Ari Ackerman, *Hasdai Crescas on Codification, Cosmology and Creation: The Infinite God and the Expanding Torah*. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

This study investigates the understanding of God as presented by the medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar, Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410/11). It illustrates that Crescas perceives God as infinitely creative and benevolent, while also examining the implicit comparison he makes between God as both creator and legislator. This comparison is based on his belief in the Deity's ongoing engagement in generative processes, characterized by the continuous flow of goodness and love, which is expressed through multiple, simultaneous, and successive worlds, as well as an ever-expanding Torah. Additionally, the work considers the Maimonidean context for Crescas' views and posits that Crescas is responding to Maimonides' assertion that creation occurs only at a single moment, along with Maimonides' idea of the Torah as perfect and unchanging.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:05

Hello, welcome to the Dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbalat. Today it is my honor to engage in a dialogue with Ari Ackerman. We will discuss his newly published book, Hastae Kreskas on Codification, Cosmology, and Creation, The Infinite God, and the Expanding Torah, published in Leiden, Netherlands by Brill 2022. Dr. Ari Ackerman is professor in Jewish philosophy and education at the Sachter Institute in Jerusalem, as well as the president of the Shachtar Institute in Jerusalem. He received his PhD in Jewish thought from Hebrew University and has published a critical edition of the sermons of Zarafia Halevi Saladin. This work investigates the conception of God as articulated by Hasai Kreskas, a medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar who lived between 1340 and 1410 or 1411. It demonstrates that Kreskas's understanding of God is one of infinite creativity and goodness while also examining the implicit comparison he makes between goddess, both creator and legislator. This understanding is rooted in his belief that the deity is continuously involved in generative activity expressed through the outpouring of goodness and love, which is evident in the existence of multiple simultaneous and successive worlds, as well as a constantly evolving Torah. The analysis also reviews the Maimonidean background that informs Crescus's position and suggests that Crescus is challenging Maimonides' claim that creation is limited to a single moment, along with Maimonides' view of the Torah as perfect and immutable. Saladin. Ari, it is an honor to be in dialogue with you today.

SPEAKER_01 2:09

Thank you, Ari, for the invitation. I look forward to discussing my work with you.

SPEAKER_03 2:16

To begin, can you tell us about yourself? Can you tell us about your personal background and the evolution of your interest in and enthusiasm for Jewish philosophy?

SPEAKER_02 2:33

What drew me to this topic is a couple of things. Firstly, I've always believed that Kreskus has been under-researched. I think he is probably the most innovative and unorthodox medieval Jewish philosophers. And nevertheless, he hasn't been researched to the extent like other important Jewish philosophers like Maimonides and Gersonides. You know, Harry Wolfson in his monumental work on Creskus, and Zeb Harvey, the most important scholar of Creskus today, done a lot of really, really important work, and that's true of other scholars. But my sense is that there's really a lot more to do on Creskus. And so that was one of the things that draw me to study Creskus. I was also privileged to study with the two greatest contemporary scholars of Kreskus. I first got interested in Kreskus when I began to study medieval Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University. I was doing my second degree there. And one of my first courses was with Avia Zoritsky. And it was really an eye-opening course. And from then on, I was really enchanted by Kreskas's philosophy. I also was able to take courses and write my dissertation with Zeb Harvey. And he's really also very much influenced how I look at Kreskas. And I owe both of them a great debt. And to this day, Zeb really accompanies all my work and is a great source for me.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

So that's really what kind of draw me to Kreskas from a biographical standpoint. What is the main argument of this book?

