In 1171, Maimonides’s younger brother David, a trader in precious stones, was drowned on a voyage in the Indian Ocean. Maimonides, who was particularly close to his brother, was crushed by the loss and developed a serious heart disorder, fever, and melancholy. “I was at death’s door,” he wrote, adding that he did not rise from his sickbed for a year. He described his plight in a letter:
Years have waned, but I still mourn and find no solace. And what could bring me solace anyway? He grew up in my lap. He was my brother and pupil. . . . My only joy was to see him. All my joy is gone. He has passed on to eternal life, leaving me shattered in a strange land. Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his books, my heart turns over within me and my grief comes awake again. For, I will go down into the grave to my son mourning (Gen. 37:35).1
David’s death was not only a shattering personal tragedy for Maimonides; it was also a great financial blow. David’s business success had enabled Maimonides to devote himself to study, research, and writing, free of material concerns. After his brother’s death, how would Maimonides support himself? He could have earned a living as a rabbi and Torah teacher, but he rejected this option on the grounds that it was degrading and compromising for scholars to turn the Torah into a tool for making money. Instead, he went to work as a doctor, soon becoming the personal physician of the sultan.
His days were long and exhausting. From morning to night he was at the beck and call of the sultan’s court and harem. Later, when his schedule became more arduous still, he wrote of the demands on him in a famous letter to his friend and translator Shmuel Ibn Tibbon:
The sultan lives in Cairo and I live in Fustat; the two towns are two Sabbath leagues apart. I have a difficult time with the sultan; I must visit him every morning. If he himself or one of his children or harem members is sick, then I may not leave Cairo. I spend most of the day in the sultan’s palace. Usually, I also have to treat some dignitary. In a word, I go to Cairo every morning at the crack of dawn, and if nothing keeps me there and nothing unforeseen occurs, I can come home only in the afternoon. Starving as I am, I find the antechamber full of people: Jews, non-Jews, nobles and lowly people, judges and officials, friends and foes, a motley company awaiting me with impatience. I dismount from my horse, wash, and entering the waiting room with the plea that they may not feel offended if they have to wait a bit longer while I partake of a hasty light meal, which normally happens only once every twenty four hours.2
Under such conditions, Maimonides wrote The Guide for the Perplexed. The greatest work of Jewish philosophy emerged not from a life of calm and equanimity but after years of profound grief and painful toil. When Maimonides writes in the Guide about suffering and evil, these were things that he knew firsthand.
We might be able to hear echoes of Maimonides’s own life experience in the Guide’s teachings on these eternal problems of religious life. The issue of providence, God’s involvement in our lives, is directly linked to the question of why tragedies befall us and may be the Rambam’s way of making sense of his own loss.
One of the deepest human needs is to be noticed. People want attention. Parents satisfy this requirement when we are young, but the need does not go away when we grow up. The more important the person we are standing before, the greater the yearning we feel for that person’s interest. God is the most important being in the cosmos. So the idea that God pays attention to us—providential concern—is one of the most profound religious needs.
The trust that God cares about the details of our lives gives us a sense of meaning and significance. It spares us from anonymity. Paradoxically, the people who most crave a sense that God is interested in their lives often are the furthest from being able to believe it. The conflict between emotional need and intellectual honesty is sharpest when we consider the question of divine providence.
At first glance, Maimonides’s concept of God leaves no room for providence. A perfect, static God is not a God who shows interest in our lives. An intimately involved God would be a God who changes in response to us. Providence implies will, and will implies change. Attributing will to God implies that He lacks something. But a perfect God does not lack anything. The Rambam reinterprets providence in a way that is consistent with his idea of God.
The central issue in a discussion of providence is the problem of evil. For the Rambam too, one of the strongest arguments against providence is that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.3
We experience a collision between our expectations of the world and what seems to be the reality. Reading the Bible makes us think that there should be a correspondence, or even a symmetry, between how we live and what happens to us. Good deeds ought to be rewarded, and bad actions should provoke punishment. The prophets promise that if we do what God wants, we will be saved from war, sickness, and hunger and that we will merit economic success and a safe and stable environment. The prophets also warn that if we do not obey God’s commands, terrible things will befall us, both individually and collectively.
Theodicy, which means justifying God’s allowing evil to exist, is the Christian tradition’s way of grappling with this problem. The aim of theodicy is to break the connection between our experience of evil and the conclusion than we should therefore judge God to be evil. Some theologians have defended God’s goodness by denying the reality of evil. The Hebrew Bible offers a different model of theodicy.
