11 - Da capo: An Introduction to the Guide

Summary

Most Jews have heard the adage from late modernity, “From Moses to Moses [Maimonides] there was no one like Moses.” In a tradition in which divine law is central and Moses is believed to be the recipient of divine revelation, these are strong words about Maimonides, indeed. There is general agreement among Jews of all stripes today that Maimonides was the greatest Jewish thinker of the medieval period and perhaps of all time. For someone so highly esteemed, it may come as a surprise that some of Maimonides's books were burned at the behest of rabbis in his own time. From what we now know, it appears that his code of law, the Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Law, cf. the meaning of “Deuteronomy”), was burned in part because it challenged the centrality of the Talmud in Jewish life by producing a greatly abbreviated version of it—making it less necessary for pious Jews to devote their entire lives to its study. Indeed, as he implies in his introduction to his code, one may study it together with the Bible and do without the Talmud! But there is another reason that the code was burned: if one need no longer devote all of one's study to the Talmud, what then should one study in its stead? Maimonides subtly implies in his code that at least some Jews should study the central mysteries of Judaism, the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot. Traditionally, these two were identified with mystical teachings of some kind, but, in the introduction to part one of his Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides identifies them with physics and metaphysics (6). In other words, he seems to have codified Jewish law so that at least some Jews could study philosophy.

Although this may not appear shocking to the contemporary reader, one starts to appreciate how shocking it is when one considers the status that philosophy had in Judaism prior to Maimonides. For the most part, it was identified with heresy. The typical heretic was referred to as an epikoros, that is, a follower of the philosopher Epicurus. In other words, it was widely accepted that Judaism and philosophy were at loggerheads.