The Rambam’s God is perfect, lacking nothing and needing nothing. The idea that such a God could require worship seems absurd. How then, should we understand the purpose of performing the mitzvot? Let us examine the guiding logic of the Torah’s commandments.
The ancient, pagan world out of which the Torah emerged was replete with rituals that enabled people to control nature and events, or at least to feel as if they were. There were ceremonies to bring rain, rituals for ensuring fruitfulness, and religious rites intended to ensure victory in war. The texts prescribing the techniques of such ceremonies also specified their desired outcome. In the minds of their practitioners, one could no more separate the ritual from the result than one can today separate the act of dialing a phone number from making a connection. The meaning of the ceremony was defined by the hoped-for outcome.
The Bible is also full of rituals. The book of Leviticus, for example, is composed mostly of instructions for how to carry out ceremonies ranging from daily acts of eating to descriptions of the rites to be performed by the priests and Levites. One striking difference between the rituals of the Torah and those of other ancient religions is that the Torah almost always leaves out the desired outcome of a mitzvah. If other writings describe rituals as causes and the magical outcomes as effects, then the Torah is a book of causes without the effects. This was a radical change in the history of religion and a decisive break with the other religions of the time. Unlike modern deist philosophers who simply annulled ancient ceremonies, the Torah maintained ritual worship but paid little attention to its consequences. In the Torah, ritual is no longer a way of asserting control over the world. The worshipper approaches the religious act without expectations of the outcome.
Ridding religious life of magical thinking about the results of our actions transformed the mitzvot from acts of power into expressions of weakness and humility. One’s spiritual posture becomes like “the prayer of the lowly man when he is faint, and pours forth his plea before the Lord” (Ps. 102:1). The fulfillment of mitzvot is about obedience rather than dominance. The Torah thereby brought about a revolution not just in theology but also in religious psychology.
The Bible’s relative indifference to the specific consequences of performing mitzvot left a vacuum that Jewish thought throughout the ages has attempted to fill. The project of interpreting the deeper meaning of the commandments was central to all the major streams of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages.
The kabbalistic contribution to this discussion was especially striking. According to kabbalistic theosophy, the higher spiritual worlds are in distress, so to speak, as a result of a rupture in the harmony between the sefirot1—the emanations from God through which the divine attributes are manifested. For example, there may be blockages in the flow of energy between the sefirot of tiferet and malchut, or perhaps an imbalance between the sefirot of hesed and din, indicating a disharmony in the divine world.
From a kabbalistic perspective, the main purpose in the life of every Jew is to help restore harmony and balance to the divine. Perhaps more than God redeems humanity, humanity needs to redeem God.2 According to Kabbalah, the Torah places the tools for this cosmic rectification firmly in human hands. These tools are the mitzvot. Halakhah is the means by which we help repair the upper worlds. This places an enormous responsibility on the shoulders of those who are keeping the commandments. This sense of the immense power of ritual to affect the world, which had been eclipsed by the biblical revolution, returned to Judaism via Kabbalah. Not only do religious ceremonies profoundly influence the world, but, according to central streams of Kabbalah, they also affect God. The question of whether Kabbalah thereby rehabilitated something like a pagan religious consciousness is a matter of dispute, but it is clear that by restoring a consciousness of the consequences of ritual acts, Kabbalah returned religious psychology to a central place in Jewish life.
Even without considering Kabbalah, however, the Bible does attribute a certain kind of causality to observance of the mitzvot. It is not a direct causal relationship between keeping particular commandments and specific consequences, but rather a connection between keeping the totality of the commandments and general societal well-being:
And it shall happen, that if you will surely keep the commandments that I command you today, to the love the Lord, your God, and to worship Him with all your heart and soul, that I will give rain in your land at the proper time: the early rains and the later rains; and you will gather in your grain, wine and oil. I will give grass in your fields for your animals, and you shall eat and be satisfied. (Deut. 11:13–15)
Material sufficiency is a result of our obedience. This is not a mechanistic view of the relationship between particular rituals and reward. The Torah wishes to instill a more subtle expectation of reward, resulting from observance of the mitzvot as a whole.
