VBM The Song of the Sea By Harav Yaakov Medan

I. "The Great Hand" And Israel saw the great hand which the Lord did upon the Egyptians, and the people feared the Lord; and they believed in the Lord and in His servant Moshe. (Shemot 14:31) The Rishonim wondered what it was exactly that the people of Israel saw and how one can see the hand of God. Some concluded from here that God has in fact a body and a hand,[1] unlike the position of the vast majority of Jewish thinkers. This is how the Rambam – who vehemently opposed this exceptional view – describes the proponents of this view at the beginning of his Guide for the Perplexed: If they did not conceive God as having a body possessed of face and limbs, similar to their own in appearance, they would have to deny even the existence of God. The sole difference which they admitted was that He excelled in greatness and splendor and that His substance was not flesh and blood. (Guide for the Perplexed I:1)