The rabbis of the Talmud read the Bible in a way that opens up the possibility that we might actually challenge God. In the face of the potential destruction of Sodom, Abraham courageously stands up to God and rebukes Him: “Should not the Judge of the whole world do justice?” (Gen. 18:25). Abraham argues, in effect, that God violates ethical laws when He kills the righteous: “Far be it for You to kill the righteous with the wicked” (Gen. 18:25). Moses echoes this idea before God vents His anger on Korach and his fellow rebels: “O God, source of the breath of all flesh! If one man sins, will you be angry at the whole community?” (Num. 16:22).
Prophets also confront God. Jeremiah poses to God the eternal riddle: “Why does the path of the wicked prosper?” (Jer. 12:1). This question resounds through Job and Psalms. The Talmud (Menachot, 29b) tells the story of Rabbi Akiva’s torturous death at the hands of the Romans. It describes Moses looking down from heaven at Akiva’s suffering. Moses turns to God and asks, “This is Torah and this is its reward?” Even from his celestial perspective, Moses cannot reconcile Rabbi Akiva’s saintliness with the brutality of his death.
Biblical heroes do not justify God; instead, they voice their protest. Holding God to account is not a sign of religious weakness—it is a strength. However, this tradition virtually ceased by the Middle Ages. Thinkers of this period, in order to justify God, began to deny the existence of evil, and Maimonides struggled with the concept of evil against others’ efforts to defend God against angry or skeptical protests.
At the beginning of chapter 12 in part 3 of the Guide, Maimonides poses a question about God’s justice.4 He does not, however, ask why there is undeserved suffering in the world. The question is phrased a little differently:
Often it occurs to the imagination of the multitude that there are more evils in the world than there are good things. As a consequence, this thought is contained in many sermons and poems of all the religious communities, which say that it is surprising if good exists in the temporal, whereas the evils in the temporal are numerous and constant. This error is not found only among the multitude, but also among those who deem that they know something. (Guide, 3:12)
Maimonides addresses the melancholy argument that there is more evil in the world than good. He thinks that this is another example of a popular idea that is founded on an intellectual error. He believes that he can correct this mistake through the power of reason. The task is to persuade people to assess reality in a different way.
The Rambam does not concentrate on the extent of evil in the world. Rather, he argues for a shift in our point of view. The individual tends to project his personal distress onto the whole of existence. If a rainstorm ruins one’s long-planned outdoor event, he might, in disappointment and pique, look at the world as a terrible place. It is hard for him to step back from his dismay or sadness and ask whether, from the point of view of the farmer who is desperate for rain, the world is also terrible at that moment. People paint the whole of reality in the hues of their own experience. The unstated premise underlying the claim that the world is bad is a certain self-centeredness, that is, the world is supposed to satisfy personal needs and that when it does not do so it is failing in its purpose. Liberating oneself from this egocentric point of view saves one from turning one’s own pain into a theological problem.
It is important to note that Maimonides uses one word, “evil” (ra’ah in the usual Hebrew translations of the Guide), to encompass a range of undesirable eventualities spanning natural disasters, famines, war and other forms of human strife, addictive behavior, and harmful ways of living. But in contemporary English the word “evil” usually connotes deliberate and malicious human action.
It is counterintuitive for us to use the same word to cover the broad array of negative outcomes that the Rambam aggregates under one heading. However, his choice of terminology is closely aligned with his philosophical goals in his treatment of “evil.” As we shall see, his point is precisely that these different sorts of harm have a lot more in common than most people think. The common factor, in the Rambam’s view, is that most of them ultimately result from human agency. So, even though this may be jarring for readers, we will follow the Rambam’s use of the same word, “evil,” to refer to all of these diverse, negative phenomena. This dissonance is meant to help us question our assumptions about why bad things happen, and to seek their common denominator.
Maimonides describes three types of evil that lead people to claim that the world is bad. The first kind is the injury that nature causes to people; the second is the harm that people do to one another; and the third is the evil that we do to ourselves.
