I recently had the pleasure of reviewing A Guide to the Guide – an English synopsis of Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed by Rabbis Chaim Kohn and Yosef Reinman – for Jewish Action magazine (link to full review at the end). The notion of making the Moreh more widely-accessible to English speakers fascinated me, not just because that was part of the motive of my writing Judaism Reclaimed. Rambam’s teachings in the Guide were not always warmly embraced by readers. To this day it is still quite common to hear his profound ideas being dismissed as “only intended for those confused” – an attempt to depict them as a compromise to the philosophically-enmeshed Andalusians and not truly representative of Rambam’s views.
It is instructive therefore to examine what Rambam himself writes about whom he imagines would read and benefit from his book, and to consider how a 21st century popular-Moreh might fit his agenda.
It is an enduring irony that perhaps the most complex book that has ever been written on Jewish thought was to be defined by the reaction of those who were not its intended readership. One thing that Rambam does appear to make abundantly clear in his introduction is that “its purpose is to give indications to a religious man for whom the validity of our Law has become established in his soul and has become actual in his belief—such a man being perfect in his religion and character, and having studied the science of the philosophers and come to know what they signify.”
Yet the Moreh, together with philosophical chapters of Rambam’s Mishneh Torah legal work, was banned and burned by rabbinic opponents in Christian-dominated France, for whom philosophy was a foreign pursuit. These rabbis were quick to denounce what they perceived to be an unwelcome Aristotelian or rationalist attempt to reconstruct Judaism in its own image. The strong criticism, bans and book burnings of the Moreh in its early years set the tone for an uneasy relationship with the work, which for many religious Jews has continued to this very day.
In the other corner of the ring, Jewish thinkers who had indeed studied the “science of the philosophers” but for whom the validity of our Law had not “become established in their soul” (a requirement Rambam set for readers in his introduction) found that the Moreh fell short of their own Aristotelian-rationalist attempts to interpret Judaism. Samuel ibn Tibbon, who first translated Rambam’s work into Hebrew, criticized what he considered to be its overemphasis on worldly religious activities at the expense of philosophical contemplation. Even rationalist rabbinic sages such as the Ralbag were critical that some of Rambam’s positions were “not implied by any philosophical principles . . . it seems rather that theological considerations have forced him.” These critics deemed Rambam insufficiently rationalist.
Meanwhile, Rambam’s indication that the Moreh contains some deliberate contradictions and concealments opened up the work to interpreters from less traditional quarters to speculate as to what Rambam’s true meaning and agenda had been.
Set against this daunting backdrop, A Guide to the Guide is a bold statement as to the significance—and continuing relevance—of the simple meaning of Rambam’s masterpiece. By providing a clear and concise English summary of each chapter, Rabbis Kohn and Reinman are inescapably taking a position on two questions that are controversial among interpreters of the Moreh.
(1) Value in the Moreh’s plain meaning
For the Moreh’s traditionalists, Rambam’s masterpiece cannot be neatly distilled into easily digestible bite-sized summaries. Such purists draw on Rambam’s own introductory guidance to the Guide, which insists that a careful methodology be employed to plumb the depths of his intricate theological theories:
If you wish to grasp the totality of what this Treatise contains, so that nothing of it will escape you, then you must connect its chapters one with another; and when reading a given chapter, your intention should be not only to understand the totality of the subject of that chapter, but also to grasp each word that occurs in it in the course of the speech, even if the word does not belong to the intent of the chapter.
In fact, Rabbis Kohn and Reinman freely acknowledge in their own introduction that Rambam did not intend the Moreh to be an easy read. Nevertheless, despite recognizing that many of the deeper secrets will remain beyond those who are insufficiently grounded in both Torah and philosophy, Rambam does not deem it to be entirely unhelpful to an uninitiated audience:
I know that, among men generally, every beginner will derive benefit from some of the chapters of this Treatise, though he lacks even an inkling of what is involved in speculation.
(2) The Moreh’s relevance to twenty-first-century Judaism
While Rambam’s own consideration of the benefits that various groups can derive from studying his work is, of course, important, it cannot be ignored that the fields of science and philosophy—which he sought to reconcile with the Torah—have advanced enormously over the past millennium. The long and winding passages that seek to rebut aspects of Aristotelian astronomy or subsets of medieval Islamo-rationalist philosophy will strike the typical modern reader as tedious and unrewarding. Once these chapters have been set aside, however, a modern, educated and religious reader of the Moreh may find some of the challenges that Rambam grappled with to be strikingly similar to some of those that confront twenty-first-century Jewry.
Today’s faithful, who must contend with widely accepted theories of evolution and the age of the universe, can find comfort in the style of techniques and arguments adopted by Rambam to rebut the science of his day or reconcile it with received Torah wisdom. More broadly, recent decades have seen a shift toward viewing mitzvot and other ritual customs as forms of segulot—mystical actions that can manipulate spiritual dynamics in order to achieve desired results. Rambam’s emphasis on the Torah and its commandments as a means to develop a serious intellectual (and thereby providential) relationship with God over the course of a lifetime may be seen by some as a welcome alternative. His approach to prayer as a primary tool for maximizing a meaningful relationship with God, rather than an aggressive storming of the heavens to make demands of the Almighty, may be similarly beneficial.
Such benefits can be enjoyed by modern readers even if they lack a precise sophisticated insight into some of Rambam’s more intricate ideas that are woven subtly into the Moreh. In this regard, A Guide to the Guide is of particular value to today’s perplexed readership who can identify and internalize core components of Rambam’s Judaism and thereby enrich their own relationship with the Torah. They need not, for example, grasp the elusive nuances of the Moreh’s negative theology—Rambam’s solution to the problem of describing God by instead describing what God is not—in order to sense the theological gulf between the human and Divine realms that forms the basis of Rambam’s monotheism and, in the reported words of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, “served as a brake against the deterioration of Kabbalah into idolatry.”
The full review can be read at https://jewishaction.com/books/reviews/a-guide-to-the-guide/
First posted on Facebook 17 December 2023, here.
