This one’s for you squeek.
Someone approached me at college and asked me the following question. On campus I looked like a typical Yeshiva guy and not someone who was taking graduate level courses. (I’m going to translate the secular terms into Hebrew for everyone’s benefit.)
“You people say the 13 Ani Mamins, written by Rambam, every morning. One of them states that Hashem has no body, has no similarities to a body and can not be physically compared to a body at all (# 3 if I remember correctly). I’m currently taking a course called calculus and just learned about infinity. So, if Hashem is infinite then of course he can not have any comparison to a body? Isn’t this extra?”
I figured that he was either trying to harass me or show off that he was taking calculus and wasn’t really interested in the answer. Here’s what I answered;
“Take the graph of y = 1/x and graph it from x = 1 to infinity. Now take that graph and rotate it around the x- axis. The volume is Pi yet the surface area is infinite. This proves that it is possible for an object to have both finite and infinite properties. Therefore Rambam had to include that principal otherwise one might think that Hashem has certain characteristics that are finite and certain characteristics that are infinite.”
When I was done he was standing there in disbelief with his mouth wide open. He had nothing to say so I just walked off.