Maimonides and Modernity
"A person should not need to choose between their religion and their rationality. The two are not in conflict."
In this episode, Rabbi Michael Beyo and Dr. Adrian McIntyre discuss the life and work of Maimonides.
Rabbi Beyo explains what he sees as the untapped potential of Maimonides medieval theology and philosophy for helping contemporary Jews to strengthen their connection with Jewish tradition while navigating the modern world.
Conversation with the Rabbi is a project of the East Valley Jewish Community Center, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, neighborhood organization that has served individuals and families inclusive of all races, religions, and cultures since 1972. Visit us online at https://www.evjcc.org
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Transcript
From PHX.fm, this is Conversation with the Rabbi, featuring open, honest dialogue and sometimes unconventional perspectives on the world we all share.
Adrian McIntyre:Welcome to another Conversation with the Rabbi. I'm Adrian McIntyre. Today, Rabbi Michael Beyo and I are going to discuss one of the most important figures in Judaism: Maimonides. Musa bin Maymun. He's a philosopher, he's a rabbi, he's a physician, he's so many things. We're clearly not going to do justice to the breadth of his teachings and the questions that he helps us address. But he's someone who's personally important to Rabbi Beyo, and I'm looking forward to getting the rabbi's insights in this conversation. Good morning, rabbi. How are you?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Good morning, Adrian. How are you? Good to be with you here again for a Conversation with the Rabbi. And yes, you picked one of my favorite topics to talk about. And as you said, in this podcast -- today at least -- we will not do full justice to the Rambam as is known in Hebrew, which is the acronym for his name Rabbi Moses ben Maimon known to the non-Jewish world as Maimonides, Musa bin Maymun, as you correctly stated. So we're not going to do full justice in this session. We might have future session as well about him, because as you said, he is such an important and cardinal pillar figure in Judaism. He also influenced others like Saint Augustine was influenced very much his teachings, but for sure in Judaism, he is a pillar. In fact, we have a saying that from Moses to Moses, there was nobody like Moses, meaning this saying wants to highlight that just like the first Moses in Jewish history -- that received the Ten Commandments from God, liberated the Jews from slavery in Egypt, brought us into the Land of Israel, gave us the Torah -- from that Moses to this Moses that we're talking about in the 12th century, there was nobody in between. And I would add to say that maybe from that Moses to our times also, there was nobody like Moses. Maimonides was born in just, I'll give you a very, very quick biography for those who are a little bit less familiar. Maimonides was born in Spain in 1138 and then passed away in 1204. When he was young ... he was born in Córdoba ... but when he was young, about the age of 20, around that time, even though the part of Spain where he was living was under Muslim rule, but within the Muslim different tribes and factions and empires, there was a war. So a group of Berbers from Morocco invaded Spain. They were called the al-Muwahhidun, and they were much more religiously fervent in their understanding of Islam than the Muslims that lived in Córdoba at the time. And so they wanted to impose Islam by force, forcefully, to those who were not Muslim. So as a result of this forced conversion attempt, Maimonides and his family together with many other Jews, they ran away from Spain and they came to Morocco for a very short period of time. They escaped there. And then from there, soon after that Maimonides settled in Egypt, in what is today Old Cairo, was Fustat at the time. And aside from about one year that he spent in Israel trying to see and visit various cities in Israel. He lived most of his life after Spain and Morocco in Egypt, where he was the chief rabbi of the Jewish community. And all of his children and grandchildren stayed in that position of the head of the Jewish community for 300 years. And he was also the physician for the Royal House in Egypt for Salah ad-Din. So a great position of influence, great position of authority, great position of interchange of ideas with the royal house.
Adrian McIntyre:Now, before we get into some of the details of his thought, his teachings, his writings, let's just pause for a minute and reflect on what your opening narrative tells us about the medieval world. Because in many ways we are talking about an organization of people and places and power that is very, very different than today -- a world in which the same territories are divided up into nation-states. So there's something rich and important, I think, in some of these intersections and conjunctions and so on. We know for example, that Maimonides was heavily influenced by many of the important Islamic thinkers that had come before him: al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Absolutely.
