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The Wall Street Journal
January 11-12, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
'Maimonides' by Moshe Halbertal, Princeton, $35, 385 pages
Maimonides' vision of a God who reveals himself through nature vaulted all religion
into modernity.
by Dara Horn
'From Moses to Moses, there has been none like Moses" runs the epitaph on the tomb of
Moses Maimonides, comparing the medieval Jewish philosopher with his Biblical
namesake—in the philosopher's favor. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this
intellectual giant to Jewish civilization and, through his influence on Muslim and Christian
thinkers, to Western civilization as a whole. In his rigorous and insightful study "Maimonides:
Life and Thought," Moshe Halbertal reintroduces readers to this rabbi-scientist, who insisted
that faith should be an enterprise based on reason. What readers will gain from this
remarkably modern thinker of the medieval age depends on their own reason—and their own
faith.
A page from a 15th-century manuscript of Maimonides' 'Mishneh Torah.' The Israel Museum,
Jerusalem, Israel / Extended loan from Michael and Judy Steinhardt, New York / The
Bridgeman Art Library
Much of what is known about Maimonides' life comes from an extraordinary source: the
Cairo Genizah, a thousand-year-old repository of nearly 200,000 medieval manuscripts
discovered in 1897 on the grounds of a Cairo synagogue. Motivated by religious concerns
about discarding Hebrew texts, Cairo's medieval Jewish community saved nearly all
writtendocuments, even children's schoolwork and sales receipts, providing a detailed picture
of its civilization. Mr. Halbertal, a philosopher who wrote the Israeli Defense Forces' ethics
manual, draws on Maimonides' works and correspondence, much of which was found in the
Genizah, to situate his subject in the intellectual battles of his time.
The Genizah's documents present a 12th-century Egypt that feels uncannily familiar: the
technology capital of the world, the crossroads of a global economy. Its philosophers,
especially Maimonides, asked a question that we in our information age still ask: Are our
lives determined by forces beyond our control, or do we have the free will to shape our own
destiny?
Maimonides was a physician, rabbi, politician and philosopher, and his life spanned concepts
and continents. Born in Córdoba in 1138, he fled with his family to Morocco as a youth when
a new, tyrannical Muslim regime took power and demanded that Spanish Jews convert or die.
At 17 he published his "Treatise on Logic," an introduction to Aristotelian logical principles;
in his early 20s, while migrating through North Africa and then the Crusader-occupied Holy
Land in flight from hostile regimes, he became a physician and began publishing on Jewish
law.
He arrived and settled in Egypt and in 1171, he was appointed head of Cairo's large Jewish
community, acting as Cairene Jewry's liaison to the Muslim ruling class. He later served as
physician to a royal vizier and then to the sultan, Saladin, publishing medical treatises along
the way, including works on treating chronic illnesses. Maimonides, though, mourned the
intellectually rich Spanish Jewish community that had formed him, and he mourned his
brother, a merchant who drowned on a trip to India. Mr. Halbertal views his two greatest
works—"Mishneh Torah," his profound distillation of Jewish law, and "Guide of the
Perplexed," his astonishing reconciliation of faith and reason—as in part inspired by these
losses.
Scholars often divide Maimonides' intellectual work in two: first, his efforts at codifying
Jewish law, which previously existed mainly in the vast and often unresolved legal
discussions in the 63 tractates of the Talmud; second, his philosophical writing that reconciles
the science of his time with his Jewish (and by extension, all monotheistic) faith. Mr.
Halbertal's achievement here is that he presents these two projects as a single one: a bold
attempt by Maimonides to make sense of faith for an educated audience in an advanced
civilization.
Prior to Maimonides, Judaism had little by way of dogma. Jews were expected to believe in
one God and to follow the Torah's commandments, but no list of beliefs defined Judaism. But
Maimonides' quest to delineate Jewish belief, as Mr. Halbertal explains, wasn't some
philosophical exercise but a historical necessity. Ancient Pagan regimes had presented Jews
with stark physical choices—martyrdom, flight or practicing Judaism secretly. As for
Christianity, Jews saw its God-incarnate as violating the Torah's prohibition on idolatry. But
Islam was unambiguously monotheistic. Was it perhaps compatible with Judaism? And if so,
why shouldn't a Jew convert? In answering this question for the Jews of Yemen, who posed it
to him when faced with Islamic persecution—Maimonides' authority was respected by
communities from France to Africa and beyond—the rabbi-philosopher presented not only a
practical answer but a conceptual one. If one accepts the Torah as a public divine revelation,
he posited, then any subsequent "revised" revelation, particularly one received in private,
wouldn't merely suggest an imperfect Torah; it would suggest an imperfect God. Jews could
not convert to Islam.
