Thread by @ZoharAtkins

It's time to honor Maimonides (1138-1204) with a @threadapalooza.

The "Rambam" (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon) was one of the most daring & revolutionary (Jewish) thinkers of all time. He was not only a philosopher, but a community leader, jurist, legal theorist, and medical doctor.

Maimonides was born and raised in Cordoba (Andalusia), but fled persecution to Morocco, and then, to Egypt. Besides a life of geopolitical exile, Maimonides suffered the traumatic losses of both his brother and his son. One of Judaism's greatest minds was also a sensitive soul.

Since this is a tribute, I'm going to focus on what I find inspiring and transformative about Maimonides, rather than an overview of his thought--which is hotly contested, as is the thought of every great thinker. 3

Philo was the first Jew who sought to reconcile the Torah (Bible) with Greek thought, in his case Plato. But Philo's enduring influence was mostly on the early Church. Philo himself read the Torah in translation (Greek). Church lore has it that Philo converted to Christianity. 4

In short, Philo aimed to read the Torah allegorically, as a tale about Platonic truth. For him, Moses was a philosopher. But that idea basically died for hundreds of years.

Maimonides brought it back and made it mainstream. 5

Maimonides has normalized for Jews and religious thinkers, broadly, the idea that the Torah does not and cannot contradict philosophical truth. 6

Intellectual honesty is not a barrier to being a religious but a fundamentally religious quality.

Wrote more on that here. whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/is-the-intel…

7

Maimonides believed that the greatest service of God was to be a philosopher, to know God, though we will see that the meaning of this is complex and counter-intuitive, since he also believed that God could only be known in the negative (God's face=essence is hidden from us). 8

He wrote an innovative and controversial code, the Mishne Torah, in an effort to interpret Jewish law a system with elegant structure and philosophical depth. That endeavor remains a kind of grail for many--the prospect of finding unity in the chaos of Jewish practice. 9

But, at least in his early life, he believed that the observance of Jewish law was largely a pre-requisite for the higher thing in life--the contemplation of God and truth. Law exists to refine character and keep society in check, but intellectual life is where it's at. 10

According to Moshe Halbertal, he reversed his position on this at the end of his mature work. The Guide for the Perplexed, his magnum opus, concludes that the end of wisdom is action. More important than knowing God is imitating God by balancing love with right judgment. 11

If you believe Judaism is an intellectual project you have Maimonides to thank. But Maimonides was not simply an intellectual. He was interested in the good life. Intellectual life matters insofar as it is a key ingredient in the good life. 12

To some that legacy is "elitist." His Guide for the Perplexed is explicitly framed as a book not for everyone.

Leo Strauss developed his thesis that great thinkers write "esoterically" (i.e., in code) from attention to Maimonides, and his contemporary, al-Farabi. 13

Maimonides's primary audience in the Guide are only those who are already perplexed. He doesn't entirely want to confuse those who are already content; he simply wants to address the spiritual crisis felt by religious thinkers. If you aren't in crisis, pls ignore, he says. 14

Yet, Maimonides fires many shots that inevitably make his work a matter of public import. He readily calls other rabbis, living and dead, "fools." He expands the category of idolater to refer to anyone with a false mental image of God, making most people and (Jews) idolaters. 15

With one hand he says "you can't handle the truth," but with the other he demands that Jewish culture be transformed. There's an ambivalence in his work between a conservative element & a revolutionary one. The mob is gonna mob, but a thinker shouldn't discount the masses. 16

A young Leo Strauss wrote in the '20s that Maimonides exercised restraint (restraint not possessed by moderns) in nodding to the need for Law. While philosophy isn't for everyone, the Law gives it in a diluted form. It gives practical wisdom where theory remains elusive. 17

The Hasidic Master, Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav was said to have studied Maimonides deeply, yet forbidden his students from learning the Guide for the Perplexed. Why? 18

Was it the intellectualism itself he worried about, preferring a God found in paradox, dance, ecstasy? Was it that he felt his' God was so abstract as to basically not exist? We can't know. What we do know is that people have been trying to cancel Rambam since his inception. 19

After his death, his books were not only banned, but burned. Yet today, that's not an option. The Shulchan Aruch--the most influential code of Jewish law--ensures Maimonides is a prominent voice in every Orthodox Jewish home. His enemies are hardly read, except by scholars. 20

Why burn Maimonides's books? What was so threatening? The list of complaints is long. Today, Maimonides is cancelled, in a way, not through censorship, but through sanitization. Religious leaders today mostly tend to read the Mishna Torah, but not the Guide. 21

A traditional view of Jewish tradition is that it is an "unbroken chain" going from Moses to the present through a master-disciple relationship. Maimonides, though, rejects the continuity thesis and justifies his writing by appealing to a narrative of rupture. 22