In the Guide, Maimonides disputes the existence of even this indirect form of causation.3 According to the Guide, Jewish religious rituals do not bring rain or heal the sick. Human ceremonies do not change nature, as the pagans believed. Observing the mitzvot of tefillin, tzitzit, or Shabbat does not restore the ruptured harmony within the sefirot, as the kabbalists claimed; no cosmic rectification is effected through the power of our acts. What, then, in the Rambam’s view, is the point of keeping mitzvot?
Maimonides’s answer is that, while the mitzvot do indeed affect the world, they do not directly influence God or nature. Instead, they work by transforming the person who fulfills them. We saw earlier that, for the Rambam, prophecy is not so much God’s initiative as the individual’s achievement. Similarly, in his view, providence is less about God’s actions than about our achievement of a spiritual state in which we merit divine concern. So, too, we might say that the mitzvot were not given for God’s sake but for man’s—in order to shape a new kind of human being. If prophecy and providence are human spiritual achievements, then the mitzvot are methods through which we may attain these levels. Underlying all of the Rambam’s writings about the reasons for the commandments is the notion that a person’s character is his greatest achievement and that the mitzvot are, above all, tools to build a whole, balanced personality.
The Talmud distinguishes between huqqim (laws) and mishpatim (statutes). While the reasons for the mishpatim, such as “Do not murder,” are perfectly clear, the reasons behind huqqim—for example, not mixing wool and linen, or sending out the scapegoat on Yom Kippur—are opaque. The Talmud says about them, “I, God, decreed it and you do not have permission to question them” (BT Yoma, 67b).
The Rambam suggests a novel way of understanding this talmudic distinction. He argues that, in fact, all of the mitzvot are capable of being fully understood. The difference between huqqim and mishpatim is not between some mitzvot that are rational and others that are not, but rather between those whose reasons are transparent and those for whom the reasons are hidden:
Those commandments whose utility is clear to the multitude are called mishpatim, and those whose utility is not clear to the multitude are called huqqim. The sages always say with regard to the verse: For it is no vain thing . . . (Deut. 32:47); And if it is vain, it is because of you (Jerusalem Talmud, Peah, I); meaning that this legislation is not a vain matter without a useful end and that if it seems to you that this is the case with regard to some of the commandments, the deficiency resides in your apprehension. (Guide, 3:26)
The huqqim also have reasons, but, unlike mishpatim, the reasons are not obvious; we have to dig deeper to find them. Revealing these hidden meanings was the goal of the Rambam’s massive and ambitious discussion of the reasons for the commandments.4
If the goal of the Torah is, according to the Rambam, to bring human beings to perfection, then a precondition for understanding the Torah is understanding the human world; anyone who wants to speak meaningfully about the reasons for the commandments needs to know something about psychology. Here, an understanding of the Rambam’s psychology and anthropology is crucial for explicating how the mitzvot work to build character.
The Law as a whole aims for two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body. (Guide, 3:27)
There are two basic components—body and soul—that must be developed in order to build a whole human personality. The Torah works on both of them. When the Rambam speaks about the soul in this context, he refers primarily to the world of intellect. When he speaks about the body, he does not only mean our physical bodies, but also the whole political realm:
As for the welfare of the soul, it consists in the multitude’s acquiring correct opinions corresponding to their respective capacity. . . . As for the welfare of the body, it comes about by the improvement of their ways of living with one another. This is achieved through two things. One is the abolition of their wronging of one another. This is tantamount to every individual among the people not being permitted to act according to his will and up to the limits of his power, but being forced to do that which is useful to the whole. The second thing consists in the acquisition by every human being of moral qualities that are useful for life in society so that the affairs of the city may be ordered. (Guide, 3:27)
The Torah leads humanity toward perfection: to political stability, emotional balance, intellectual wholeness, and the acquisition of correct views about the universe. The coming sections will focus on two particular aspects of how the mitzvot form human beings: first, the way they contribute to people’s intellectual development, keeping us far from error and bringing us closer to the truth; and second, the way they mold human character traits and foster inner wholeness and balance.
