Did the Rambam Believe in the Supernatural?

Yes. Okay. So, he's saying what about the fact that the Rambam is a doesn't seem like he followed in the same tradition as what the Ramban did later on where the Rambam some people think that the Rambam did not believe in Shedim. Uh, and this is a mistake. not only a mistake because I say it's a mistake but because for the Rambam to say that there's no shim would be heresy because it's clearly mentioned in the what the Rambam was actually mentioning was saying that there's no specific type of mazzik init not that there's there's there's there's mazikim there's there's a stories in the in the it's mentioned mentions to say you don't believe in Shedim means you don't believe a word of the Torah. So a lot of people think that the Rambam didn't believe in supernatural but it's a mistake. It's Rambam specifically said there's a certain type of mazik that does not exist init. That's it. That's where it ends. It's not he just doesn't believe anything supernatural. That's not right. He never says that he doesn't believe anything is supernatural. In fact, there is a story that Rav Mazuz Alav HaShalom published about the Rambam that I mentioned years ago when the book came out of how the Rambam was uh he was the doctor of the uh the uh the king, the non-Jewish king and uh the king wanted to play chess and the Rambam would play chess with him and would lose on purpose. Time after time he would lose on purpose. And one day the king said, "Listen, I'm tired of you losing on purpose to me. I want a challenge. I want you to really go, "No, your highness." He goes, "Listen, I decree that the next person that wins has to convert has to the other one has to convert to his religion. Meaning now you can't pretend you can't pretend to lose to me because then you'll have to convert to Muslim to become Muslim. And this is again this is not me right. This is Mazda wrote this. Okay. The Rambam now is in a predicament he can't get out of. They start playing chess and the Rambam says all of a sudden I forgot the rules of the game. Meaning there's which is heavenly help. There's NES and then there's something called there's like a evil miracle which is the exact opposite. He says I forgot the rules to the game and he started losing and he was only a few moves away from losing the entire game. All of a sudden there's a knock on the door. They open it. They see a man respectable and it says yes how can I help you? says, "I am uh uh here because this man over there, the Rambam, he owes me money and I want the money back." So the king looks at the Rambam, he says, "No, you don't have any money. Tell me, I'll give it to you." How you going to have people, it's embarrassing for somebody of your stature to have people go after him asking for money? They owe them, pay your debts. The Rambam says, "Listen, I don't know who this person is. I don't owe him any money." So the per So the person says, "Okay, if he says he doesn't owe me any money, I'm willing to accept that if he swears that he doesn't owe me any money by repeating what I say in our language in Hebrew." Okay, you willing? Sure. I'll repeat whatever he says. No problem. Repeat after me. And then the person says to him, "Move the rook to the right. Move the this to the left. This one four spaces." He tells him the whole mala of what to do with the chessboard. He then leaves. The Rambam returns to the game and within a few moves he beats the king. The king loses his mind. He goes, "How could it be? I was two moves away from beating you. He says, "Your highness, I'll tell you the truth. You were two moves away from beating me until a miracle happened that Hashem sent me this person to save my life." What do you mean? How'd he do? He told the story. Immediately the king says, "Find him. Who is this person?" They found him. They brought him in. Said, "Who are you? And how did you know that we're playing chess?" to come specifically at that time. It says, "My name is Rabbi Avraham Ibn Ezra. I am from Spain and I had a dream last night that by the name of Moshe will be in trouble and he will need my help to win in chess so he doesn't have to convert to Islam." Wait, you're from Spain? How long have you been here? says, "I came here a few hours ago." Says, "When did you leave Spain? I left a few hours ago." What do you mean you left a few hours ago? It takes months to come from Spain to here. He says, "For you, your highness, it takes months. For me, it only takes me a moment. I do what our Torah calls." And the king says, "No, come on. Stop it. Tell me the truth." He goes, "No, this is this is what it is." And then the Rambam says, "Your highness, what he's saying is true. Our Torah does allow us to use for specific situations." He says, "And you Rambam, you know how to do it?" He says, "Yeah, I know how to do it, too." He says, "Can you show me? Can you prove it to me?" He says, "Sure. Tell me where you want me to go and I'll go and I'll come back." He says, "Well, there is a uh place in, I don't know, some other country over there. There is a cafe and they have a specific type of cookie or candy over there that I like. Can you get it for me? Says your highness. Sure. And again Rav Mazuz writes the story. The Rambam leaves the room comes back only two minutes later with the candy with the thing that the the king wanted and he goes here you go. Here you go your highness. So to say this story and then understand that the Rambam not only believed in the supernatural, he lived the supernatural. That doesn't mean that the way that he pas or the way that he clarified the different parts of the Torah is going to be in the same fashion as the okay did it differently. He was uh you know Mekubal he dealt with that world of of the Torah much you know more publicly and much more intensely than anybody else in his generation. But again the Rambam his was to give you the to give you bottom line this is what it says without taking you into different places that may or may not help you may or may not confuse you. Why? Because in his generation what you needed to do is to understand what to do. Until that time really you were relying on people understanding how to extrapolate from the Talmud. What is the bottom line? What is the bottom line? And since the Rambam saw that people are not doing it the right way, especially since you had the you had the Karaites that were manipulating the text left and right, manipulating what the Torah