Human physicality makes us vulnerable to injury from nature, including sickness and natural disasters such as earthquakes and storms:
The first species of evil is that which befalls a man because of the nature of coming-to-be and passing-away, I mean to say, because of his being endowed with matter. Because of this, infirmities and paralytic afflictions befall some individuals, either in consequence of their original, natural disposition, or they supervene because of changes occurring in the elements, such as corruption in the air or a fire from heaven and a landslide. We have already explained that divine wisdom has made it obligatory that there should be no coming-to-be except through passing-away. . . . Thus, this species of evils must necessarily exist. Withal you will find that the evils of this kind that befall men are very few and occur only seldom. For you will find cities, existing for thousands of years, that have never been flooded or burned. Also, thousands of people are born in perfect health, whereas the birth of an infirm human being is an anomaly . . . they do not form a hundredth or even a thousandth part of those born in good health. (Guide, 3:12)
We cannot avoid the losses, disruptions, and traumas that occur in nature, but we can make our peace with them. They are an integral part of our being in the world. Likewise, to have a body is, as Hamlet puts it, to be subject to the “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
The second type of evil is the harm that people cause one another, through crime or war, for example. Maimonides makes a distinction between crime that happens within a state and that is relatively limited, on the one hand, and war that is waged between states:
The evils of the second kind are those that human beings inflict upon one another, such as tyrannical domination of some over others. These evils are more numerous than those belonging to the first kind, and the reasons for that are numerous and well-known. The evils in question also come from us. However, the wronged man has no device against them. At the same time, there is no city existing anywhere in the whole world in which evil of this kind is in any way widespread or predominant among inhabitants of that city; but its existence is also rare—in the cases, for instance where, when one individual surprises another individual and kills him or robs him by night. This kind of evil becomes common, reaching many people, only in the course of great wars; and such events too do not form the majority of occurrences upon the earth taken as a whole. (Guide, 3:12)
Maimonides believes that the political framework can substantially limit the evil of war. In his view, war is more widespread than crime because there is no effective international authority that can limit this type of violence. This was certainly the case in his time, and it is arguably still true today. Maimonides lived in an age of violent political strife. In his childhood he was forced to flee Spain because of the Almohad invasion, which destroyed the highly developed Jewish community in Andalusia. As an adult he lived in Egypt, which still bore the wounds inflicted by Saladin’s conquest.
The third kind of evil, that which a person does to himself, is caused mainly by bad habits. Chasing after sensual satisfaction, especially food and sexual licentiousness, is damaging to the body. As a physician, Maimonides stressed the importance of prevention and restraint.5 He cautioned against the dangers of overeating, overindulgence in sex, and any excessive and repeated behavior that upsets biological equilibrium. “Most of the sicknesses that befall people are caused by eating bad foods, or by gluttonously filling their stomachs, even with good foods” (MT, Hilkhot Deot, 4:15). People who surrender to their unfettered physical desires will inevitably suffer as a result:
This kind is consequent on all vices, I mean concupiscence for eating, drinking and copulation, and doing these things with excess in regard to quantity, or irregularly, or when the quality of the foodstuffs is bad, for this is the cause of all corporeal or psychical diseases and ailments. With regard to the diseases of the body, this is manifest. (Guide, 3:12)
What has Maimonides achieved philosophically through his division of evils into these three groups?
A basic principle emerges from this categorization. The closer a particular type of evil is to us, the more common it is. Damage caused by a natural event, which does not depend on human action, occurs least frequently. The harm that people do to one another is more common, and the evil we do to ourselves is the most widespread of all. Maimonides is not trying to ignore the presence of evil but to change our perception of its source. Many people feel themselves to be passive victims of cosmic evil. However, Maimonides transforms man from a hapless victim of evil to its primary cause.
Even with respect to harm from natural occurrences, Maimonides also implicates human responsibility. He describes the dangers to which people driven by uncontrollable lusts subject themselves:
In most cases such a man exposes himself to great dangers, such as arise in sea voyages and the service of kings; his aim therein being to attain these unnecessary luxuries. When, however he is stricken by misfortunes in these courses he has pursued, he complains about God’s decree and predestination and begins to put the blame on the temporal world and to be astonished at the latter’s injustice. (Guide, 3:12)
A merchant who makes dangerous sea voyages for business because he is driven to become rich is more likely to drown than a person who chooses a less potentially remunerative but also less risky way to earn his livelihood. He is not responsible for the storm, but he is responsible for his decision to go to sea. So the first stage in the Guide’s treatment of suffering is to challenge our sense of victimhood and to give us a far greater sense of responsibility for the consequences of our choices.
