Let us take a fleeting glimpse at the role Maimonides played
and continues to play in a series of issues dividing twentieth and early-
twenty-first-century Jewry.
For Orthodox Jews, the issue of the permissibility and desirability
of advanced secular education remains, perhaps remarkably, a major
point of contention. For obvious reasons, Maimonides appears to lend
support to the position affirming the desirability of such education, not
only because of what he said but because of what he so patently did.
Indeed, Norman Lamm once remarked that if Maimonides returned to
this world, he would surely choose to teach at Yeshiva University. But, as
we shall see, nothing about the uses of Maimonides is straightforward.
In this instance, a genuine characteristic of Maimonides that we shall
encounter again, to wit, his elitism, affords the opportunity to challenge
this assessment. Thus, representatives of Traditionalist Orthodoxy have
argued that Maimonides’ own pursuit of philosophy was to be restricted
to a small coterie of the elite. Did he not say that his great philosophical
work was intended for a tiny number of readers? Did he not also say
that one may not turn to philosophical pursuits without first mastering
the corpus of rabbinic law? Now, these arguments do not accomplish
all that their advocates wish, since they leave in place Maimonides’
value judgment as to the superiority of philosophically accomplished
individuals to philosophically naïve rabbinic scholars, but at least the
traditionalists’ educational and curricular priorities can be salvaged
without an overt rejection of Maimonides.
Moreover, Maimonides did not always formulate his legal rulings in
a manner conducive to the interests of Orthodox modernists. Thus, he
forbade the reading of idolatrous books and apparently extended this
prohibition to anything that could engender religious doubts. This passage
became the basis for an article by Rabbi Yehudah Parnes, then at Yeshiva
University, in the first issue of The Torah U-Madda Journal, a publication
dedicated to the principle of integrating Torah and worldly knowledge,
arguing that Jewish law requires severe restrictions on the reading habits
and hence the curriculum of all Jews. I responded to this argument in an
article co-authored with Lawrence Kaplan, invoking other Maimonidean
texts as well as the evident behavior of Maimonides himself, but there is
no better illustration of the ability to appeal to Maimonidean authority
on both sides of almost any issue than an exchange in which advocates
of a broad curriculum need to defend themselves against the assertion
that they are defying the precedent set by a man who took all of human
learning as his province.
A delicate issue with a long history that became particularly acute in the
late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the Jewish attitude toward
non-Jews. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Christians pointed to
Talmudic passages discriminating against Gentiles. Without diminishing
the acute threat that these arguments posed to medieval Jews, one can
still point out that the matter became all the more sensitive (though
slightly less dangerous) in an age that began to advocate an egalitarian
ethic granting Jews citizenship, genuine religious freedom, and legal
equality. Here again Maimonides plays a major role on both sides of the
discussion. Antisemites cited Maimonides’ codification of discriminatory
laws such as the exemption from returning lost objects to non-Jews,
even a prohibition against doing so, while defenders of the Jews, both
Jewish and Gentile, pointed to his citation in similar contexts of the
biblical verse that God’s mercy is upon all his creatures, as well as specific
rulings such as those prohibiting theft from non-Jews as well as Jews.
More than one Orthodox rabbi in the late twentieth century maintained
that Maimonides’ formulation of the reason why one may not return lost
objects to non-Jews, namely, that one would be “strengthening the hand
of the world’s wicked,” limits the prohibition only to wicked Gentiles. For
reasons rooted in the values of the commentator, an apparently general
statement that non-Jews are wicked becomes an explicit distinction
between those who are wicked and those who are righteous.
Now, Maimonides did famously affirm that pious non-Jews have a
portion in the world to come; at the same time, he conditioned this on
their belief in revelation. This condition has troubled some Jews since the
days of Mendelssohn, when its source was unknown. We now know the
source, and one recent scholar - the late Marvin Fox - noted Maimonides’
requirement, apparently approved of it, and enthusiastically endorsed a
version of the Mishneh Torah text denying that those who observe moral
laws on the basis of reason alone are even to be considered wise. What
motivated Fox was his own philosophical argument against the existence
of a morality independent of the divine will. Most moderns, who have
different instincts about morality and fairness, remain troubled, and so
they eagerly point to a letter attributed to Maimonides that appeals to
contradict the condition he set forth in his code. It is perfectly evident
that larger moral instincts are at work in the choice of which Maimonides
you embrace.
This issue applies to non-Jews in general, but Maimonides has also
been invoked in very different ways with specific reference to Christianity.