SPEAKER_02 4:33

Well, the book focuses on two topics in Kreskus' philosophy. The first is codification, and the second is creation. And the first topic, that of codification, we really have very different, very little material. I have very little material to work with. He wrote a sermon on Passover, and there's a Lachic section there. He has a chuvah, a lachic response that was written by his student Albo, which where Albo talks about Preskus's Halacha. But really, Prescus is best known, and almost all the material we have is Crescus as a philosopher. But I nevertheless thought that it's very important to understand Preskus as a legal scholar, and that's the kind of the first topic of the book. And codification, the particular issue I focused on was codification. We know that Crescus wanted to write a code, but little scholarship has been, there's little work that has been done on how to imagine what type of code he wanted to write and how his his interest in codification relates to his other philosophic interests. And I try to show that his code was grounded in one very, very important assumption. Greskus believed that the Torah was infinite and boundless, that it was constantly growing and expanding. And as a result, the previous models of codification and particularly Maimonides' Mishnah Torah weren't relevant because they're grounded on the assumption that the Torah is closed. In other words, codification is generally an act which you try to bring together all the existing halakhic material and set it in in very, very particular boundaries. But Crescus wants to show off the Halacha as as groundless as without boundaries, as infinite, as infinitely expanding. And therefore, he thought of codification in a very, very different way, something that's focused more on legal principles and less on specific halachot. Okay, so that was kind of the first topic I dealt with. The second half of the book deals with creation. And I tried to show that how Crescus' conception of creation is related to how he looks at God. That God is always generative, God is boundless, he's always trying to bring into existence new worlds. And therefore, Crescus offers two very highly innovative theories of creation. One is that God is always bringing about an infinite number of worlds that exist, that exists one after the other. And also that God brings into existence an infinite amount of simultaneous worlds. So this is really very, very different than the other existing theories of creation. And he particularly focuses on Maimonides and Gersonides, and he criticizes their approach and he tries to present a new approach.

SPEAKER_03 8:56

If we don't want to be asking a follow-up question, earlier on, you alluded to Costa Cresca's being understudied, certainly relative to Maimonides. Can you assess why you feel this to have been the case? Is this for theological reasons? Is it for sociological reasons?

SPEAKER_02 9:20

I think the main reason is firstly, Crescus's writing is very, very difficult to decipher. He was a a particularly poor writer. He's very scholastic, and his arguments are very terse, and it's and it's it's very, very tough to get to get at his at his arguments. So I think that was really that's the that's a really deterrent for for various scholars to study his work. You know, and again, Maimonides is a despite being a very, very complicated work, his guide to the perplex, it's easier to get at than Crescus, and that that's certainly true of other philosophers. I I'd also add that Crescus' work was only recently translated into English, while Gersonides and Maimonides' works were translated much, much earlier.

SPEAKER_03 10:31

What is your book's contribution to the study of Halacha?

SPEAKER_02 10:37

I I think there are two main contributions here. One is again what what the Crescus's particular approach to codification. Like I mentioned already, I think Kreskus has a unique take on codification. You know, codification is usually really focused on the particular halachot, bringing together specific cases regarding halacha, how you should act in a specific case. It's very practical oriented in that sense. Crescus' codification, and again, my work on Crescus is kind of excavating his codification. We don't have his code. We have a few methodological comments in the beginning of his philosophic work. We have in his work on his sermon on Passover a fragment about the laws of Passover, which was probably a draft of the section on the laws of Passover for his code, but it's a very, very brief passage. So I'm really imagining it. But according to my reconstruction of his approach to codification, I think he focused more on legal principles. In other words, he wanted, he thought that the halachas are always generating anew. And therefore, you can't always, you can't just record the existing halachot. You have to give halachic scholars tools in order to adjudicate halakha. And that's the the most important point of um codification. Okay, it's to it's it's it's to record the existing halachot, but it's also to allow for the generation of new halachot. And that's a really a different approach to codification. So that's one of the book's contribution to Alakh. The other is the other issue that I dealt with in terms of crescus, and it wasn't here, it wasn't just Kreskus, it was also his circle, his students, Yosef Albo, who's very well known for his Saibrai Karim, his book of principles, and a lesser-known student, Zrachi Alevi. My claim is that Kreskus and his students employed not only formal, formalistic halakhic arguments, but they also used concepts and arguments from philosophy to address halakhic issues. And I'll just give you two examples of that I brought that I that I analyze in my book. One is there's a halacha called katlanit. It's a woman who marries three times, and each time or the first two times her husband dies, she's a third-time widow. Can she marry or not again? And this was actually an issue that came up at Crescus' time because of the persecutions of 1391, where there were a lot of widows, and some of them were widows for the second or third time, and the question was about remarrying. So Crescus employs principles from astrology when he's adjudicating this case. And he makes certain distinctions about certain about different widows, and he actually gives a permissive ruling allowing most of these women to remarry, because again, taking from the astrological tradition. Another example is, and this is an even more interesting example, is Kreska's student, Zrachia Levi. He has a sermon on Nid Darim on vows. And he asks a lachic question whether it's good to do vows or not. Should someone prohibit on himself a certain action through Nid Darim? Or is it better, or is that considered excessive stringency? This is a question that was debated within the Halachic literature. And Crest and Zurachia brings arguments from the Halachic literature, but without mentioning, he most of the Halachic treatment is based on a section from Thomas Aquinas's Sumo Theologica, which also deals with vows, whether it's good to take vows or not. And it's almost literally translated from the Latin into the Hebrew. The only changes is when Aquinas brought proof texts from the New Testament, Prescus would find alternative proof texts. But he he clearly saw Prescus and his students clearly see that philosophy and halakha should be intermingled, that we should, that that halakha is not a closed system, but it's it's open to philosophic argumentation. And this is interesting also because often we see Kreskus as an anti-rationalist. You know, Crescus is the archantirationalist, and he's the opposition to Maimonides, who is the rationalist. And there's some truth to that characterization of Crescus. And Creskus talked about love and as a as an emotion as a religious emotion, something that was and a non-intellectual emotion. But in his works, Kreskus was very much a rationalist. And he believed that argumentation from philosophy should be used not just in philosophic works, he used it in his sermons, in his polemical work with Christians, to much to a much greater degree than scholars before him. And this is true with Halacha as well. We don't have much halakhic material of Kreskus, but the that which we have generally integrates philosophy into it. So those are like I think the two most important contributions to how we understand halacha from my work.