Perfection of the soul, according to the Rambam, requires that we avoid common mistakes and misconceptions in our ways of thinking, and that we then embark on a philosophical journey that leads to the truth. This approach might seem surprising. The Torah does not actually teach its readers any systematic philosophy. It appears to lack all the usual ingredients of a philosophical work: it provides no statement of premises, or discussion of logical method, or any deduction of conclusions from first principles. The Torah presents no rigorously defined and examined body of knowledge. How, then, is the Torah supposed to keep us from error and aid us in our long, arduous climb toward truth?
Instead of intellectual investigations, the Torah demands commitment to action. The Rambam’s educational approach was based on a deep belief in the power of deeds to subtly yet palpably affect our ideas. It is the practical actions mandated by the Torah that protect against intellectual error and bring us closer to metaphysical truths. The long-term persistence of well-grounded religious belief within any community depends less on the profundity of that community’s philosophers than it does on the extent to which core beliefs are internalized in the souls of believers, through action.
The Rambam’s analysis of the emergence of religion can help us to understand better the relationship between rituals and ideas. Let us reconstruct his understanding of four religions: the religion of the generation of Enosh, the philosophical religion of Abraham, Jesus’s religion without commandments, and the normative Judaism of Moses.
In the days of Enosh, mankind made a big mistake . . . The wise men of that generation were ignorant, and Enosh himself was one of those who erred. This was the mistake: they said, “since God created the stars and sphere in order to run the world, and set them in the heavens and gave them honor; and since they serve God, it is fitting that we praise and glorify them and give them honor also. For surely it is God’s will, may He be blessed, to magnify and honor those who magnify and honor Him, just as a king desires that people give honor to the servants who stand before the king, thereby honoring the king himself.” After this thought took root in their hearts, they began to build temples to the stars and to offer them sacrifices, and to sing their praises and to bow down to the stars, out of the false belief that they were thereby fulfilling the desire of the Creator. And this was how the worshippers, who understood the truth, would justify their practice: they would not say that there is no God apart from this star that we are worshipping. . . . Everyone knows that there is none besides God. Rather, their error and foolishness consisted in imagining that this emptiness was God’s will. (MT, Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, 1:1)
Some historians describe monotheism as a spiritual revolution that took place against the backdrop of a pagan world.5 Maimonides, by contrast, describes a historical process that is exactly the reverse. In the beginning, humanity was monotheistic; polytheism sprouted out of monotheism. Paganism was born from a mistake that people made in the days of Enosh when they thought that the way to worship an abstract God was to bow down to the stars. This was not a philosophical error. The mistake was in their choice of method for worshipping God rather than in their understanding of the nature of God. It was a ceremonial error, not a theological one. But in the end it led to idolatry: not merely bowing down to stars, but also believing in them.
As time passed, the glorious and awesome Name of God was forgotten from the mouths and minds of men and they no longer knew Him. Men, women and children knew only the images of wood and stone, and the temples which had, through human folly, been consecrated so that people could worship the images and swear by their names. Even the wise men and priests among them believed that there is no God, save for the stars and spheres whose images were depicted. But as for the Rock of all Worlds, no one knew Him, except for a handful of individuals such as Hanoch, Methusaleh, Noah, Shem and Ever. (MT, Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, 1:2)
This narrative illustrates the Rambam’s guiding principle that belief follows where action leads.
This story of humanity’s descent into idol worship serves as the background for the appearance of Abraham. Abraham was born into a world that had forgotten the truth. Through force of intellect he succeeded in revealing it anew. Maimonides portrays Abraham as a philosopher who meditated on the cosmos.6 By reflecting on the eternal motion of the spheres, Abraham grasped the unbridgeable difference between God and the world. Here is the Rambam’s description:
From the time when that great man was weaned, he began to wonder, even from when he was a child, thinking to himself, “How is it possible that this sphere should be in continuous motion, without anyone moving or guiding it. Surely it is impossible that it should move itself!” He had nobody to teach or instruct him, for he was mired in a world of foolish idolaters in Ur of the Chaldees. His father, mother and everyone around him worshipped idols, and he worshipped with them, but all the time, his heart was restless,7 until he came to the true path as a result of correct reasoning; he knew that there is one God, and that He guides the spheres and created everything, and that there is no God besides Him. Abraham realized that the whole world was wrong and that what had caused them to err was their worshipping of stars and images, until the truth had become lost. (MT, Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, 1:3)
Abraham began to teach his discoveries and to gather followers who were convinced of the truth of these new-old ideas. This community wandered around the ancient Near East until it reached the Land of Canaan, where, led by Abraham and then by his offspring, it settled and continued to develop. The Rambam depicts Abraham’s followers as a group united by loyalty to certain philosophical truths; there is no mention in the Rambam’s account of laws, rituals, or commandments that bound them together.