If one is the cause of his own pain, then he is also its cure, and herein lies the Maimonidean “therapeutic” approach. By changing our habits and aspirations, we can reduce or eliminate our suffering. We need to rid ourselves of the expectation of external redemption and accept responsibility for our condition. Theodicy—justifying God—does not help us to reduce suffering; on the contrary, it can hinder us. Maimonides shifts the source of troubles from God to man. He moves the discussion from theology to therapy.
Maimonides’s therapeutic approach to human suffering requires a clearer understanding of the source of psychological pain:
With regard to sicknesses of the soul due to this evil regimen, they arise in two ways: in the first place, through the alteration necessarily affecting the soul in consequence of the alteration of the body, the soul being a corporeal faculty—it having been said that the moral qualities of the soul are consequent upon the temperament of the body. And in the second place, because of the factor that the soul becomes familiarized with, and accustomed to, unnecessary things and consequently acquires the habit of desiring things that are unnecessary . . . and this desire is something infinite. For whereas all necessary things are restricted and limited, that which is superfluous is unlimited. If, for instance, your desire is directed to having silver plate, it would be better if it were of gold; some have crystal plate; and perhaps plate is procured that is made of emeralds and rubies, whenever these stones are to be found. Thus every ignoramus who thinks worthless thoughts is always sad and despondent because he is not able to achieve the luxury attained by someone else. (Guide, 3:12)
Someone who believes that his happiness depends on the extent to which he satisfies his desires is destined to suffer. A Buddhist commentator gave this elegant and simple definition of happiness: “Happiness is a consequence of attunement between what man wants and what he has. The greater the gap between those two things, the greater will be that person’s suffering.”6
Maimonides was neither the first nor the last to observe that, paradoxically, the pursuit of happiness is the cause of suffering.7 The lust for sensory pleasure or wealth is insatiable. If a person craves honor and power, he will never be satisfied with what honor and power he attains. His desire for more will remain.
In the Buddhist tradition, one works through this problem by recognizing and renouncing desire. We can reach an alignment between what we want and what we have by extinguishing craving, or “thirst.”8 Consumerism, on the other hand, is driven by the quest for happiness. The basic illusion of consumerism is that more stuff will quench the thirst. The next purchase will bring one to the elusive goal of satisfaction.
The Rambam locates the source of suffering not in the existence of desire but in the way that desire tends to grow. Harmony is not achieved by utterly negating desire, but rather by cultivating desires that are in tune with reality. It is like a person who is trying to read a book while sitting in the middle of a playground full of noisy children. His inability to read the book makes him angry: “What kind of lousy playground is this where a person can’t even read a book in peace?” Such dissonance expresses a mismatch between a person’s expectations and the place where he actually is. The way to avoid frustration is to reassess one’s expectations.
Underlying the sense of dissonance between one’s desires and reality is the impulse to understand the world. Sadly, over the course of our lives, this beautiful, natural thirst to know is trampled, and other yearnings flourish in its place, only worsening our psychic pain. The Rambam offers a kind of philosophical therapy that can revive our sense of wonder and natural curiosity about the world. He believes that the ideal approach is to want to know the world. Only then will one experience harmony and avoid suffering.
Maimonides sees Job as an archetype for the process that people generally undergo when they confront suffering. Job suffers sudden and multiple afflictions: his wealth is taken, his children die, and his body is afflicted with terrible sicknesses. At first, Job responds by blaming the world and its Creator for what has happened to him:
Now all men, I mean the vulgar, glorify God with their tongues and attribute to him justice and beneficence when they are happy and prosperous or even when they are in a state of endurable suffering. However, when the misfortunes mentioned in Job befall them, some of them become unbelievers and believe that there is little order in all that exists at the time when they lose their fortune; others hold to the belief in justice and order in spite of their having been stricken with the loss of their fortune, but do not keep patient if tried by the loss of their children. Others again are patient and keep an untroubled belief even when they lose their children, but none of them supports patiently the pain of the body without complaining . . . either with the tongue or in the heart. (Guide, 3:22)
When things are going well, we often do not question good and evil in the world. But when circumstances seem to turn against us we tend to see the world as the cause of our suffering. This is Job’s reaction to adversity. At first, he experiences himself as a helpless victim of the afflictions that assail him, but then Job undergoes a transformation in consciousness that profoundly alters his relationship to suffering.