SPEAKER_03 18:23

If you don't want to be asking a follow-up question, what is the relevance of your study for thinking about the phenomenon of codification? Where does Hostai Kreskas's worldview view fit in thinking about the phenomenon of codification?

SPEAKER_02 18:48

So I think that there were a lot of, you know, I think there was a debate going on in medieval Judaism about the extent to which the Torah is always expanding or not. Okay, is the Torah a fixed system? And this is certainly the O Nik view. Maimonides, to a certain extent, accepted this view as well. He thought the idea that the Torah is always changing has very corrosive political implications, and therefore he talked often about the Torah being immutable. He allowed for a lot of changes, but he tried to not emphasize the fact that the Torah can be changed. But then there were other scholars like the Baleetosvot, Kabbalistic scholars like Nahmmanides and Crescus himself, who argued that the Torah is something that is always growing, it's always expanding. And most of these scholars, particularly the Baleetosvot, who thought that the Torah is expanding and dynamic, were opposed to codification because they thought codification implies that the Torah is fixed. And Creskus tries to kind of square square the circle to a certain degree. He tries to accept the he he he embraces the idea that the Torah is dynamic and expanding and growing and changing. But he tries to think of a model of codification that allows for this view of the Torah. Because he thought codification was important. He thought it was very important that Jews have a book that tells them concretely what is to do. He thought Torah is not theoretical, but it's practical.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

Can you comment on Crescus's ideas about creation vis-a-vis Maimonides' ideas about creation and Gersonides' ideas about creation?