At the height of the group’s flourishing, a famine forced them to travel south into Egypt. A lengthy sojourn in Egypt engendered a spiritual crisis. The children of Israel were subjected to cruel and degrading slavery by their Egyptian hosts. Harsh external conditions brought about profound inner changes—the midrashim tell of a profound devastation of the people’s spiritual identity—until Abraham’s descendants had almost entirely lost their philosophical heritage. As the Rambam expresses it:
Time wore on, and Israel in Egypt learned from the ways of their neighbors and began to worship idols like them; all except for the Tribe of Levi, who held fast to the ways of their ancestors, and never worshipped idols. But they were an exception. The principle that Abraham had implanted was uprooted and the descendants of Jacob went back to making the same mistakes as everyone else. (MT, Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, 1:3)
Abraham’s revolution did not survive dramatic changes in the community’s political and economic circumstances. The trauma of the Egyptian exile caused Abraham’s legacy to be all but forgotten. According to Maimonides, by the time of Moses there were just a few isolated individuals who knew God: “In those days no one except a very few people knew of the existence of God” (Guide, 1:63).
There is a connection between the loss of monotheistic belief in the days of Enosh and the spiritual decline of Abraham’s descendants in Egypt. Enosh’s generation forgot God by choosing the wrong rituals. One may infer from a close reading of the Rambam’s narrative here that Abraham’s descendants lost their body of knowledge through not having any rituals. Maimonides finds a common meaning in both stories: the walls that defend knowledge from ignorance and worship of God from idolatry are not made out of philosophical arguments. The truly effective barriers are constructed not of ideas but from religious acts. Rituals that sustain group identity and reinforce its core principles are necessary for long-term survival and flourishing. Enosh buttressed his ideas with false rituals; Abraham did not support his ideas with any legal superstructure at all. This lack of appropriate commandments and rituals caused both communities to lose their knowledge of fundamental philosophical truths. Maimonides articulates this principle explicitly in the Guide:
You know from what I have said that opinions do not last unless they are accompanied by actions that strengthen them, make them generally known, and perpetuate them among the multitude. (Guide, 2:31)
We may identify the same ideas that underlie Maimonides’s descriptions of Enosh and Abraham in his analysis of the birth of Christianity. The Rambam’s relationship to Christianity was complex and ambivalent. On the one hand, he believed that Christianity had an important role to play in the world by spreading knowledge of God and thereby paving the way for universal redemption. On the other hand, he viewed it as a false religion that is essentially idolatrous.8 Notwithstanding this ambivalence about the existence of Christianity after the fact, however, the Rambam’s opinion of the emergence of Christianity was unequivocal. He saw it as a dangerous development, pregnant with potential for disaster:
Also Jesus of Nazareth, who imagined himself to be the Messiah and was killed by a bet din, had already been foreshadowed in one of Daniel’s prophecies, as it said, And the lawless sons of your people will assert themselves to confirm the vision, but they will fail (Dan. 11:14). Could there possibly be any greater failure than this? All of the prophets predicted that the Messiah would save and redeem Israel and strengthen observance of the mitzvot; then this man came along and caused Israel to be put to the sword, and the remnant of the Jewish People to be scattered and humiliated, and he supplanted the Torah and deceived most of the world into worshipping a God who is not God. (MT, Hilkhot Melakhim, 11:4)
Jesus began a process that caused both physical and spiritual destruction: the exile of the Jewish people and the spread of idolatry. How did it happen that he caused most of the world to worship “a God who is not God”? How was he able to lead so many to idolatry? In his “Epistle to Yemen,” the Rambam addresses the question:
The inventor of this religion was Jesus of Nazareth . . . who was a Jew. He thought that he had been sent by God to clarify all of the doubtful points in the Torah and that he was the Messiah whose coming had been predicted by all the prophets. He reinterpreted the Torah in a way that led to the nullification of the Torah and its commandments. The sages, may their memories be for a blessing, understood his intentions and before his impact became very strong, did what was fitting to him.9
Here the Rambam distinguishes between Jesus and Christianity. Jesus did not found Christianity, but he began a process that led to its establishment.10 Maimonides attributes to Jesus a new way of interpreting the Torah—an interpretation that rejected the binding nature of the mitzvot. In the “Epistle to Yemen,” Maimonides writes about what Jesus initiated, that is, the abrogation of the commandments. In the Mishneh Torah, the Rambam describes how, as a result, much of the world was swept up by an idolatrous religion.