meant left and right. So the Rambam says we have to simply help people know what the bottom line is without all the extra stuff that you have in the and that's why he himself wrote if you read my books that's enough not that don't read the talmud but you read my books you'll know what to do you'll know how to live like a Jew which is really the bottom line this is why I tell people for example when they learn especially if you're older if you're especially if you're starting to learn in your 20s30s and 40s Don't focus so much on learning the language as you do on learning what the actually says. Why? It's more important for you to know what the actually says rather than learning Aramaic and other types of uh you know Hebrew because if you are learning at a young age you're 8 9 10 11 12 13 years old you have all the time in the world go learn the language be a master of Aramaic of uh the Aramaic and the Aramaic and the Aramaic of Aramaic of the uh of the Yerushalmi which are all four different types of Aramaics. Go enjoy. Why? You're 10 years old, you're 12 years old, you're 15 years old, you're a baby, you have all the time in the world. But if you're 30 years old, you don't have that kind of time. You don't have that kind of time. You need to know what it says. You need to know the bottom line. What does it say? What does say what say? Why is in every argument? What's happening here? Who get me? So that's the thing a person needs to know that the is the goal of the GMA is to teach you how to think. But we don't paskin from the we have our scheme to do that because we already had the Rambam extrapolate things then we had obviously of the and the goal is for us to know is that the is going to teach us how to think is going to build the argument of why this was the conclusion but ultimately it's not something that we poskin from we poskin from the actual poskim because again we and even earlier generations lost our ability to extrapolate the ultimate truth from the as as so we have there's there's there's completely nonsense there's kishuf that's 100% the specifically says that uh uh one of the one of the had to go uh and uh you know kill 80 witches and in order to kill the 80 witches he had to know a certain amount of kishuf himself to know who's a witch who's not knew it's not like they they had to know language they had to know uh they had to know why how to judge it in order for them to judge if someone's a she loses her right to exist in order for them to conclude that she's a they had to know kishu themselves they had to also know the languages because they couldn't use an interpreter they had to know exactly what the person says so the specifically says that there is kishuf the specifically says that there is Shedim there is mezikim there is one that is uh completely spiritual there's one that's half man half spiritual you know so there's entire teachings about this so when somebody says the Rambam doesn't believe it what they have to understand they don't understand what the Rambam is saying. They don't understand what the Rambam is saying. The same thing is that uh we we saw and and published about where some people think that the Rambam wrote that it's a mitzvah. It's a biblical mitzvah to lend money to the and charge him interest. This is a mistake. Not only it's a mistake, it's not a mistake because I say it's a mistake. It's a mistake because of two reasons, two clear proofs. Number one, uh the the son of the Rambam uh he himself says this is not what my father meant and he was a pretty good student of his father. Number two, which is even clearer is that the Rambam wrote where there he detailed all 613 mitzvot. If lending money to the Gentiles and charging him interest was a mitzvah, it would be one of those 613 that he listed. But it's not. It's not. So we see from there that whoever understands what the Rambam said uh as this is a mitzvah this just simply did not understand what the Rambam was saying. Now again this is why we have different uh that extrapolated different details that also didn't always agree with each other. Some disagreed with the Rambam. some uh you know uh agreed with them about different subjects but also one of the things that I know I remember learning with my Rav is that the Zad was also something that became much more public later on after his lifetime. Many say that if the Rambam had access to the same level of Zor as we had later on certain Alot would even be different. We're not saying he didn't have access to it at all because obviously we see from some of his teachings matches it. We see certain things that he said that match it sometimes even word for word that it's it's copy and paste over here in this particular sentence. So we see there's certain things that are clear that he had access to something. But did he have the same level of access as let's say the Ramban or later sages are result perhaps not because again remember in those days this is before the printing press. This is before the printing press. It wasn't so simple to to get certain things but uh but again that's what we have that's we have that until this day they clarify certain things overall uh it's it's not a uh it's not a problem for anyone to say listen I agree with the Rambam about not uh believing that there's certain no problem but you can't say I don't you know that there's no shedim at all why there's evidence of it it's not only that it's in clearly in the Torah itself There's evidence of it. There's there's clear evidence of it. There's bones. Not all the bones you see in in a museum are real. A lot of them are just simply man-made in order to complete the figure. But there's there's thousands and thousands of them. Big bones that were found. You can't say, "Oh, I don't believe it. What do you mean you don't believe in it?" It's like saying, "I don't believe in the sky." There's evidence. There's certain things that are clear evidence. Same thing for these things. Now I would not recommend for a person say I want to see evidence of sheddim. It's not wor don't I don't recommend anybody asking for that but there's evidence of it. Yes. Good questions by very good questions. Every Jew must remember that he is a Jew and she is a Jew. We do not celebrate non-Jewish holidays even if they seem harmless. It is a zil, a disrespect to the Torah, and it leads to a desecration of God's name. Stick to our holy Torah and our own holidays. That is the path of a true Jew.