The sages, in order to find an excuse for it, say a man is not to be blamed for what he does when suffering, meaning that he was excused because of his great sufferings. (Guide, 3:22)
In Maimonides’s view, Job’s faith becomes deeper and more sophisticated. At the outset, his belief is based on tradition, not on independent thought. By the end of the story, Job has reached a more profound faith, the fruit of his intellectual search. He learns that material resources are of limited value and comes to appreciate the genuine worth of intellectual enlightenment and knowledge of God. Job grows to reject his earlier yearnings and substitutes a new set of desires. By exchanging his physical appetites for spiritual ones, Job relieves his own suffering. It is not that the evils of the world have ceased to exist; rather, Job stops seeing them as evil. Difficult events in themselves are neither good nor bad. It is the way in which we experience them that makes the difference—and that depends on us.
Maimonides sees an allusion to Job’s transformation in the fact that the opening of the story praises him as pure-hearted, upright, and God-fearing. The Bible does not call him wise at this point. Job had much to learn before he could earn that description.
Maimonides’s approach here is radical. By transferring the source of evil from God to man, he turns the fact of evil into an idea: a human, mental construct. Maimonides recommends that we refocus our desires from satisfying our worldly wants to attaining knowledge of God by means of understanding the world. The urge to consume the world causes suffering; the desire to understand the world brings happiness.
Maimonides opens his discussion of providence by setting out the different theological options:
The opinions of people about providence are five in all. And all of them are ancient; I mean that they are opinions that have been heard about at the time of the prophets, since the true Law has appeared that has illumined all this darkness. (Guide, 3:17)
Maimonides first presents the view of nonbelievers, who deny that there is any providence in the world:
The first opinion is the profession of those who consider that there is no providence at all with regard to anything whatever in all that exists; that everything in it, the heavens and the things other than they, has happened by chance . . . and that there is no one who orders, governs, or is concerned with anything. This is the opinion of Epicurus. He also professes that there are atoms and holds that they mingle according to chance. Those in Israel who were unbelievers also professed this opinion; they are those of who it is said: they have belied the Lord and said: It is not He (Jer. 5:12). (Guide, 3:17)
According to the nonbeliever or heretic, there is no order to the universe and no external being to provide order. The chaotic nature of the world precludes faith in providence.
The second approach is attributed to Aristotle. Maimonides presents it as the opposite of the heretic’s view. According to Aristotle, there is abundant, natural order in the world testifying to the existence of providential concern:
Aristotle has already demonstrated that this opinion is inadmissible; that it cannot be true that all things should have been generated by chance; and that, on the contrary, there is someone who orders and governs them. . . . The second opinion is the opinion that providence watches over certain things and that these exist through the governance and the ordering of one who governs and orders, whereas other things are left to chance. This is the opinion of Aristotle. (Guide, 3:17)
The argument between Aristotle and the heretic is about how nature works. According to the nonbeliever, the world is chaos; according to Aristotle, it is cosmos, an orderly system. The universe reveals an extraordinary degree of order to anyone who investigates it deeply. This argument has important implications for the question of providence. According to Aristotle, order is evidence of a being that organizes the world. The fingerprint of divine concern is revealed in cosmic order. This idea is the basis for one of the most important proofs for God’s existence—the teleological argument.9
This proof has different versions, but its core is that the universe cannot explain its own existence. Imagine a man who goes to a desolate place and sees a bunch of scattered stones. On climbing a hill and looking down, he sees that the stones are organized in the shape of an arrow. This is not merely an observation about the geometrical form of the stones; it is also evidence that someone else was there before him.10 It shows that he is not alone.
Since nature cannot be the cause of its own harmonious organization, deep order imprinted on the world is evidence of a transcendent intelligence at work. This is the meaning of providence, according to Aristotle—an external wisdom that set up the world.
What about miracles? In the Aristotelian view, miracles are a problem. An event that breaks the laws of nature seems to disrupt the predictable and harmonious working of the world. Miracles break the rules, and the rules are the main evidence for God’s existence. Jewish biblical commentators with Aristotelian views are troubled by the descriptions of miracles. They interpret stories like the parting of the Red Sea and manna in the desert as events apparently extraordinary yet also scientifically explicable.
This version of God’s involvement in the world implies that there is no divine providence with respect to particular individuals. The laws of nature are blind to human biography. If two people fall from a high place, one a murderer and the other a saint, both will perish when they hit the ground. Gravity does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked.