According to the Rambam, Christianity developed in stages: the initial stage was a change in Judaism’s legal structure, and thereafter a transformation of Jewish beliefs—from monotheism to a different religion that the Rambam regarded as being tainted with idolatry. Once again, as in the generation of Enosh, changes in practice lead to a sea change in faith.
There are also parallels between the unintended consequences of Abraham’s revolution and the emergence of Christianity. Abraham erred, Maimonides implies, in not creating a system of ritual or mitzvot that would bind together his philosophical community. Christianity ultimately canceled the commandments. Both communities ended up in idolatry.
Two pervasive principles emerge from Maimonides’s discussion of Enosh, Abraham, and Jesus:
1. Correct religious ideas will not endure in the long term unless they are supported by a system of rules and practices.11
2. Fundamental changes in laws lead to changes in fundamental beliefs.
Moses’s mission was to succeed where these pioneers had failed (or, in the case of Christianity, would fail in the future). He needed to forge a community in which religious beliefs would be internalized by all members and would be transmitted to future generations. For Moses, mitzvot were the mechanism that would preserve and communicate the fundamental ideas of Judaism.
Pure philosophy may, perhaps, be a transformative force for a few exceptional individuals. But history shows that to make philosophy an active force in the world, it must be preserved and lived by a group of people over an extended period of time. Human instability and weakness mean that ideals are fragile in the crucible of experience if they are not rooted in clearly defined actions. Because of their practical nature, the mitzvot are able to protect and perpetuate the theoretical truths of Judaism.
There are two kinds of commandments in the Torah. There are mitzvot that aim to distance people from false notions, and there are mitzvot that aim to draw people closer to true beliefs. Rambam believed that the Torah did not view people as blank slates. It was dealing with thousands of years of conditioning by pagan religions that had implanted false ideas deep in human consciousness. The Torah invested great efforts in uprooting idolatrous preconceptions. Abraham succeeded, at least for a time, in freeing his followers’ minds from idolatry, using argument and persuasion. Moses employed a different approach: the mitzvot were designed to erase idolatrous beliefs from the consciousness of those who fulfilled them. The educational power of ritual is the Torah’s weapon of choice for defeating paganism.
According to the Guide, there are two basic methods that the Torah uses in its struggle against idolatry: distancing and appropriation. There are mitzvot whose goal is to distance people from idolatry and all its symbols and ceremonies. And there are other mitzvot that aim to take away the magic of pagan religions by appropriating some of their main characteristics.
Ancient, universal, pagan religion (which the Rambam calls the “religion of the Sabians”)12 believed in the divinity of the heavenly bodies. Maimonides tells his readers that he invested considerable intellectual energies in learning about the Sabian religion. Out of a belief that the Torah is trying to undermine the idolatrous mind-set, the Rambam put on his anthropologist’s hat, so to speak, and set out to explore pagan culture. He hoped thereby to better understand the forgotten rationales for some of the Torah’s commandments.