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Okay, sure. That's that's I discuss this extensively in my book, and I it's a very, very fundamental debate, and they differ on two issues. Okay. Firstly, Maimonides and Gersonides both believed that the world came into being at a particular instant of time. In other words, creation is not eternal, that the world comes to being from a temporal standpoint. Now I'll I'll just qualify this in two in two ways. Firstly, this is Maimonides' exoteric view. In other words, there's a debate whether this was really Maimonides' position. He clearly states this view in the guide to the perplex, in his philosophic work, in a very, very clear way. And he spends a lot of effort to try to defend this view. But there are many scholars, both medieval commentators on Maimonides and contemporary scholars of Maimonides who argue that actually Maimonides' true understanding of creation was that the world is eternal, that the world didn't come to being at a particular time. But for our purposes, the esoteric view is more important because that's certainly the way Crescus understood him. Okay. The second important point about Maimonides and Gersonides in terms of the world creating at a specific time was that Maimonides and Gersonides differed on one point about this. Maimonides argued that the world was created from nothing, ex nilo, at a certain instant of time. At a particular instant of time. Gersonides argues that no, that there's this material substratum of the world that exists for eternity. It's unformed, it's incohate. And then the world begins at an instance of time in the sense that God fashions this material substratum at this instant of time. He brings it the matter and he gives it a particular form, and that's the way the world is created. Okay? So they they they both argue that the world has a particular temporal beginning, but they differ whether there was some matter that the world, whether at this point the world is created from some pre-existing matter or creation ex nihilo. Okay. A second point where Maimonides and Gersonis are in agreement is whether they both argue that there is only one world in existence. Okay? That there aren't multiple worlds in existence. Okay. And it's interesting that in the first point, they both differ from Aristotle. Aristotle thought the world was eternal. In terms of the second point, they're following Aristotle. Aristotle thought that there is only one world in existence, and an idea that there were advocates at his time in the ancient Greek world that believed that there were multiple worlds in existence. In our world, there's only one world. Aristotle rejected this, and Maimonides and Gersonides dispute him. Now, Crescus argues against both of these premises. We'll begin with the second, the the second point. Crescus's argues for multiple worlds simultaneously. In other words, God, when he brings our world into existence, he brings other worlds into existence. Okay? And he probably brings infinite worlds into existence. Now, this is interesting not only from the perspective of whether there's one world existing or not, one world existing, it's also important in terms of how we see space. Aristotle's world, and this is true of Maimonides and Gersonides, was limited spatially. Okay? There's a boundary that limits our universe. But Crescus believes that space can be infinite. And therefore, these all these worlds are being pop, the infinite universe is populated by these infinite worlds. Okay, so that's one way Crescus differs with Maimonides and Germanides. He also differs regarding the temporal beginning of creation. And here it seems like Crescus's views evolved. Initially, he argued that our world, that God is always involved in bringing our world into existence. In other words, he had this idea that there's an eternal creation. In other words, God is actively keeping our world into existence. He's bringing it into existence. Creation isn't something that has a temporal final point, but it's something that has temporal duration. It's an infinite temporal duration. God is always working on creating our world. Okay. Then at a certain point, he seems to have been bothered by the radicalness of his theory. And he therefore argued that no, our world was brought into existence at a specific point. Okay, so he's kind of reverting back to Maimonis and Gersani's theory, but he differs with them. And again, he wants to have creation as an eternal process. So he argues that our world exists for a specific amount of time. And then God brings into existence another world, which again has a specific temporal duration. And our world was preceded by other worlds. So in other words, God throughout time is always bringing worlds into existence, destroying them, and bringing other worlds into existence. Okay? So what really emerges from this from this idea is that creation is eternal and infinite. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 29:40

Can you elaborate on how Crescus goes about making the case for the existence of multiple worlds? What sources does he rely on? What are the influences on him in making this case? Can you go into detail about okay?

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Certainly. Um firstly, in terms of the sources, this question was greatly debated in the Middle Ages among Christian philosophers. Okay, among Jewish philosophers, and among Islamic philosophers, there isn't much, there's almost a unanimous voice that Aristotle was right, there's only one world, and there really isn't much debate or even discussion about this issue. In Christianity, this is a very lively debated issue, and there are, you know, most most medieval Jewish most medieval Christian philosophers, Aquinas, Accum, Nicholas Rem are debating this issue. And I show that Crescus is drawing from scholastic sources. He's taking their arguments. He borrows from Thomas Aquinas' and his discussion in the Sumo Theologica. Okay. Now, in terms of the specific arguments he uses, and I I would I just getting back to that point about his dependence on Aquinas, um, he borrows arguments from Aquinas, but Aquinas, in the end, agreed with Aristotle. In other words, he uses Aquinas' arguments, but he arrives, Trescus arrives at a different conclusion. And this is an important point in general in terms of Treskus. Trescus had a lot of sources that he used. Jewish rabbinic sources, Kabbalistic sources, and we can talk about that a little more later on, Jewish medieval philosophic sources, Islamic philosophic sources, you know, Wolfson, Harry Wolfson's book on Kreskus's critique of Aristotle shows how well versed Kreskus was in the Islamic philosophic literature. I try to show that he takes some scholasis of some, but Kreskus was such an innovative thinker, and he refused to passively absorb sources. So he would always have his own take on the issue. He would take arguments and notions and conceptions, but he would blend them in a very new and innovative way. And that's certainly the case here with Aquinas. Now, in terms of the arguments for why there's multiple worlds, I think the most important argument is his argument from God's goodness. And Crescus argues: if God is good, he must always be involved in bringing into existence more existence. Because the more existence there is, the more goodness there is. And therefore, and this is really important in terms of the way he views God. In other words, God is always active and dynamic, he's always involved in creation, he's always bringing in more new existence from the, and his motivation is because he always wants to increase goodness. Okay. So that's how he looked at multiple worlds. And again, uh, you know, in terms of his arguments, he a lot of it has to also do with space. You know, he had to try to show that Aristotle's closed world and Aristotle's rejection of infinity, of a uh of an infinite vacuum, was wrong. And this was very, very important, not just in terms of the issue of creation, it was also in terms important in terms of Kreskus's scientific views and his unorthodox scientific views. He was one of the few medieval Jewish thinkers who rejected Aristotle's notion, a definition of space. And there are those who claim that Crescus's views had an impact through various channels, the ultimate rejection of Aristotelian science, which happened a couple of centuries later.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 35:26