Judaism was meant to be a wise religion, but its leaders lost the forest for the trees and became mired in superstition. Maimonides isn't great because he was taught by someone who learned from someone, but by use of his his own reason. 23

Maimonides says he is using reason to save Judaism from itself, rather than appealing to Revelation. 24

For Maimonides, there is nothing philosophical in the content of Revelation that we can't discover through reason. Thus, the loss of revelation isn't a definitive catastrophe since it can be recuperated by the philosopher. 25

In an age where the transmitters lack philosophical grounding, the philosopher must take it upon himself to reinvigorate the tradition w/o appealing to tradition. This is quite a polemical claim. 26

Maimonides has bravado, and if he weren't so amazing we 'd probably say he was deeply arrogant--or as pop psychologists would say "disagreeable." But over time, his chutzpah has proven a boon; a less strident, more polite Maimonides would have been less impactful. 27

How does one have the confidence to rule against everyone else? Maimonides is a case study in religious conviction. He was by no means Lutheran, since he didn't believe in consulting conscience, but reason. And he also rejects the egalitarian view that all opinions are equal. 28

But he does believe that one has a religious obligation to seek truth, even when truth leads to strange places, places that seem to contradict one's religious community. 29

The main contrarian position of Maimonides is that God is incorporeal. Another, related one, is that Biblical language describing God's emotion and body is to be read metaphorically. 30

Readers disagree as to whether Maimonides rejects creation ex nihilo, siding w/ Aristotle that the universe is eternal. But regardless, he believes you can't prove that the world was created...31

Re prophecy, prophets are great people of great mind and character, but what they grasp is not a revelation, but a philosophical truth which they depict with great imaginative capacity. Prophets are normal. You and I could be prophets if we worked hard enough on ourselves. 32

In this sense, Maimonides saw himself as a prophet--not someone who received an external call, but who realized it in the form of an autonomous discovery. Maimonides is a bridge on the path to modernity, where modernity is to be understood as the discovery of "interiority." 33

Look, if you aren't an Aristotelian, you might think Maimonides's system is out-dated. So what? Do I really care if God does or doesn't have a body? The sense in which God is one? Whether the Biblical world can be made to match the discoveries of classical astronomy? 34

But to me, the enduring point is not the content of Maimonides, but the form, the claim that Judaism is a form of life that facilitates philosophical life, not a backward or primitive faith that should be embarrassed by or avoidant of philosophy. 35

In other words, if you think Nietzsche or Heidegger or Arendt or whomever has the truth, you must read the Torah and Jewish law, accordingly. One must not be defensive about the insights that secular thinkers possess.36

For Maimonides, Aristotle was one of the great people who ever lived. He wasn't Jewish, he didn't receive the Torah. No matter. That's an incredible statement coming from a medieval mind; probably a more tolerant sentiment than we find in today's academia. 27

Maimonides shares a classical aversion to matters of the body and sexuality. He seemingly continues a tradition of mind-body dualism by which I am less persuaded and compelled (I prefer the insights of Merleau-Ponty and the Hasidic-Kabbalistic concept of "avoda b'gashmiut.") 38

Maimonides rules (we might say progressively) that one who loves Torah study can live a monastic life, choosing not to marry and procreate. He himself married later in life. 39

The asceticism is worth mentioning because it feels deeply bound up in his rejection of God's corporeality. If he were less negative towards the human body he might have appraised God's body differently. 40

But in my estimation the real challenge Maimonides poses is not to those who think God has a body, but to those who think they can know God at all. Maimonides makes God's greatest characteristic God's unknowability. 41

In this he anticipates Kant. God is the thing in itself. He also makes epistemological humility--the realization that we can't know God--a religious virtue. 42

How do you square a sense of humility re: our inability to know God with a brazen sense that one knows what Judaism is all about, what the laws mean, etc.? 43

In the Mishne Torah, Maimonides offers a presentation of the Law without discussing his sources or showing how he came to his conclusions. The reasoning is there, but implicitly. Now a whole cottage industry exists around trying to reformulate how he came to his conclusions. 44

But Maimonides wanted his work to be clear, unburdened by dialectics. He thought the study of Talmud lead to confusion for the average person and that if he were successful, people could rely on him and not have to learn the primary sources themselves. 45

That Maimonides is not taken at face value, but studied for his formal technique is an ironic plot twist, history's sweet revenge. Where he sought convergence, the Jewish tradition of commentary on commentary turned him into more grist for the mill. 46

The phrase "Mishna Torah" is a reference to the Book of Deuteronomy; it means the second or repeated Torah. Maimonides writes a book meant to stand in for what came before. If you have the second Torah do you need the first? Jewish history has answered that you do. 47