Adrian McIntyre:We know that this is a literary / philosophical / scientific (although it's really proto-scientific) tradition to which the West owes a huge debt. Because the writings of Aristotle had been lost to Western knowledge and were only recovered later by being translated back from Arabic.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:You're absolutely correct.
Adrian McIntyre:Maimonides is participating in this tradition. He's reading and writing in Arabic, and he's a Sephardi Jew. And this is something that is a theme that I know you are passionate about. Talk a little bit about some of these conjunctions.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:So you are absolutely correct. We should start from the fact that on the one hand, yes, Maimonides continues and he is the highlight of a very rich Sephardi tradition, "Sephardi" meaning Spanish and Portuguese Jewry. A rich tradition where for a long period of time -- we're talking many centuries, about maybe 700 years -- there was what is called the "golden years" of the coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Spain. Now, was it really golden? Ah, so ... debatable.
Adrian McIntyre:By the way, whenever anyone tells you about the "golden years," whether it's the 1950s in the United States or anywhere ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Right, exactly.
Adrian McIntyre:... it's always debatable.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly, right. Was everybody treated the same way in front of the law? Not really. But it is undeniable that these centuries were a period of time where Islam culturally grew and produced wonderful work of culture. Judaism did as well, and they worked side by side. There wasn't the, as we say ... the rabbi in the Sephardi world was not only a rabbi, as we find in the Ashkenazi world that often rabbis, that's their profession. They are rabbis. They lead their communities. But more often than not in the Sephardi world, especially in this time, the rabbi is also a philosopher or is a poet, or he's a general leading armies for the Sultan, or he's a doctor. And so they are able to take information and data and from multiple disciplines and make them much more holistic. And Maimonides is right there. And it's absolutely true that the Western world had completely lost through the Middle Ages, the teachings of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and they come through us again through the translation from Greek to Arabic, through the great Muslim philosophers. And that's how they come to Maimonides. And then once again, the Western world, the Christian world, reconnects with those philosophers through the translation from the Arabic into Latin.
Adrian McIntyre:Especially the Aristotelians. I mean, just a minor point is that Plato had survived, and the Neoplatonists and medieval Christian philosophy were continuing to write increasingly ... I don't want to mischaracterize what is very serious work, but it was taking some of Plato's basic ideas and mapping them onto a world in which a feudal system and the dominance of the Christian Church had created this really weird kind of social order. And the Neoplatonists were very much a part of that. I think their work is important and should be engaged with, but there's something about the natural philosophy of Aristotle, the attention to the real world, the observable world. It's an empirical tradition, if you will ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yes.
Adrian McIntyre:... that was lost and becomes so important in informing future inquiry and what comes to be called -- although we should be careful of all of these labels -- comes to be called the Enlightenment, comes to be called the Scientific Revolution, and so on. But here's where I want to dial in and zoom in a little closer, because I think you could reveal something to us. You've stated to me that Maimonides is one of the most important thinkers and, in many ways, the most misunderstood. And here's what I think you meant when you said that. I'd like you to clarify it. You said that to some denominations in Judaism, he is Maimonides the rabbi. To others, he is Maimonides the philosopher. Why the difference now, in the way he's read in the contemporary world?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:That's a wonderful question. And it's a very Pandora box-like question. It opens up so many possible answers and directions. So I will try to make it justice. Maimonides, and we said he's a rabbi, and is a rabbi. He approaches Judaism and life through the prism of a Jewish person that cares very much about his religion and his community. And at the same time he doesn't want and cannot run away from what in his time was the accepted truth of philosophy, of what we call science. They would call it all philosophy. Everything was under the big umbrella of philosophy. But he cannot ignore what the great minds of his time and of prior times have taught. So for example, in his time, the medicine of Galen was the predominant understanding of the human body. And he refuses to disregard that in order to accept maybe a different system. He accepts that, and he merges that within Judaism. He accepts the understanding of Aristotle on so many aspects because he understands and he believes that they represent the truth of reality. And he refuses to live in a world, in a religious world, that is in conflict with accepted truth of