Maimonides then presents a third option: an extreme concept of providence, according to which God is fully involved in the world. Nature as an independent entity disappears. This view is attributed to the Ash’ariyya, an important Islamic school of thought which held that God decrees in advance everything that will happen; it is all God’s will. The tree that falls in the forest is not brought down by the force of gravity but by a divine decision to fell that particular tree at that exact moment. Like that of the heretic, this approach denies the existence of laws of nature. However, whereas the nonbeliever declares that there is no natural law because everything is chance, this position holds that there is no nature because everything is God.
Many Jewish thinkers have criticized this view. Their objections are usually based on the observable fact that there are laws of nature. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand the order and regularity that we see in natural phenomena. The classic response of the Ash’ariyya and others11 involves the idea of “hidden miracles,” in which all of nature is subsumed within the category of miracle. According to this view, although it seems to us that the tree falls because of the laws of gravity, actually it is a hidden miracle. There is no essential difference between a tree falling—a hidden miracle—and the parting of the Red Sea—an open miracle. The two phenomena are both expressions of God’s will at that moment.
A fourth view12 that Maimonides presents is described as “the opinion of the Torah and of most of our sages”:
It is a fundamental principle of the Law of Moses, our Master, peace be on him, and of all those who follow it, that man has an absolute ability to act; I mean to say, that in virtue of his nature, his choice and his will, he may do everything that it is within the capacity of man to do. . . . It is likewise one of the fundamental principles of the Law of Moses our Master that it is in no way possible that He should be unjust, and that all the calamities that befall men and the good things that come to men . . . are all of them determined according to the deserts of the men concerned through equitable judgment in which there is no injustice whatever. . . . For all his ways are judgment (Deut. 32:4). But we are ignorant of the various modes of deserts. (Guide, 3:17)
The Torah and Aristotle both describe a world in which there are laws of nature. In the Torah, miracles do not take the place of nature, but sometimes they intrude upon it. In contrast to Aristotle, however, in the Torah nature is not static, and human actions have their effect. God demonstrates His involvement not only in the laws of nature but also by sometimes miraculously breaking them.
These views express the relationship between God and the world in strikingly different ways. For the Aristotelian philosopher, God is limited by the laws of nature. According to the Torah, God is constrained by moral considerations. We are entitled to expect that God will not utterly flout moral laws and that He will not systematically punish the righteous or reward the wicked. According to the extreme theology of providence, God is not limited by any framework of law or expectations—neither by physics nor by ethics. God acts solely according to His own will.
After explaining these alternatives, Maimonides offers his own view of providence:
As for my own belief with regard to this fundamental principle, I mean divine providence . . . I for one believe that in this lowly world . . . divine providence watches only over the individuals belonging to the human species and that in this species alone all the circumstances of the individuals and the good and evil that befall them are consequent upon deserts, just as it says, For all his ways are judgment (Deut. 32:4). But regarding all the other animals and, all the more, the plants and other things, my opinion is that of Aristotle. For I do not by any means believe that this particular leaf has fallen because of a providence watching over it; nor that this spider has devoured this fly because God has now decreed and willed something. . . . According to me, divine providence is consequent upon the divine overflow; and the species with which this overflow is united . . . so that it becomes endowed with intellect . . . is the one accompanied with divine providence, which appraises its actions from the point of view of reward and punishment. If, as he states, the foundering of a ship and the drowning of those who were in it and the falling-down of a roof upon those who were in the house, are due to pure chance, the fact that the people on the ship were on board and that the people in the house were sitting on it is, according to our opinion, not due to chance, but to divine will in accordance with the deserts of those people, as determined in His judgments, the rule of which cannot be attained by our intellects. . . . Providence is consequent upon the intellect and attached to it. For providence can only come from an intelligent being. . . . Accordingly, everyone with whom something of this overflow is united, will be reached by providence to the extent that he is reached by the intellect. (Guide, 3:17)
The basic difference between the Torah’s and Maimonides’s view is the way in which providential care works. In the Torah, religious and ethical behavior is the basis for God’s involvement. For the Rambam, on the other hand, the criterion is human intellectual attainment. From Maimonides’s perspective, God does not distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, but rather between the wise and the foolish. The closer someone has come to reaching rational perfection, the greater is God’s providential concern for that person.
Furthermore, reason is not just the cause of God’s involvement in a person’s life; it is also the medium through which one receives God’s providence. God saves the rational individual by penetrating his consciousness: “Providence is consequent upon the intellect and is attached to it” (Guide, 3:17).