As my teacher Ben Sommer, following Robert Cover, argues, "Torah" means "justified law." Law is what we are supposed to do. Reasoning and narrative are how we justify and contextualize it. You can't separate them. Halacha needs Aggadah and vice versa. 48

Now you could argue that the Guide is where Maimonides does his justification. But the relationship between Guide and Mishna Torah is complicated. For our purposes, it seems as if Maimonides decouples law from philosophy. Law is about the bottom line. Philosophy=contemplation 49

How should we weight the value of contemplation against that of action? Maybe it depends on the person. But lest you think Maimonides was only a philosopher, think again. This was someone who counseled people, and navigated intra-Jewish and inter-religious political conflict. 50

For Strauss, arguing against Kojeve, the philosopher cannot be a statesman & vice versa. But Maimonides was both. Now following Strauss you could say that he ultimately had to choose, and much interpretation of Maimonides turns on whether you think him more one or the other. 51

One way to tell the story is that Maimonides was a doctor, concerned with health. Philosophy was a kind of medicine to be administered to help spiritual and mental health, but not an end in itself or not an end in itself for everyone. Different strokes for different folks. 52

I'm reminded of a line in Plato's Phaedrus in which Phaedrus admits that a doctor isn't someone who just hands out medicine, but knows how to dose it in the right measure in the right circumstances. 53

This being said, Maimonides has strong views on the right and wrong ways to think about things. He's willing to admit when he's wrong, but he doesn't believe in mincing words. It's an interesting model for today. 54

I wouldn't call him an example of "civil discourse" in the sense of being polite, but I would in the sense that he valued arguing in good faith. He shows that open-mindedness and passionate polemic can be mutually inclusive. 55

Today if someone called someone else "stupid," we might be put off, but Maimonides felt an obligation to call phooey when he saw it. 56

So for instance he criticizes astrological informed writers like Ibn Ezra, telling him that his efforts are "a waste of time." 57

Why all the spilled ink, why all the devotion to the Law, if we can't know anything about God? Is the not-knowing a path to mysticism; is it skepticism? Is it quietism? What's the deal? 58

We'll never know, and maybe Maimonides himself was ambivalent, containing all those possibilities and more. But one thing I've learned from the study of skepticism is that skepticism ultimately defeats itself. One cannot remain a skeptic about all things simultaneously. 59

Franz Rosenzweig (stay tuned for a future threadapalooza) writes that "We can know Nothing of God, but our Nothingness is OF God." 60

This means that there's a difference between not-knowing and thus being indifferent and not-knowing as a way of relating. If viewed through the latter mode, Maimonides believed that not knowing God was itself a way of knowing God! 61

Allow me to explain (lol): if the philosopher is Socratic, and the more he knows the more he knows that he doesn't know, then the highest achievement is the realization that one doesn't know God. There is no end to not knowing God, and it takes practice. 62

The Greeks would call this practice kenosis, or emptying out. One must continuously empty out one's concepts. The problem w/ theurgical models of mysticism is that they claim to know what they cannot. 63

But in their defense, we might say that they are a ritualized acknowledgment of not knowing. All these debates get rehashed in the reception of Kant. 64

The romantic response to Kant, much like the Kabbalistic response to Maimonides, is that not-knowing just means we can't know God COGNITIVELY; therefore, let's try to know God in other ways, through dancing, singing, feasting, gazing, tree hugging, trance-talking, etc. 65

Maimonides, read in this way, much like Kant, is a reductio against reason. Reason shows its limits, leading to a re-appreciation of intuition, or, if you will, Revelation. 66

Interestingly, Maimonides's son was influenced by Sufism, though Maimonides himself never partook. 67

Because Maimonides explicitly says in the Guide that he's writing esoterically (declaring through a megaphone "don't buy this sweater") he leaves open how much of what he says he really thinks. 68

Philosophical readings argue that Maimonides believed very few things to be true, but many more things to be useful. More conservative readings say Maimonides really believes many of the doctrines he espouses. 69

I always found it funny as a kid in synagogue that we'd end Friday night by singing Yigdal, the thirteen principles of faith established by Maimonides. 70

Ironically, these principles have become canonical--even a standard for conversion, for many--despite existing nowhere previously in such form. The Torah itself makes little to no systematic demands on our belief. 71

But did Maimonides himself actually believe them, or only believe that it was good for the average person to believe them? And isn't it ironic to refer to principles of faith when the author was someone who believed in reason, not faith? 72

At the least, it's a misnomer. They should be called principles of reason. But they can't be called that, because it's unlikely that they can all be proven philosophically. 73

In any case, I never took the principles too seriously in part because they were set as part of a song and singing has a way of deflating or at least revising the words you are singing. 74

" If
wisdom is not to be had, it is
to be sung."

oxonianreview.org/wp/poetry-comp… 75

Maimonides is one of the few Jewish thinkers who has managed to inspire both religious and secular Jews. Religious Jews admire his legal genius and his clear, moral, integrated, and systematic pov. Secularists can admire him for being a philosopher and for saying...76

That we must be willing to change our view of tradition in light of the truth, even if or when that truth comes from non-Jews. The Torah is a path to wisdom, but what matters is most the destination (wisdom), not the means (Judaism), especially when that means is distorted. 77

Since Maimonides, few have dared or been able to live explicitly in both the world of Jewish law and the world of philosophy. Strauss praises Maimonides, but lived as a philosopher.