life, natural life, laws of nature. Now they used maybe different terms than we use, but that was their frame of mind. And so fast forward many centuries, or even if we go from the time of Maimonides, there was always a conflict in Judaism between those who wanted to accept the truth of mysticism over the aspects of nature and those who wanted a synthesis between the laws of nature and Judaism. So for example, when the Torah says, "God spoke to Moses," what does that mean? Does it mean that God actually spoke like we are speaking? Or do we need to understand that allegorically, metaphorically? Well, we all understand that if we are going to say that God does not speak in the way that we understand speech, because he doesn't have a mouth, he doesn't have vocal chords, he is ... et cetera. That opens a Pandora's box about understanding all Jewish texts. Then it becomes very interesting on which part of the text shall I accept at face value, literally, and which part of the text shall we accept metaphorically? So throughout Jewish history, since Maimonides, there were those who did not want to accept Maimonides' allegorical reading of the Torah. And therefore they only accepted him when he codified Jewish law, because that is less controversial from a theological perspective. Because Jewish law tells you what you have to do and what you cannot do, and what you can eat and what you cannot eat, and how to behave. So it's much less theological in that sense. And then you have those who wanted to accept Maimonides, not maybe so much for his legal codes, but for his philosophical understanding of theology. And so that is the tension that often exists among those who study Maimonides between the rabbi and the philosopher. And it's a tension that exists in Judaism between what is called "Athens and Jerusalem." What is the importance that we are going to give to rationality?
Adrian McIntyre:So you're referring here to that he organized his work in a couple of pretty significant, dare I even say encyclopedic projects. One is the Mishneh Torah, which is a fairly significant, 14-volume if I'm reading correctly ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:14-volume ... 14-volume, and it's still today, it is the only work on Jewish law that encompasses all of the aspects of Jewish law, including those aspects of Jewish law that are not applicable anymore since the destruction of the Temple two thousand years ago.
Adrian McIntyre:Is a work of that scope possible? His goal was a complete codification of the oral Torah ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Law.
Adrian McIntyre:Yes, the law. So that if somebody had his 14-volume set and had mastered the written Torah, they wouldn't need anything else. They would have their authoritative sources.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Right, you would have everything there.
Adrian McIntyre:What strikes me about some of these projects I think, for example, later on of Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the idea that we would somehow take all knowledge and put it into ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Well, he meant it ...
Adrian McIntyre:Maybe in the age of the Internet, that seems increasingly improbable, but ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Right. He meant it as all of the knowledge until his time. But that was supposed to be a way for Jewish communities, both on the communal level and on an individual level, to know how to behave. So it goes into the details of Kosher laws, into the details of marriage laws, the details of divorce, transactions, just how to live your life as a Jew. But the Mishneh Torah is not a theological work. Meaning, he writes theological works like the Guide for the Perplexed. So it's not that the Mishneh Torah encompasses all knowledge, it encompasses all the Jewish legal, behavioral, applicable law.
Adrian McIntyre:I'm struck by some of the parallels between another legal interpretive tradition, which is widely misunderstood today. And that is Sharia law. If you look at any of the four major schools of Islamic legal jurisprudence, they are commentaries, interpretations, codifications on exactly the same kinds of issues. They are about practices. They are about contracts. They are about the very common, everyday things that might be adjudicated in a court before a Qadi, an Islamic judge. And at the same time, you also, whether it was under the Almohad dynasty, whether it was under the Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt, you had these separate courts, because the Islam of the day had space for Jews to take up their concerns about marriage and divorce and property and so on with the Jewish courts and Christians to do the same thing. So depending on which community you were part of, you had access to a court with the ability to make a claim. Someone stole my chickens. My neighbor built his wall onto my property. I don't want to actually pay my ex-wife. These kinds of things.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly. And as we said many times, Judaism and Islam share a lot, especially from the theological and practice focus that both religions place so much attention on the day-to-day "do" and "don't do." How to wash yourself. How to pray. How many times you have to pray. Which direction to pray. Who can I marry? Who can I not marry? What can I eat? When can I eat? Et cetera, et cetera. So much attention ...