How, then, is the work of providence accomplished? Not by preventing disasters from happening in the rational person’s vicinity. If, according to circumstances and the laws of physics, a particular building is “supposed to” fall down, it will. If meteorological conditions are such that a certain ship is going to sink at sea, it will sink. But God’s providence is manifested by preventing a person from deciding to enter the shaky building or board the doomed vessel. God does not uproot the laws of nature. Rather, He protects the wise through their minds.
This concept of providence begs many questions. First, it does not stand up to the test of experience. We see in life that wise people are not immune from tragedies and disasters. In addition, the theory raises problems of consistency within the Rambam’s writings. By implying that God restricts the free choice of the enlightened individual in order to protect him from harm, the Rambam seems to be contradicting what he writes in other places: that God never interferes in human decisions. Maimonides makes this claim when explaining Moses’s educational role after the Exodus from Egypt. Four hundred years of immersion in Egyptian paganism had left their mark on the Jewish people. The forty years in the desert were a kind of therapy that served to erase the fingerprints of idolatry. Maimonides asks why God needed to lead the people on such a long and arduous journey in order to free them from the after-effects of idol worship. Couldn’t He have simply performed a psychological miracle? Why didn’t He simply enter the Israelites’ souls and wipe out the remaining tendencies toward idolatry? Maimonides then lays down an important rule: God does not take away our free choice.
God does not change at all the nature of human individuals by means of miracles. Because of this great principle, it says, O that they had such a heart as this . . . (Deut. 5:26). It is because of this that there are commandments and prohibitions, rewards and punishments. . . . We do not say this because we believe that the changing of the nature of any human being is difficult for Him, may He be exalted. Rather, it is possible and fully within His capacity. But according to the foundations of the Law, of the Torah, He has never willed to do it, nor shall He ever will it. For if it were His will that the nature of any human individual should be changed because of what He, may He be exalted, wills from that individual, sending of prophets and all giving of a Law would have been useless. (Guide, 3:32)
A person’s consciousness is his autonomous realm. Within it, he alone is sovereign. Here is the textual problem: According to part 3, chapter 17 of the Guide, human consciousness is a domain in which God intervenes, whereas in part 3, chapter 32, it is not. We have here a “contradiction of the seventh kind,” which, as we discussed earlier, aims to conceal from the reader profound and sometimes radical ideas.
Rabbi Moses Ibn Tibbon, a medieval commentator on the Guide, made one of the earliest attempts to resolve this contradiction. He understood part 3, chapter 17 not as saying that God interferes in our thought processes but rather that human thought processes themselves are our divine, providential protection.13 The wise man is protected from harm because he knows how to avoid getting into dangerous situations like unstable buildings and ships during storms. Reason, the godly part in each of us, is what protects us from harm.14 This naturalistic reading finds support in the next chapter of the Guide:
The fact that some individuals are preserved from calamities, whereas those befall others, is due not to their bodily forces and their natural dispositions, this being the meaning of the dictum “For not by force shall man prevail”—but to their perfection and deficiency, I mean their nearness to and remoteness from God. For this reason, those who are near to him are exceedingly well-protected: He will keep the feet of his holy ones; whereas those who are far from Him are given over to whatever may happen to befall them. For there is nothing to protect them against whatever may occur; for they are like one walking in darkness whose destruction is assured. (Guide, 3:18)
Just as vision protects one from stumbling on obstacles along the way, so reason acts as an inner eye guarding against danger. Someone who orders his life rationally, maintains his emotional equilibrium, doesn’t smoke, and eats in a healthy way is much less likely to be exposed to pain and suffering. The eyes of reason will protect him from many of life’s traps.
Ibn Tibbon’s point is that rather than God protecting us, we protect ourselves. Our intellect, the godly within us, saves us from danger. This approach resolves the contradiction with part 3, chapter 32 of the Guide. Providence does not limit human freedom. On the contrary, it is a consequence of our choice to develop intellectually.