In a famous censored passage near the end of his code (Hilkhot Melakhim
11:4), he explains why he thinks the divine plan arranged for the spread of
Christianity and Islam. It has not been uncommon for twentieth-century
Jews motivated by ecumenical sentiments to cite this explanation as
evidence of Maimonides’ positive stance toward those religions, to the
point of asserting that he saw them as a way of preparing the world
for the messianic age by disseminating monotheism. In fact, as rabbinic
authorities know very well, this is not what he says at all. Christianity
and Islam, he maintains, prepare the world for the messianic age by
familiarizing many people with the Torah, so that the Messiah will be able
to speak to them within a familiar universe of discourse. But Christianity,
unlike Islam, is in Maimonides’ view full-fledged avodah zarah, usually
translated loosely but not quite accurately as idolatry.
The central philosophical and religious beliefs of Maimonides have
been the subject of fierce debate in academic circles with little impact
on more than a few Jews. Still, the subject deserves some attention
even in this forum. Under the influence of Leo Strauss, Shlomo Pines,
and others, the perception of Maimonides as a theological radical who
disguised many of his real views has attained pride of place among many
historians of philosophy. In this perception, Maimonides considered
matter eternal, denied that God actively intervenes in human affairs,
rejected physical resurrection, considered philosophical contemplation
superior to prayer, and did not believe that anyone other than the most
sophisticated philosopher has a portion in the world to come. For these
scholars, his legal works and more popular philosophical teachings were
intended for the political purpose of establishing a stable social order.
One deep irony of this position is that the author of the standard list of
Jewish dogmas would be revealed as one whose adherence to some of
those dogmas is very much in question. The irony is deepened in light
of the contention in Menachem Kellner’s Must a Jew Believe Anything?
that Maimonides virtually invented the notion of Jewish dogmas, a
contention that I consider overstated but nonetheless reflective of an
important reality.
Other scholars, such as Arthur Hyman, Isadore Twersky, and Marvin
Fox, resisted the extreme radicalization of Maimonides. It is, I think, very
difficult to reconcile the portrait of a radical Maimonides who denied
immortality to any non-philosopher with the Maimonides who fought to
teach even women and children that God has no body so that they would be
eligible for a portion in the world to come. Maimonides battled to establish
a conception of God that in its pristine form was indeed inaccessible to
the philosophically uninitiated, but I believe that he meant his dogmas
sincerely as a realistic vehicle for enabling all Jews to achieve immortality.
In recent years, several efforts have been made to render Maimonides the
philosopher accessible and relevant to a larger audience. Kenneth Seeskin
has made this an explicit objective, Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s depiction
of an austere, distant Maimonidean God for whom halakhah is the be-
all and end-all of Judaism was broadcast on Israeli radio, and David
Hartman’s Maimonides: Torah and the Philosophic Quest was clearly aimed
at an audience beyond the academy. But the Maimonides presented in
these works and others is not always the same Maimonides.
A few moments ago, I allowed myself the expression “even women
and children.” The role of women is an issue that came to occupy center
stage in much twentieth-century discourse, and Maimonides played
no small part in Jewish debates about this matter. His dismissal of the
intellectual capacity of women is well known, but his heroic image and
immense influence have led committed Jewish thinkers and scholars with
twentieth-century sensibilities to see if some more positive assessment
can be elicited from his works. Thus, Warren Harvey argued in an article
published more than twenty years ago that although Maimonides
excluded women from the study of the Oral Law, and preferably even
from that of the written Torah, he regarded the commandments to know
God and love him, which certainly obligate women, as inextricably bound
up with the study of Torah, indeed of Talmud or gemara. Thus, we have
a powerful deduction to set against Maimonides’ explicit assertion, and
we ought at least to take it into account.
An even stronger example of this approach is Menachem Kellner’s
article contrasting Gersonides, who allegedly regards women as
intellectually inferior by their very nature, with Maimonides, who allegedly
sees their deficiencies as environmentally induced. Among other things,
Kellner points to a passage in which Maimonides lists Moses, Aaron, and
Miriam as the three individuals who died in a state reflecting the highest
level of human achievement. Thus, says Kellner, one-third of those who
reached the highest level ever achieved were women. (One could quarrel
with his use of the plural here.) I am inclined to think that Kellner is
too hard on Gersonides and too easy on Maimonides. No rationalist
philosopher in the Middle Ages—including Gersonides—could really
exclude all women from the capacity of attaining a high level of intellectual
achievement, since these philosophers regarded such achievement as
necessary for prophecy, and there were indisputably women prophets. As
to Maimonides, Kellner’s arguments for his higher estimation of women
strike me as very weak, to the point where I understand them primarily
as a result of the admirable desire to interpret the stance of the greatest
of Jewish thinkers in as favorable a light as possible.
