Shoshi’s Reviews > The Guide to the Perplexed: A New Translation > Status Update

3.2a-b "Even one who has some understanding of these mysteries is barred halakhically from teaching or expounding them unless 1-1 and to such a person they describe....That is why knowledge of this kind is gone from our nation....For it was not published but borne from breast to breast and never set down in a book.....

Part II Chap 29 v2.65b "It is unwise to explore these questions armed only with imagination rather than scientific knowledge. Best to avoid what wretched homilists and exegetes do, who think knowing how to gloss a phrase is all the science they need & that the windier and wordier their treatments run the better. Reason is what we need to probe this subject..."

At Part 2. Someone else put a hold request so I'm out of renewals for now. Guess I'll have to check this out again later!

1.78b ...."Do not think anything else or even entertain the ravings of amulet writers and the 'names' you hear from them or find in their idiotic books - names they concocted that mean nothing at all. They call them names and pretend they bring purity and holiness and can work wonders - fictions unfit for a grown man to hear, let alone believe!

1.37a "The Torah 'speaks in human language,' (I 26), because it is meant to be accessible and studied by young people, women, and ordinary folk without the capacity to understand things as they really are." Och.

...people grow attached to the familiar views they grew up with. They become partisans of those views and have no use for alternatives. Bias toward the familiar can blind people to the truth.

"Our powers are not boundless. Intellectual acuity also varies greatly from one person to the next....One person might discover an idea independently that another might never understand, no matter how it was explained to him."

11 of the translation
"To an untutored clown with no grasp of nature, even impossibilities do not seem far-fetched.