Where if anywhere does the philosophy does the philosophy of kalam fit in contextualizing Hostai Kreskus's thought?

SPEAKER_02 35:45

I I don't think Treskus was very interested in Kalam philosophy. I think Kalam had a had a deep impact in the first stage of medieval Jewish philosophy on thinkers like particularly Rosadjigon and other Gaonic thinkers. But I think Maimonides made the argument within Jewish philosophy that kalam is apologetic, and that those who are doing serious philosophy shouldn't be under the sway of Kalam. And I think Crescus, even though he rejects a lot of Maimonidean philosophy, Maimonidean conclusions, I think he was a very serious philosopher. He you know constructed, you know, he was much more of a rationalist in terms of his belief that reason can solve philosophic and theological questions. And I think Kalam didn't attract him for that reason.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

Can you describe Crescus's notion of the infinitely creative God?

SPEAKER_02 37:16

So that that's one of my important one of the important points in the book is is not just dealing with creation, but seeing how creation uncovers the most important characteristics of Crescus's God. So it's Crescus' God is a God of goodness, a God of love. God wants to bring goodness to human beings. He loves human beings, and therefore he's always involved in creation. He's always involved in bringing goodness, he's a dynamic God. And this very much difference differs from Maimonides and Gersonides' God, who is much more static. In other words, God acts through creation, but he acts at one specific point of time, and it's limited to that point of time. And then afterwards, God is far more static, and this follows the Greek conception of God, the Greek philosophic conception of God, which valued God's being static and not dynamic. And Kreskas, like he thinks the Torah is dynamic and always new laws are always brought into existence, he also sees God as dynamic and always involved in bringing into existence new world, goodness through his love of human beings.

SPEAKER_03 39:18

Let me ask you as a follow-up question: where and under whom did Hastai Kreska study and learn Torah?

SPEAKER_02 39:27

So he he studied in the Beit Midrash of Ravnisim of Gurandi. Ravinisim was a follow both a great Halachic scholar at his time, him and the Ridvaj were the two most important scholars in the second half of the 14th century in Spain. And um I let me let me correct that. Excuse me. Rab Nisim was the most important scholar in Spain on the second half of the 14th century, and Costa Crescus and Rivash were his two most important students. And Rabbeinu Nissim was also a philosopher. He wrote philosophic sermons, Drashotaran. And he wasn't a systematic philosopher in the sense that he he developed like Sadhya or Maimonides or Grasonides or Crescus a full philosophic worldview. But his Drashot are innovative and interesting. And he clearly was Crastai Crescus's rabbi, both in terms of halakhan and in terms of philosophy.

SPEAKER_00 40:51

What is Crescus's relationship to scholastic sources in general and to Thomas Aquinas in particular?

