I have just finished a series of taped lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.  I heard the last lecture of the series this morning on my bike after the sun had risen but before the full blast of nature’s engine could press down on me.  It was far better to see where I was riding and avoid the pitfalls that are on the road that each of us travels.  Thomas was a Christian philosopher whose treatises on Law still resonate today.  I was impressed by his knowledge of and criticism of Jewish texts and particularly his intimate involvement with Maimonides, whose Guide to the Perplexed, was used as arguments suitable for Christendom.

What interests me most about the life of Thomas is that he was so facile in his use of Pagan philosophy, the works of Plato and Aristotle in particular. He employed rationality and pure reason to elevate the divinity of Jesus with the Godhood of his “Father”.  Most of what Thomas wrote was legalistic and he deserved the title of “Angelic Doctor”.  He was a teacher, soon important in his own time and is still influential today.  He knew his opponents, the Islamic theorists and Jewish sources, thoroughly.  He appreciated the ancient Pagans particularly by way of the Islamic philosophers, Averroes and Avicenna, who made Ancient Greek knowledge available because the Muslim conquerors preserved libraries. Thomas used reason, whether Islamic or Jewish, to develop his ideas and his corpus of Christian Law.

What Thomas has done for me is to criticize from the outside, the Jewish practice of sacrifice. His logic is unarguable. We all know the story of how Jesus went into the Temple and chased out the money changers who were there to make it possible to buy animals used for sacrifice at the doors of the Temple of Jerusalem.  Jesus did not stop official sacrifice in the Temple. It ended with the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, just as the Romans enabled the deification of Jesus by crucifying him.  Rereading in the Torah, of how the priests must dash the blood of a sacrificial animal against the altar, is retold by Christians as the sacrificed martyr, Jesus, who “died for our sins”.

Thomas did an excellent job of showing how God gave the animals we sacrificed to Him life in the same way he gave us life.  Therefore, God did not demand, as the Jewish scriptures explicate, the life and blood of sacrifice.  I think he was very persuasive and correct.  I question trying to understand why God at that time and Place in Ancient Israel, gave such detailed rules how sacrifice was to be done.  In many other ways, we still perform sacrifices that make a mockery of life that should be treasured. Thank you, Thomas. As a Reform Jew, I think we should put parentheses around these Torah passages and let the past claim them.