4 Comments

• Curious

  Why does the Rebbe give a little chuckle in middle of the Sicha?

• my guess to question #1

  today’s (Sunday) portion of Tanya reads: “If, however, the eyes were permitted to see the power of G-d and the ‘breath of his mouth’ which is in the created thing… then the materiality… would not be seen by our eyes…” in other words, there are two aspects to an entity, the material and the spiritual. the Rebbe is speaking about a spritual Inyan, the angels, and he is about to explain how one can recognize an angel through the Rambam’s explanation, so we can see the spritual through material traits. before the words “Where would the Rambam describe angels in his Code?” the Rebbe laughs. here is my guess. the Rebbe would have no problem describing angels on a spiritual level. so to him, when he says ‘describe angels,’ he sees angels and to him it is a contradiction to use physical traits to describe angels. if you are describing angels, why not just descibe angels? but the Rebbe catches himself and addresses his audience on their level.

  another guess would be that the Alter Rebbe came and told him a joke.

• Curious!

  Thanks!

• Simple

  The simple answer is that it is literally laughable to think that the Rambam, the great rationalist, who in many places denied the separate existence of angles and wrote that angels were really just things which people imagined when God was communicating with them, that this same Rambam could have written a description of an angle for halachic purposes?!? Hence the Rebbe laughs before proceeding to his chiddush which is that even though the Rambam never directly describes an angel, he alludes to a property of angels in another halacha from which we can infer our answer.