Kindle Notes & Highlights
I began to plan my reading of Maimonides. I filled in a reader’s card at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, I sifted through the shelves of Judaica at the Strand Bookstore, I got permission to take out books at the Columbia University Library. I started to read several biographies of Maimonides, histories of al-Andalus, North Africa, and Egypt, books on Arab philosophy, books on the Talmud and Jewish law, histories of medieval medicine. The more I read, the vaster my subject became.
Maimonides was educated in a society in which several cultures were in constant though sometimes acrimonious dialogue.
However, after reading about Maimonides’ peregrinations, I identified with the experience of constantly changing landscapes, voices, customs, languages, and skies.
discovered that for Maimonides these changes enriched his own thoughts through contact with, for instance, the science of astronomy in Seville (possibly), Islamic legal systems in Morocco, Christian politics in Palestine, Arab medicine in Egypt.
After following Maimonides, I became more conscious of how the different experiences of place had changed me and my relationship to my books.
Time, space, memory, and movement were in some sense, for Maimonides, of the same nature.
Maimonides taught me also to think about repenting, and to consider repent an active verb with myself as both subject and object.
He described the process of repentance as having three stages: first confession, then regret, and finally a vow not to repeat whatever it was we did wrong. The true repentant, according to Maimonides, is someone who has the opportunity to commit the same sin once more and declines to do so.
“It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.”
Perhaps one way to approach the question of Maimonides’ importance is through his lifelong concentration on the laws that define the Jewish people, collectively and individually.
Another is through his attempts to understand our relationship with the Creator by means of the power of reason.
Knowledge leads to the love of God, Maimonides wrote, and “the nature of one’s love depends on the nature of one’s knowledge.”
The authors of one Maimonides biography argue emphatically that Maimonides’ highest achievement was that he “taught his brethren how to think; he showed them how to live.”
The idol maker, by contrast, “hopes to compete with the Creator, and schemes to invent a substitute for the Creator.”
An ignorant man, Maimonides wrote, “imagines that all that exists exists with a view to his individual stake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him. And if something happens to him that is contrary to what he wishes, he makes the trenchant judgment that all that exists is an evil. However, if man considered and represented to himself that which exists and knew the smallness of his part in it, the truth would become clear and manifest to him.”
With a population of perhaps half a million, Córdoba overtook Constantinople as the largest and most prosperous city in Europe,
Not only images taken from the other culture took root in the writings of both communities: terms and expressions in one language would serve to communicate concepts and procedures that lacked a proper name in the other.
Maimonides was now in his twenty-second year, and his scholarly gifts were beginning to be recognized among the intellectual elite. Fez proved not to be a good choice.
Whatever the reason behind his scholarly decision, the young Maimonides’ reputation in the field of Jewish law kept growing.
These two deaths plunged Maimonides into a profound depression that lasted for over a year, and which he diagnosed himself as “a medical condition.”
Aristotle, in one of the “problems” attributed to him (but collected sometime between the third century BCE and the sixth century CE) asked why melancholy and genius are so often associated.4 Aretheus
To counter a depression such as this, Maimonides recommended tending to the five senses “for the purpose of quickening the soul.” Hearing was to be nourished “by listening to stringed and reed-pipe music,” seeing “by gazing at beautiful pictures,” smelling “by strolling through beautiful gardens,” feeling “by wearing fine raiment,” and tasting “by eating highly seasoned delicacies.” Such things, Maimonides judged, “are not to be considered immoral nor unnecessary.”7
Maimonides himself died in Fustat in 1204, probably from exhaustion. He was sixty-six years old.
Scholarly inquiry and unquestioning faith were not seen as opposites by the student Maimonides, and he required no fantastical tales to secure his attention.
As a reader of the tenth-century Islamic philosopher Abu Nasr Al-Farabi (whom he overwhelmingly praises) and Avicenna, both of whom developed in their writings linguistic theories, Maimonides was aware of the importance of learning and putting to good use the rhetorician’s art.
because he wished that his son forge his path himself, which (as we have said) Avraham successfully did.7
On the basis of Aristotle’s work, together with translations of Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, Al-Farabi composed a college curriculum that interwove Greek philosophy, Islamic science, and the study of the liberal arts.
Avicenna as well argued for a study chart that incorporated cross-cultural texts on logic, philosophy, and theology, and proposed a rich academic program that would assist the incipient soul to engage in “a spiritual, secret conversation” with the All-Knowing, fount of all wisdom.
Philo of Alexandria argued that God did not thrust human beings into the world to fumble aimlessly in search of such answers. Philo, like Aristotle before him and Maimonides after, believed that factual evidence filtered through human reason must light the way to the truth, and that we should not put our trust in the superstitious fictions of divination and astrology.
For centuries, religious thinkers were reluctant to allow philosophical questions to enter the realm of theology.
The Maimonides scholar Leo Strauss has argued that this perplexity is not epistemological but political, and that any questions about the basis of knowledge that can be asked must necessarily be preceded by the question of what it means to philosophize within the framework of the authority of the Law.
The Law, says Strauss, is the pre-philosophical context of philosophy as well as its framework.16
In recommending the study of Aristotle, Maimonides makes clear his belief that we “should accept the truth from whatever source it proceeds.”
His magnificent aspiration was to transform Judaism into “a religion of reason.”21
Perhaps Maimonides, believing in the reality of ideas and also in the need to approach ideas empirically, can be said to have been both.
The ties between Maimonides’ philosophical inquiries and those of Aristotle have long been the subject of controversy.
“Nothing in excess,” becomes “a totally new and uniquely Jewish creation” after being “converted” in the teachings of Maimonides.26
The singularity of God embraces every moment in time as his omnipresence occupies every point in space. The true name of God is therefore One because it can apply to nothing else but God.
Divine logic governs him who is also that logic.
From the point of view of most historiographers, Maimonides was not a historian.4 For Maimonides, historical progress is, at its best, a deepening of learning, not a progressive accumulation of discoveries and insights, because truth is essentially unchangeable.
In pre-Maimonidean Jewish philosophy, it was stated that there existed a rational process, independent of tradition or revelation, “for gaining knowledge of God, the world, and morality.”
THE CREATION of the Talmud remains a mystery.
Prayer is confession, not a demand for change, in order to reach an ideal state of obedience to the One.
Graetz wrote that “it can justly be said that Judaism owes its regeneration to the thoughts of Maimonides.”
For that reason, “the chief object of the Law,” Maimonides noted, “is the teaching of truths.”4
The noted historian Shelomo Dov Goitein, reviewing Pines’s translation of the Guide in 1963, advised the curious reader to begin with the introductions, then go to chapter 32 of part I, which deals with the danger of careless study, “and then to read wherever he is attracted by the subject matter.”
Graetz seems to accuse Maimonides the philosopher of betraying Maimonides the believer.
Maimonides went farther and declared that the incorporeality of God was an essential part of Jewish dogma, and that anyone who did not understand and accept this was no less than an idolater.
For Maimonides, all laws (including the Law of God) must have two ideals: social well-being and the development of the intellect.
Shortly after Maimonides’ death, a compromise was reached: it was decided that no one should study Maimonides before the age of twenty-five.