Adrian McIntyre:Can I have honey? Can I have honey if I'm in my menstrual period?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:All of those things, exactly.
Adrian McIntyre:The minutiae.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:All the minutiae that, jokingly, sometimes I say that we Jews are obsessive-compulsive, and probably Muslims are as well, because of the minutiae that sometimes people that are not familiar with both traditions and don't appreciate the importance of the minutia in religious life, that people from the outside, of other traditions, they don't really understand why those minutiae are important. But for us, they are very important, for Jews and Muslims, the minutiae that fill our everyday life with holiness. It's our behavior. And I'm speaking now for Jews. I'm not speaking for Muslim, because I'm not an expert in that. But for Jews, for sure, it's the minutia of everyday life, in the service of God, that is the goal. And as I was saying the other day to a friend of mine, I was learning with a friend of mine, and I was saying to him in Judaism, we do not have the separation of secular and religious. Ideally they are all together. It's not that I open a door into my religious life once a day or once a week or once a year, and then I close that door and I go into my normal life, my secular life. No. The idea, the goal, is to bring holiness into mundane aspects of life. So my entire day to day from the moment I wake up, to how I put my shoes on, to how I go to sleep at night, is embedded with behaviors that we hope are proper behaviors to better myself. And in service of God.
Adrian McIntyre:The Mishneh Torah was compiled over 10-year period, and it was written in Hebrew.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yeah.
Adrian McIntyre:The Guide for the Perplexed comes out 10 years later, or is finished 10 years later ... it was published long after that ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yeah. It takes him about 10 years each.
Adrian McIntyre:... and it's written in Judeo-Arabic, which is classical Arabic using Hebrew alphabet.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Right. With some Hebrew words. Yeah.
Adrian McIntyre:With loanwords mixed in. Judeo-Arabic, for those who don't know is also the language in which many of the documents that were discovered in what's now called the Genizah a cash of records, texts, court records and all the rest that was discovered in Cairo and really changed some ways in which this important period that the 11th of the 13th centuries were understood. It's fascinating to me that again, when the text is a legal interpretation of the Torah's written in Hebrew, when it's a philosophical attempt to synthesize a rationalist tradition with Jewish theology, it's written in Judeo Arabic, and now here in the modern world, very few people in everyday life outside of a scholarship or the rabbinate read any of those languages. So you can buy the Guide for the Perplexed on Amazon for $9.95 or whatever. You can listen to it on ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yes, but I don't like that translation.
Adrian McIntyre:Exactly. Let's talk about this thing, which is the way in which these texts -- which were embedded in their moment and in their tradition, which were a significant contribution to thought and theology -- the way in which these texts now live in the contemporary world. You've told me that you have engaged in a daily study of Maimonides for 25 years.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Maybe even more. Yeah.
Adrian McIntyre:Why?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Since Maimonides, Judaism either accepts Maimonides' teachings or refutes Maimonides' teachings. Either or, you need to confront yourself with Maimonides. It's like studying philosophy. Whether you agree or not with Aristotle, you have to deal with Aristotle.
Adrian McIntyre:I think it was Mortimer Adler who said, "You don't read Aristotle, you only reread Aristotle."