Arguably, Rav Soloveitchik is the successor, or perhaps R. David Hartman. 78

For the most part, the philosophers don't study or observe law and the observers and jurists don't read much philosophy. Maimonides is a relic of the world of yesterday. 79

I think Levinas was someone who believed jewish law contained philosophical truth and that philosophy led to the same conclusions found in Jewish life, but he lacked the knowledge and training to write a Mishna Torah. 80

Perhaps systematic thought is over done. This is the theme I've addressed in my threads on Heidegger, Strauss, Benjamin, Arendt, Strauss, and Wittgenstein. If so, Maimonides's project is belied by our postmodern turn. 81

But I hold out a strange hope for a committed, future thinker who might read the Torah in light of the greatest modern thought, and who can interpret Jewish law in light of the contributions of Nietzsche and Freud, Heidegger and Arendt. 82

I hope, in my way, to contribute to such a project, to be a bridge between the poetic world of the Bible, the mimetic world of Jewish life, and the philosophical tradition. 83

One of the criticisms I've heard of Maimonides is that not everything we do needs to have anintellectual meaning. There's wisdom in ritual, tradition, custom, and we don't always need to explicate it. Sometimes when we do we become alienated. "Show, don't tell." 84

Ie. Maimonides was a universalist, but he did so at the price of intellectualizing Judaism; the power of an ancient tradition is much greater than what the philosopher can say. 85

I give credence to that critique, but I also think it can be a cop-out, a way of avoiding introspection and accountability. I think we need to find a compromise, a balance, between reducing Judaism to philosophy and allowing it to stay on the philosophical sidelines. 86

If you let things remain unjustified you can become decadent, corrupt, self-righteous, closed. But if you always justify you can become defensive, zealous, sectarian, and culty...only those who can justify themselves are welcome. 87

In my view, liberal secular culture has an intellectualist bias and parochial, pre or non-"enlightened" religious culture has an anti-intellectualist bias. Both, in extreme, go wrong. But there can be no synthesis, in my view, only a pragmatic middle way. 88

Which is to say, Maimonides is not for everyone and that's OK. Philosophy is not for everyone and that's OK. But if you're perplexed Maimonides wants you to know you're doing something right. I find that deeply consoling and profound. 89

Maimonides turns being lost into a sign of being religiously brave. In that, he's kind of a porto-existentialist. 90

For me, the lesson of Maimonides is "make your own way." But it's not a blank check. You must learn and learn and learn so that your way is sound. Still, if you must resort to being an autodidact, that's ok. The sages won't save you. 91

So, do I accept Maimonides on the problem of evil, on the issue of providence, on whether and in what sense God has agency? For me, the strength of Maimonides is not that he gives me a system and more that he tells me that tradition settles nothing. 92

I must decide these questions, using reason, and interpret tradition accordingly. I must find the balance between saying tradition is right and I am wrong and saying tradition is lost but I can give it life again. 93

Now, you can't do that without a community. And this is the difference between the community leader reading Maimonides and the academic reading him. The community leader understands that it's not enough to have the truth; you have to change the world, too. 94

Whereas the pure thinker might be tempted to say that the world can't and won't change, but at least philosophy exists for the few, as a haven in a mindless world. 95

That Maimonides wrote esoterically actually shows that he cared about being part of a community. Today, there is a tendency amongst the "public intellectual class" to say the truth and let the listeners be damned. 96

I find in Maimonides an incrementalist belief that through sensitive education, culture can be changed for the better. And I also find in him a belief that ethics are at stake in metaphysics. 97

It's wrong to idolize God because it's wrong to idolize ourselves. Negative theology underwrites negative anthropology. In admitting that we are formed in the image of the unknowable, we must treat one another with appreciation for our essential mystery. 98

By rejecting a belief that we can know God's essence, we reject any reductive view of the human, a reductive view that we might say leads to totalitarianism. Yet skepticism is not the end, but the beginning. 99

The realization that philosophy is a way of life, not an answer-code, helps return to everyday life with greater appreciation. Because words are insufficient to what is, we must walk humbly in the world.

Before philosophy, prayer; after philosophy, prayer.

100/100