And so we come to two issues where a Maimonidean ruling placed
significant restrictions on women. As Harvey pointed out in that article,
it is very far from clear that the usual guidelines for deciding among
conflicting talmudic opinions required the ruling that women should not
be taught Torah. But that is how Maimonides ruled in his pioneering code,
with lasting impact on Jewish law and practice. The twentieth century
has seen major changes, but Beis Yaakov schools had to be justified as
an emergency measure, and Orthodox institutions teaching Talmud to
women, though they rely on the position of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik
and other distinguished authorities, are subject to ongoing criticism that
requires incessant justification.
The second of these issues reflects the fact that only Maimonides’ code
ruled on matters relating to Jewish kingship and authority. A rabbinic
text had affirmed that a Jewish king must be male, and Maimonides
extended this, without a clear source, to all positions of authority
(Hilkhot Melakhim 1:5). In pre-State Palestine, this ruling was mobilized
to argue even against women’s suffrage, but it was particularly relevant
to the holding of political office. A discussion of this issue by Rabbi
Ben Zion Uzziel illustrates strikingly some of the motifs that we have
already encountered. First, he berates his correspondent for suggesting
that Maimonides may have misunderstood the rabbinic text under the
influence of the custom of his own time. We are permitted to disagree
with Maimonides, but we may not say such things about him. Second,
Rabbi Uzziel stresses that Maimonides’ position is not articulated in
any other classical source. (Note that Maimonides’ addressing of issues
not dealt with by other authorities usually endows him with special
authority; in this instance, it was used against him.) Finally, Rabbi
Uzziel deduces from a discussion of the Tosafists that they disagree with
Maimonides even though they do not say so explicitly. In the presence
of a strong desire to rule against Maimonides, both inference and the
silence of other sources can count against an explicit ruling. It is worth
noting that the Maimonidean prohibition of positions of authority for
women played a role in Saul Lieberman’s opposition to the ordination
of women, a stand that had a significant impact on the decision of some
Conservative traditionalists to leave the Jewish Theological Seminary or
break with organized Conservative Judaism when women were admitted
into the rabbinical program.
The role of women in the Israeli polity leads us to the question of
the State itself. Maimonides has been a central figure for both religious
Zionists and religious anti-Zionists. His position that the messianic
process will develop naturalistically was seized upon by religious Zionists
to demonstrate that Jewish sovereignty must be reestablished by human
effort, this despite his explicit admonition that we are simply to wait.
His assertion that the final Temple would be built by human hands and
not, as Rashi thought, by the hand of God, reinforced this perception.
On the other hand, the vehemently anti- Zionist Satmar Rov pointed
to Maimonides’ omission in his Book of the Commandments of the
commandment to live in Israel. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, sympathetic to
the State and hawkish on territorial concessions but opposed to Zionist
ideology, “proved” that the State has no messianic significance whatever
by citing the fact that Maimonides did not list the return of the dispersed
of Israel until a late stage of the Messianic process - this despite the
fact that Maimonides wrote that the order of events in the unfolding
messianic scenario is not a fundamental religious principle. The Rebbe
was well aware of the rabbinic texts about gradual redemption cited by
religious Zionists, but he maintained that Maimonides knew them too
and had effectively ruled against them in a binding, authoritative code.
Beyond the State there is the Messiah. Here Maimonides looms
enormously large. In the last two chapters of his code, he set forth
criteria for identifying first a presumptive Messiah and then one who
had attained his status with certainty. While many Jews had written
about the Messiah, only Maimonides expressed his views in a code, which
once again led some readers to grant them the force of law. A king from
the House of David becomes presumptive Messiah by studying the Torah,
strengthening it, compelling all Israel to obey it, and fighting the wars
of the Lord. He attains the status of certain Messiah by gathering the
dispersed of Israel and building the Temple in its place.
The waning years of the twentieth century produced a major messianic
movement that apparently violated these Maimonidean guidelines,
and it was precisely the movement whose leader had described the
last two chapters of the Mishneh Torah as legally binding. Here we are
witness to the most creative efforts to establish that a position that
Maimonides explicitly rejected is in fact compatible with his guidelines.
Thus, Lubavitch hasidim during the Rebbe’s lifetime argued that he had
achieved the criteria of presumptive Messiah. He was a king because
rabbis are called kings in the Talmud; he “compelled” by persuasion;
several thousand Jews qualify as “all Israel”; and mitzvah tanks qualify
as instruments of the wars of the Lord. Some even argued that he had at least begun the activities associated with the certain Messiah; he was,
after all, instrumental in preserving the Jewish identity of Soviet Jews
so that they could be gathered into the land of Israel, and 770 Eastern
Parkway is at least the interim Temple and the spot where the final,
heavenly Temple will descend before both buildings are transported to
Jerusalem. As to Maimonides’ assertion that if the figure in question
“does not succeed to this extent or is killed, then it is known that he is
not the [Messiah],” this refers only to one who was killed, not one who
died of natural causes, or it refers only to a scenario in which the Messiah
would arrive naturalistically, or it is irrelevant because the Rebbe did
not die at all.