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly. Yes. Wonderful. So whether today a person is a Maimonidean or whether he is an anti-Maimonidean, whether he is a complete mystic or not, you need to confront yourself and either accept or refute Maimonides because his legal work is the basis for all subsequent Jewish legal works. The basis to the extent that often people just copy-and-paste what he said and create a new work. And then they change just a word here and a word there. That's on the legal perspective. On the theological perspective, and this is where we get into the more controversial part of Maimonides, he codified what are known as the Thirteen Principles of Faith. Up until that time in Judaism, nobody with a few exceptions here and there, but really Judaism did not have a code of Jewish fundamentals on a theological level. It is Maimonides who lives in a world that is in contrast and competition, theologically, with Christians and Muslims that he needs, or he feels that he needs to come up with what are our Jewish fundamentals. Muslims believe in one God, just like Jews. So if we cannot create the difference between us and them, it would be easy maybe for some people in his time to say, "Okay, let me become Muslim. Why not, if it is the same God? Also Muslims don't eat pork. Oh, also we don't eat pork." Meaning there are so many similarities that it could lead people from the Jewish faith to accept the faith of the majority. And Maimonides wanted to protect the Jewish community from doing that. And so that's one of the reasons that he writes the Thirteen Principles of Faith, and these Thirteen Principles of Faith have become kind of the litmus test for Judaism. The irony and the tragedy is that the overwhelming majority of Jews throughout the ages and even today, and especially today, that swear by the Thirteen Principles of Faith -- that even study the Thirteen Principles of Faith -- they do not study what Maimonides actually wrote and his formulation of the Thirteen Principles of Faith. They study somebody's understanding because a copy of his original Thirteen Principles is the one that has been printed in the prayer book. So now you have a situation that every Jew has his own prayer book. And at the end of the daily prayers in the morning, you have the list of the 13 principles. Jews believe that's the list. "I'm going to abide by this list." But that list is a forgery, meaning, it's not what Maimonides really said. And even though in the title they look the same, when you study both lists and you do a comparative study, those two lists in many aspects have nothing to do one with the other. So the irony is that today for many Jews, the Thirteen Principles of Faith are the litmus test for being Jewish, but they are not really studying or abiding by what Maimonides wrote. And they have no idea what he wrote. And because of Maimonides' controversial theology, his theology is not really studied. The Guide for the Perplexed is studied only by scholars, it is not studied in rabbinical academies. He's not studied by the everyday Jew, and his other philosophical treaties as well. And so we have this schism that people know one aspect of Maimonides, or they know a morphed Maimonides, but they don't know often the full Maimonides.
Adrian McIntyre:If we could just zero in on the controversy at the heart of this for a second to see if it clarifies anything, recognizing that somebody from a different school thought might take an opposite and contrary view and argue vehemently against us, and so on. At the time this work was circulating, initially even, it had mixed reception.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:You mean the Guide for the Perplexed?
Adrian McIntyre:Yes.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yes.
Adrian McIntyre:Some people thought it was phenomenal. Others said it should be burned. And it was, in fact, burned. What is at the heart of the theological contention over this work? Recognizing that this is asking for a simplistic answer to a complex question and that others will disagree. What's the issue?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yeah. I will give a few points. Number one, a complete rereading of the text in a non-literal way. So God becomes in many aspects an Aristotelian prime mover rather than a loving father. And for most people in all religions, or in many religions, they want God to be a loving father rather than an Aristotelian prime mover.
Adrian McIntyre:It's almost as if they want an anthropomorphic God, even though there are theological problems with this idea.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly. So they say that God is not anthropomorphic, because Maimonides tells you that you have to accept that.
Adrian McIntyre:The hand of God is a metaphor, not an actual hand.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly. But at the same time, when they engage in a prayer they honestly believe that if they pray well enough, maybe God will listen to their request. And so they don't understand, as Maimonides says, that they are engaging and making God anthropomorphic when they say that God is not anthropomorphic. But in their behavior and their thought and their theology, God is anthropomorphic. So that's a one big challenge for many people. The second big challenge is the understanding of Maimonides when it comes to why should a Jew perform mitzvot? Why should we live our life according to Jewish law? What is the ultimate motivation and what is the ultimate reward or punishment that we will receive? Well, the text and other theological approaches in Judaism are very clear. When we say our daily prayers, it's very clear. "If you do X, God will reward you. If you do Y, God will punish you." Maimonides doesn't take that approach. His approach is much more complex into what is the reward? What is the punishment? Much more complex. Maimonides' approach to prophecy is very different than other approaches that we find in Judaism about prophecy. So in all of these major theological questions, issues of the world to come, issues of reward and punishment, creation versus eternity of the universe, all of these are topics that Maimonides deals extensively in the Guide for the Perplexed. And they were found to be dangerous. They were found to be dangerous by some of his contemporaries and some later that at the time they burned his books. And today they don't burn his books, but they're not studied. They're not studied. And that creates a problem because we are only studying Maimonides from one aspect and forgetting the other. And it's a problem because I truly believe that if we could teach Maimonides for Maimonides, so many Jews would be much more connected to their Judaism.