SPEAKER_02 41:01

So to understand this, I want to talk about a scholarly debate regarding the influence of scholastic sources in post-Mimonidean philosophy, and particularly regarding Crescas. So Creskus for a very long time was believed to not have engaged scholastic sources. There's almost no mention of scholastic sources. Wolfson argues that Creskus was engaging Islamic philosophers like Al-Farabi, Evan Senna, and even Roasht, and didn't have knowledge of developments in scholasticism. And came along Shlomo Pinus, one of the great scholars of medieval Jewish philosophy and medieval philosophy in general, in the second half of the 20th century. And he argued that in general, in southern France and in Spain in the 13th and 14th century, even though philosophers do not mention Christian philosophers, they were aware of these sources and they engaged them. And he showed this is particularly true of Crescus. But he he he failed, penis failed to show how Crescus a particular, you know, that he failed to argue convincingly, at least in my mind, that Crescus read Latin scholastic text. He shows in general that Crescus was aware of certain debates that were going on in the scholastic world and that he knew some of the conclusions. What I think I how I contributed to this, to our understandings of Crescus' relationship to scholastic sources, I argued that it is clear that he read specific scholastic sources. He didn't just have a general understanding of the views and debates there. He takes specific arguments, and the arguments are formulated by Crescus in a very, very similar way to the way they're formulated in scholastic sources. And I show that particularly about Aquinas. Okay, that in in in the debate about multiple worlds, Kreskus clearly read the Summa Theologica and had a very detailed understanding of that text.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

What is Creskus's relationship to Kabbalistic sources?

SPEAKER_02 44:27

That's also an interesting and debated question. Now, I think on the one hand, I think it's very clear that Kreskus saw himself as following within the cabbalistic tradition started by Nachmonides. Just a little background in terms of Nahmades. Nahmides was a scholar in the the 13th century in Spain, in an area where Crescus, uh in Aragon, where Crescus also was active. And Nahmanides had a student, the Rashbah, who's also a Kabbalist. And the Rashbah had the student, his chief student was Ravnisim of Garandi. And then, as I explained, Kreskus was a student of Rabbeinu Nissim. So Kreskus saw himself as part of this rabbinic chain. And Kreska saw himself as defending the theological view of Nahmanides in many instances. And particularly regarding the two main issues that I discuss in the book. There was the idea that the Torah is infinitely expanding, that the Torah is dynamic. That's a view that Nahmanides upheld, it's a Kabbalistic view. And also the idea that God is dynamic, that God's goodness is overflowing to the world constantly. Crescus also adopts this to a certain degree from Nachmanides. But and here my position is not accepted by everyone. I believe that Crescus rejected the Kabbalistic view, the Kabbalistic conception of God as composed of different sphere. In other words, Crescus wanted to accept Machmany's theological views, specific theological views, without the cap the specific Kabbalistic infrastructure, the foundation. This is also connected to a question of what which text we can attribute to Crescus. Crescus, there's a text, a commentary on Kadish, that's that certain scholars attributed to Crescus. I I I've argued that it's not an authentic Crescus text. And that text is very, very Kabbalistic and mentions he wrote. And so if you see this text as as a part of Crescis's auvoir, then it pushes Crescus much further into the Kabbalistic camp. I think that's that it's a mistake to attribute the text to Crescus, and that Crescas at the end of the day did not accept a lot of the Kabbalistic ideas about God being composed of various spheros.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

How would Kreskus relate or respond to or conceive of the immutability of the Torah? How would Kreskus address this?

SPEAKER_02 48:34

Well, he he does address this specific question in both his polemical work against Christians and in Orashem. And he explicitly states that the Torah does not undergo change. And I think the reason he adopts this opinion is because of the arguments, the Christian arguments about the Torah being changed in a way that validates the New Testament. You know, Christians argued that the Torah undergoes changes, and therefore the shift from the Old Testament, from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament is valid. And Kreskus, and this is true of Maimonides and other Jewish philosophers, argue that the Torah is immutable in order to counter Christian arguments. But I think that's a polemical argument by Kreskis. I think Kreskis did believe ultimately that the Torah undergoes expansion and adds new things, and adding new things isn't a certain is a certain form of change. So I think while his explicit view is that the Torah is immutable, I think his true philosophic opinion was that the Torah is infinitely expanding.

SPEAKER_03 50:02

Why is your book relevant and important today in the year 2026?