Remarkably, almost incredibly, a learned Lubavitch rabbi
arguing that a supremely righteous man can annul himself to the point
where he is nothing but divinity found a Maimonidean passage that
allegedly reflected this conception.
These are instances where people who know Maimonides’ statements
very well and even consider them binding nonetheless disregard or
refashion them through creative exegesis. But many people who revere
him reject his positions or even consider them heretical without knowing
that he held them at all. Orthodox Jewish education, even in Modern
circles and all the more so in Traditionalist ones, pays little attention to
what we call theology. Thus, it is easy to compile a list of explicit positions
of Maimonides - not those of the putative esoteric radical - that would be
labeled heresy or near-heresy in many contemporary yeshivas. Examples
include his assertion that rabbinic statements about the details of the
messianic process may be unreliable, that the Rabbis could have made
scientific errors, that God does not intervene in the lives of individual
animals, and more. Maimonides’ iconic status was achieved at the price
of consigning many of his views to a black hole of forgetfulness.
In these circles, however, Maimonides’ great rabbinic works are
alive and well. In the course of the twentieth century, the Mishneh
Torah moved to center stage in traditionalist bastions of Torah study.
Here too there is a certain degree of irony, but it predates the twentieth
century. Maimonides envisioned his code as a work that would serve as
a standard handbook for scholars, summarizing the results of Talmudic
discussions and freeing people already familiar with those discussions
from the need to revisit them in painstaking detail. He did not realize
that it would become an adjunct to Talmudic study, complicating and
enriching it even further.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, R. Meir Simchah of Dvinsk
wrote his classic Or Sameah centered on Maimonides’ code. The immensely
influential, pathbreaking methodology of R. Chaim Soloveitchik of Brisk
took Maimonides as its point of departure even as it revolutionized
the study of the Talmud itself. Two generations later, R. Joseph B.
Soloveitchik made Maimonides’ “Laws of Repentance” the centerpiece of
annual discourses during the High Holiday season that drew thousands
and influenced thousands more, discourses captured in part in On
Repentance, one of the great Jewish religious works of the century. In
an effort at popularization that engendered criticism but also enjoyed
modest success, the Lubavitcher Rebbe urged daily study of sections
of the Mishneh Torah modeled after similar initiatives in the study of
Mishnah and Talmud. And in the far narrower world of the academic
study of Talmud in a university setting, scholars specializing in the field
sought to find in Maimonides evidence of sensitivity to their own central
contention, to wit, that the anonymous sections of the Babylonian
Talmud are later than the rest and should be treated accordingly.
When Prof. Kraut sent the participants in this conference an e-mail
message indicating that many hundreds of people had registered, I
replied, “Did you tell them that Maimonides himself was speaking?”
The attendance here is ample testimony to the magic of Maimonides’
name. This wide appeal leads me to a final observation about the abiding
power of Maimonides the communal leader and gifted writer to inspire
audiences to this day.
In early 1989, I spent seven extraordinary weeks teaching at the
inaugural mini-semester of the Steinsaltz yeshiva in Moscow, the
first such institution to be granted government recognition since the
Communist revolution. The students consisted largely of refuseniks
who had risked careers and livelihoods to commit themselves to Jewish
learning and observance. In addition to the study of Talmud, Bible and
more, there was a slot twice a week for Jewish Thought. I decided that
the text I would teach would be Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen, a work
directed to a beleaguered Jewish community pressured to abandon its
faith. It was as if Maimonides had composed the work for the students
in that yeshiva. The greatest challenge in teaching the Epistle to Yemen in
that environment was to read the words without shedding tears.
I conclude then with one small selection from the many relevant
passages in which Maimonides speaks to Soviet Jews during the
transitional moments between implacable persecution and the beginnings
of hope.
Persecutions are of short duration. Indeed, God assured our father Jacob
that although his children would be humbled and overcome by the nations,
they and not the nations would survive and endure. He declares, “Your
descendants shall be as the dust of the earth,” that is to say, although they
will be abased like the dust that is trodden under foot, they will ultimately
emerge triumphant and victorious. And as the simile implies, just as the
dust settles finally upon him who tramples upon it and remains after him,
so will Israel outlive its oppressors. The prophet Isaiah predicted that
during its exile various peoples will succeed in their endeavor to vanquish
Israel and lord over them, but that ultimately God would come to Israel’s
assistance and put an end to their woes and afflictions… The Lord has
given us assurance through His prophets that we are indestructible and
imperishable, and we will always continue to be a preeminent community.
As it is impossible for God to cease to exist, so is our destruction and
disappearance from the world unthinkable.
Dr. David Berger - Culture In Collusion and Conversation