Adrian McIntyre:Let's end with this open question, which might lead us to a further conversation in the future. For Jews today, young and old, trying to navigate this world, not the medieval one, and finding a wide variety of sources claiming authority, providing guidance, and so on, we sort of end up ... as a very clear outsider, it seems to me that we end up with an overwhelming set of options. Whether you get your Kabbalah from Madonna or from something else. And you're kind of ... this mishmash, if you will, of "I like Maimonides when it suits me and I take a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I end up with something eclectic and contemporary and all the rest." What do you suggest as an alternative? I mean, should everybody go learn Judeo-Arabic to read Maimonides in the original?
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Right. So this is one of the problems of Judaism. Meaning, we don't have a systematic church. We don't have the high priest, the high rabbi that everybody accepts. No.
Adrian McIntyre:Let me also add as an outsider that I've seen systematic churches cause great problems in the world, so ...
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yes, absolutely. Every system has its own problems.
Adrian McIntyre:I mean, bureaucracy.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Yes, yes. In Judaism, it's an open market of ideas. And so everybody picks and chooses their rabbi. And everybody picks and chooses their rabbi according to what their rabbi's answers to their questions are. It's a challenge. It's a problem. And at the same time, it allows for exchanges of ideas that are so useful and important. So there is the ups and downs of that. Personally, I think that paradoxically, it is a Maimonidean approach -- a medieval approach, so to speak, of somebody that is a medieval, but he was a counter to the milieu that he was surrounded in many aspects -- that could make religion much more sense in today's modern world. Because often the religion and the God that many Jews choose not to believe is, as I say jokingly, is the bastard child of Zeus and Santa Claus. That we as modern people that have studied, and we accept science and we accept modernity and we accept the Scientific Revolution and all that it brings, we cannot accept any more concepts like miracles. Or it's difficult to accept concepts like miracles. What does it mean, a miracle? Show me, how does that work?
Adrian McIntyre:I prefer David Hume the Scottish philosopher's treatment, which is, "Miracles only happen to people who believe in miracles."
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Well, that is exactly ... without knowing, you quoted Maimonides. And I presume that David Hume maybe took it from Maimonides. Because that is exactly word for word what Maimonides says about miracles. "Miracles are true only for those who witness the miracle."
Adrian McIntyre:And who believe that miracles are phenomena, because for everybody else it's atmospheric pressure, it's something else.
Rabbi Michael Beyo:Exactly. So how can a modern young man or a young woman of 18 years old, when they read the Bible, they read the Torah, accept that the universe was created in six days? Six days of 24 hours? That creates a perplexity in them. That was exactly the questions to which led Maimonides to write his Guide for the Perplexed. So the same questions that brought him to answer by writing the Guide for the Perplexed are the same questions that we have today. How did the universe come to be? Why do bad things happen to good people? Reward and punishment. Why should I behave in a certain way? Why should I keep certain traditions? What is the reward that I will get? All of these questions, that often the answers we receive normally lead us away from religion, I strongly believe that Maimonides' answers would strengthen Jewish connection with religion and with our tradition. A person should not need to choose between their tradition, their culture, their faith, and their rationality. The two are not in conflict.
Adrian McIntyre:If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe to Conversation with the Rabbi on your favorite podcast app. You can also find the latest episodes online at ConversationWithTheRabbi.com. For all of us here at PHX.fm, I'm Adrian McIntyre. Thanks for listening, and please join us for the next Conversation with the Rabbi.