It is this concept—that God's perfection itself prevents divine interventions and "miracles"
ousting the natural order—that vaults Maimonides' thought out of the world of mere piety and
into the realm of philosophy. Followed to its logical conclusions, the idea of a perfect God
demands a belief in a God who reveals himself not through violations of nature, but through
nature itself. This sanctification of nature turns Judaism into a rigorously rational faith.
Consider, for instance, Maimonides' idea of divine providence. God's protection, he insisted,
doesn't come from divine intervention in human affairs, but rather through the divine gift of
human intellect, which affords talented humans the capacity to solve human problems. As a
physician, Maimonides couldn't believe that physical suffering was an act of divine will—
because if that were true, then how could he cure a disease?
Maimonides' faith was more modern than medieval. Yet it differs profoundly from today's
casual agnosticism, because it was motivated by a philosophical humility rare in our time. In
the discussion of idolatry in the Mishneh Torah, for example, Maimonides identified
superstitions as not merely foolish, but as "means employed by ancient idolaters to deceive
the peoples of various countries and induce them to become their followers." Idolatry, here, is
less the belief in a false God than the false belief in human control over the world, whether
through charlatan leaders or through the worshiper's own actions (if I do a rain dance, it will
rain). In debunking this belief, Mr. Halbertal writes, Maimonides "went so far as to make
rationality into a religious obligation." To be rational is to acknowledge human limitation. It
means standing in awe of what we can't grasp.
"The Guide of the Perplexed" is Maimonides' greatest work. Written as letters to a Jewish
student confused by Greek philosophy and its apparent conflict with the Torah, the "Guide"
presents a system of Jewish belief that accommodates a scientific worldview—but in a highly
enigmatic style that invites multiple interpretations. Wisely, Mr. Halbertal doesn't choose a
single angle from which to view the text, but rather analyzes it from multiple perspectives,
since, as he puts it, "any attempt to propose a single consistent reading of the treatise strikes
me as doomed to failure." Instead, Mr. Halbertal suggests a "skeptical" reading, which veers
toward agnosticism; a "mystical" reading, which assumes a hidden spirituality; a
"conservative reading," which keeps the work in line with the Torah; among others. (For
those following at home, the most accurate English translation of the "Guide" is the edition by
Shlomo Pines.)
The text is also a radical critique of religious language that would be at home in a literarytheory course. In rationalizing the Torah's descriptions of God's intervention in human affairs,
Maimonides argues that any language describing God as having a body, or even emotions,
must be understood metaphorically, as a feeble attempt to describe a presence beyond
description. In doing so, Mr. Halbertal claims, Maimonides suggested that language itself is a
kind of deception, an idolatry that props up the illusion of human power. As Mr. Halbertal
puts it, "Recognizing the limits on language is tantamount to recognizing the limits of our
cognition of the world." Whether this means that God can't be known at all, or that God
simply can't be known through language, is one of the many questions that Maimonides left
unanswered. This ambiguity and others like it give the "Guide" its enduring power, turning it
into a fascinating test of the readers' own beliefs.
Mr. Halbertal's book isn't for the uninitiated. Despite its English subtitle, this is no biography.
The author isn't a historian, and while the book's short biographical section provides the
rudiments of Maimonides' life and a convincing sense of his personality, it takes primary
sources at face value and is less reliable as a result. This is a philosophy book that doesn't try
to seduce the non-analytic reader. Mr. Halbertal also assumes—appropriately for his original
Hebrew-language audience—a knowledge of Jewish legal concepts that is basic to those with
a Jewish education but alien to those without one. Readers unfamiliar with terms like
halakhah (literally "the walk," denoting Jewish law) or geonim (literally "geniuses," denoting
early medieval Babylonian rabbinic authorities) will be swimming upstream. Those merely
curious about Maimonides may do better with Joel L. Kraemer's beautifully written 2008
biography, which provides a more accessible, if less nuanced, summary of his ideas along
with ample historical and cultural background.
But those prepared to plunge into the depths will be rewarded with a mind-enlarging
perspective that is absent from today's American culture, where theological arguments are
typically reduced to a choice between arrogant atheism or mind-numbing faith. While
Maimonides' ideas won't convince those wedded to either of the above, it is refreshing for
today's perplexed to listen in on serious thinkers—both Maimonides and Moshe Halbertal—
who refuse to check their brains or their faith at the door. As Mr. Halbertal says, the perplexed
of every age can learn one thing from Maimonides: No matter what their dilemma may be,
"they should never allow it to foreclose human thought and inner integrity."
—Ms. Horn's most recent novel is "A Guide for the Perplexed."
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