SPEAKER_02 50:12

I think that there's two important ideas here. First is its conception of halakha. I think Kreskus offers a non-formalistic approach to halakha. That we shouldn't just be concerned with technical halakhic argumentations, but we sh we could use arguments outside of the halakhic canon. And again, I point to Kresk's use of philosophic sources. And also his idea that the Torah is dynamic. That and it's interesting that when Albo presented Kreskus's view about Katlamit, this issue that was debated in Spain, Albo says, you know, you know, he was clearly defending himself against those who said, no, this was the accepted Halachic position, and you can't change it. And he says, no. You know, that every Halachic scholar could bring on new views, and we shouldn't see the Torah as static, but rather as dynamic. I think this is a very important issue in terms of today. We're dealing with new, a new historical, new, new historical circumstances, as we always dealt with new historical circumstances, and therefore we have to be open to rethinking alakic issues. And this idea of Kadasha Sor Mira Torah, I think Crescus provides an important counter argument to it. I also think Creskus's God, who is a god of love, is important for today as well. There was an important philosophic, uh Jewish philosophic work that was that was recently published by a friend of mine, Shy held, Judaism is all about love. And we actually had a conference, this book at Schechter that I organized. And we're editing a volume on Chai's book. And and Shy has a footnote in the volume about Kreskas. And that you know, that Kreskas is an important Jewish philosopher because he emphasizes how much God is a God of love and how that impacts on God's relationship to human beings, God's desire to bring about goodness in the world. So I think also that this conception of God also is something that should be taken into account in terms of contemporary theological debates. Again, Kreskus, because of his inaccessibility, is often not a voice and not well studied, but I think it's worth the effort. And he has a lot to say that that is still relevant today.

SPEAKER_03 53:47

As we bring our dialogue to a close, can you tell us about your next research project?

SPEAKER_02 53:52

So I'm actually leaving medieval philosophy at least temporarily. And I'm I'm I started to work on another thinker that that very much engages me. I mean, that's Rav Cook. And I want to work on, and I'm working on how Rav Cook engages secular Jewish thinkers like Achana Am, Berdchevsky, and Alef Dal Gordon. And I want to look at Rav Cook as a second Aliyah thinker. You know, generally Ravkuk is studied as someone whose main interlocutors were either Kabbalists or modern philosophers such as Spinoza, Bergson, or Nietzsche. And without discounting those frameworks within which you can understand Rev Cook, I think Rev Cook's main philosophic framework were these secular Jewish thinkers. Those he read the Hebrew newspapers were Akada Am and Burdachevsky and Brenner and Gordon Bialik wrote, and these very much fructified his thought. And I want to show how these were formative influences in Rav Cook's theology and philosophy. So that's what I've been working on as of late. I hope I'll have the opportunity to speak to you in a few years when my my book on Rov Cook comes out.

SPEAKER_03 55:42

As we end our dialogue today, I'd like to emphasize how grateful and appreciative I feel for your time and attention throughout the course of this dialogue. I can hardly thank you enough.

SPEAKER_02 56:02

Well, thank you as well, Ari.

SPEAKER_03 56:04

I really enjoyed our conversation. As we end today, I'm signing off as Ari Barbalatt, your host on the Dialogues in Judaic Studies podcast. Today it's been my privilege to engage in a conversation with Ari Ackerman. We have been discussing his newly published book, Hastait Kreskas on Codification, Cosmology, and Creation, The Infinite God and the Expanding Torah, published in Leiden, Netherlands, April 2022. This work investigates the conception of God as articulated by Hastaid Kreskas, a medieval Jewish philosopher and legal scholar who lived between 1340 and 1410 or 1411. It demonstrates that Kreskas's understanding of God is one of infinite creativity and goodness while also examining the implicit comparison he makes between God as both creator and legislator. This understanding is rooted in his belief that the deity is continuously involved in generative activity, expressed through the outpouring of goodness and love, which is evident in the existence of multiple simultaneous and successive worlds, as well as a constantly evolving Torah. The analysis also reviews the Maimonidean background that informs Crescus's position and suggests that Crescus is challenging Maimonides' claim that creation is limited to a single moment, along with Maimonides' view of the Torah as perfect and immune. I will welcome Dr. Ari Ackerman is professor in Jewish philosophy and education at the Schechter Institute in Jerusalem, as well as the president of the Shachter Institute in Jerusalem. He received his PhD in Jewish thought from Hebrew University and has published a critical edition of the sermons of Zarachia Halevi Saladin. Thank you wholeheartedly.