machshavah (practical consideration). Both require a relatively high level of knowledge, as evidenced by the fact that the Rambam goes on to provide a three-chapter primer of Aristotelian metaphysics and physics “to open the way for the meivin (contemplative thinker) to love the Name.” While it is certainly possible to for a sunset to awaken ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem, I don’t think the average person’s awe of the sunset stems from a scientific knowledge of astronomy, optics, and other areas of physics.

However, in the middle of the aforementioned primer, the Rambam drops a clue which might provide us with the basis for an answer. In the Laws of the Foundations of Torah 3:11, he cites a pasuk from Tehilim: "Praise Hashem from the earth: sea creatures and all depths, fire and hail, snow and smoke" (Tehilim 148:7). This is problematic: how can non-rational creations – such as “sea creatures and all depths, fire and hail, snow and smoke” – praise Hashem? Rambam answers:

The meaning of this statement is: praise Him, mankind, from His gevuros (mighty acts) which you see in the fire, the hail, and the other creations that can be seen on earth, the gevurah (might) of which is constantly discernable to the small and the great alike.

When the Rambam describes the gevurah of these phenomena, he is clearly not referring to the lofty intellectual levels described in Chapter 2:2, since he specifies that this gevurah is “constantly discernable to the small and the great alike.”

I believe that the gevurah mentioned by the Rambam is identical with (or is at least related to) the numinous feeling we experience when we behold such natural phenomena as crashing waves, a ferocious storm, and a dazzling sunset. In that aspect of these experience, man feels the overwhelming power of Hashem’s mighty acts, and “there the small and the great are equal” (Iyov 3:19). True, for the meivin who understands the science behind these phenomena, the sunset may give rise to ahavas Hashem and yiras Hashem, but both the meivin and the average person alike will be able to praise Hashem from the awe that arises within them when they gaze upon His handiwork in nature.

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