However, Ibn Tibbon’s reading turns out to cause other problems. While his answer resolves the tensions between the chapters that we have seen so far (part 3, chapters 17 and 32), it contradicts what Maimonides writes in part 3, chapter 51, where he returns to the question of how God watches over the enlightened:
Consider the “song on mishaps” (Ps. 91). You will find that it describes this great providence and the safeguard and protection from all bodily ills . . . so that neither those that are consequent upon the nature of being nor those that are due to the plotting of man would occur. It says: That he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler . . . His truth is a shield and a buckler. You shall not be afraid of the terror by night nor of the arrow that flies by day; of the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor of the destruction that wastes at noon day (Ps. 91:3–6). He then goes on to describe the protection against the plotting of men, saying . . . : A thousand may fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand; it shall not come near you. Only with your eyes shall you behold, and see the recompense of the wicked (Ps. 91:7–8) . . . then it gives the reason for this great protection being effective with regard to the individual . . . : Because he has set his passionate love upon him, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he hath known my Name (Ps. 91:14). We have already explained in preceding chapters that knowledge of the Name is apprehension of Him. (Guide, 3:51)
Providence confers protection upon the enlightened one. On a battlefield, thousands may fall, but the perfect man will walk away safe and sound. This is clearly different from part 3, chapter 17, where the Rambam says that a wise man should stay out of dangerous situations. Part 3, chapter 51 claims that even if wise people place themselves in peril, they will be protected. This is a big problem for Ibn Tibbon’s naturalistic understanding of providence. Can one really argue that wise people who walk on to a firing range will be saved because they have learned rational techniques for dodging artillery shells? Naturalistic approaches to providence simply do not cover graphic, miraculous descriptions such as “a thousand shall fall at your side and ten thousand at your right hand, but they shall not come close to you. With your eyes you shall behold and see the recompense of the wicked.”
We seem to have reached an impasse. The idea of providence advanced in chapter 17, where God intervenes in human consciousness, contradicts the theory of freedom in chapter 34. The possible solution to this tension—full naturalization of providence—contradicts chapter 51, in which the enlightened are literally protected in extreme circumstances. What is the secret teaching about providence that these multiple contradictions conceal?
The key to resolving these contradictory ideas about providence lies in our earlier discussion of evil. It is not that the enlightened ones never encounter harmful events. Rather, they do not experience such incidents as being harmful. The thirst for knowledge of God frees them from dependence on this world; the spiritual life is their shield. People who love God with their whole being will enjoy total protection from the painful vicissitudes of this world. This is how we should understand the enigmatic words of the Rambam:
Thus it has become clear to you that the true reason for a human individual’s being abandoned to chance so that he is permitted to be devoured by the beasts is his being separated from God. If, however, his God is within him, no evil at all will befall him. For He, may He be exalted, says, Fear not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am your God (Isa. 41:10). He says: When you pass through the waters, and I will be with you, the rivers shall not overflow you (Isa. 43:10). This is accounted for by the fact that everyone who has rendered himself so worthy that the intellect in question overflows toward him, has Providence attached to him, while all evils are prevented from befalling him. It says, The Lord is for me, I will not fear; what can man do unto me? (Ps. 118:6). And it says, Acquaint now yourself with Him, and be at peace (Job 21:21), meaning to say: turn toward Him and you will be safe from all ill . . . it is as if . . . this individual is protected because he has known Me and then passionately loved Me. You know the difference between the terms one who loves (oheb) and one who loves passionately (hosheq); an excess of love (mahabbah), so that no thought remains that is directed toward a thing other than the Beloved, is passionate love. (Guide, 3:51)
Absolute love of God saves a person from emotional dependence on anything else in the world. As we saw from Maimonides’s explanation of Job, much of our suffering is subjective. Job’s suffering ends when he stops experiencing the disasters of his life as disasters. Personal redemption comes from love of God. The more we love God, the more we will be freed from the pain and distress of this world. Providential protection, then, is a human cognitive achievement.
But did the author of the Guide manage to free himself in the way that he exhorts his students to do? As we saw at the start of this chapter, Maimonides wrote the Guide under almost unbearable circumstances.
Let us recall the Rambam’s discussion of how running after wealth and sensory pleasures causes suffering. In his description of this kind of life, Maimonides cites two examples:
Thus every ignoramus who thinks worthless thoughts is always sad and despondent because he is not able to achieve the luxury attained by someone else. In most cases such a man exposes himself to great dangers, such as arise in sea voyages and the service of kings; his aim therein being to attain these unnecessary luxuries. (Guide, 3:12)
Maimonides knew all about these experiences. His brother’s business involved “sea voyages,” and his own profession, chosen after his brother’s death, was in “the service of kings.” This is a wink from the master to his students throughout the generations. Maimonides himself was not fully free. He was not a guru, exhorting his students to strive for the peaks of enlightenment that he himself had reached. Maimonides did not believe that he had reached the summit. As a teacher, he did not merely show his students the way. He also admitted that he was walking the very same path beside them.