Now, Rabbi Sacks explicitly says, "Jewish thought is counter-philosophical" (page 167) to distinguish it from the Western philosophical tradition of thought.
Rabbi Sacks says, "The Jewish mystics, among them Rabbi Shneur Zalman, spoke about two souls that each of us has -- the animal soul (nefesh habehemit) and the Godly soul. On the one hand we are physical beings. We are part of nature. We have physical needs: food, drink, shelter. We are born, we live, we die."
He then quotes a passage from Ecclesiastes 3:19 about our animal nature.
"Yet we are not simply animals. We have within us immortal longings. We can think, speak, and communicate. We can, by acts of speaking and listening, reach out to others."
I have here quoted from page 154.
Rabbi Sacks also mentions "what the Jewish mystics called the nefesh habehemit, the animal soul" parenthetically on page 13.
Even though Rabbi Sacks claims that "Jewish thought is counter-philosophical," I learned in my studies of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy at Saint Louis University, where I took English courses from Ong, how to distinguish the specifically human soul from the infra-human soul of the human animal -- a distinction that parallels Rabbi Sacks' distinction. Methinks he doth protest too much about how counter-philosophical Jewish thought is.
For example, Rabbi Sacks discusses Rambam's "two quite different ways of living the moral life": the way of the saint and the way of the sage (page 223). "The sage follows the 'golden mean,' the 'middle way' [between the extremes]" (page 223). Rabbi Sacks says, "This is very similar to the vision of the moral life as set out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics" (page 223). True enough. However, because Aristotle is a philosopher, the parallel between Rambam's way of the sage and Aristotle's vision of the moral life does not exactly support Rabbi Sacks' claim that "Jewish thought is counter-philosophical.
I can attest from the courses in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy that I took at Saint Louis University that St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a medieval Aristotelian whose vision of the moral life also included the golden mean between the extremes.
Before the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church down-sized Thomism, many American Catholic undergraduates at Catholic colleges and universities in the United States studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy as part of the required core curriculum and studied Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics.
In conclusion, if American progressives and liberals today are interested in the thought of a Brit born and raised in the tradition-based society of England, they might fascinated with Rabbi Sacks' creative interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and political thought in Western culture.
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