One of his conclusions was that Sabianism had been extremely successful through the judicious use of fear in its rituals. Ancient Sabian ceremonies were full of threats against the safety of anyone who dared to miss the magical rites. The Rambam thought that a number of the Torah’s commandments are responses to Sabian ceremonies. For example, the Sabians venerated cows as holy animals, and therefore prohibited their slaughter:
As for the slaughter of oxen, the majority of idolaters abominated it, as all of them held this species in very great esteem. Hence you will find that up to our time, the Indians do not slaughter oxen, even in countries where other species of animals are slaughtered. (Guide, 3:46)
The Torah’s choice to designate oxen as sacrificial animals was therefore a profound protest against paganism. When a Jew in the ancient world slaughtered a cow, he was also at the same time erasing pagan conditioning that had been etched on his consciousness.
Sabian priests used to cast spells on trees, believing that this would cause the trees to grow faster and produce more fruit. The average length of time for a new tree in Israel to bear fruit is three years. The Torah prohibits eating fruit from a tree until at least three years after it was planted.13 According to the Rambam, the purpose of this prohibition is to remove the temptation to use magic in order to accelerate the tree’s development. The Torah sets a clear limit. Even if the tree naturally grows more rapidly than the average, it is still forbidden to eat the fruit for three years.
Yet another example was the Sabian priests’ custom of wearing ceremonial robes of wool and linen mixed together. Known as the prohibition of “shatnez,” the Torah forbade such mixtures. According to the Rambam, one cannot understand this biblical law without the background information about the ritual dress of idolatrous priests.
The Torah was not content with mere declarations against idolatry; it also demanded action. There are many more examples throughout the Guide where the Rambam demonstrated that fulfilling mitzvot served an anti-pagan purpose. Obviously, as time has passed, the pagan rituals that underlie some of the Bible’s prohibitions have been forgotten. Only the prohibitions remain. Stripped of their original context, they may appear pointless. However, Maimonides’s anthropological investigations, through which he reconstructed rival religious cultures that were contemporaneous with the Torah, revealed the importance of those prohibitions in the battle to uproot idolatry.
The Rambam’s views on this subject were formed by extensive study of ancient pagan and astrological texts. He read everything that he could possibly find in this field. Maimonides’s profound investment in researching idolatrous culture is surprising. He was, after all, passionate about the need to devote one’s leisure time to worthwhile intellectual pursuits. In one place, he attacks people who spend their time studying astrology, writing, “How many men who are great in years if not in wisdom have wasted their lives learning those books [of astrology]” (Guide, 3:37). Why, then, did the Rambam invest so much energy in mastering and interpreting pagan writings?
The answer apparently is that the Rambam did not believe that pagan writings should be studied for their inherent value. Rather, he dedicated himself to studying them so as to better understand a far more significant text, the Torah. For him, studying Sabian literature was an extension of learning Torah. Just as Aristotle’s writing contained metaphysical knowledge that was necessary for unlocking secrets of the Torah, so too, researching pagan writings yielded anthropological knowledge that was critical for a proper understanding of the reasons for the commandments.14
Abraham neither legislated rules nor commanded rituals. According to the Rambam he did, however, establish the Temple Mount as a center for worshipping God:
It is known that idolaters sought to build their temples and to set up their idols in the highest places they could find there: upon the highest mountains (Deut. 12:2). Therefore, Abraham our Father singled out Mount Moriah, because of its being the highest mountain there, proclaiming upon it the unity of God and he determined and defined the direction toward which one should turn in prayer, fixing it exactly in the west. For the Holy of Holies is in the west. This is the meaning of the dictum of the sages: “the indwelling is in the west.” They, may their memory be blessed, have made clear in the gemara of the tractate Yoma, that Abraham our father fixed the direction toward which one should turn in prayer, I mean the Temple of the Holy of Holies; in my opinion, the reason for this is as follows: inasmuch as at that time the opinion generally accepted in the world was to the effect that the sun should be worshipped, and that it is the deity, there is no doubt that all men turned when praying toward the east. Therefore Abraham our father turned when praying on Mount Moriah—I mean in the sanctuary—toward the west, so as to turn his back upon the sun. (Guide, 3:45)
Abraham chose Mount Moriah as a ceremonial site because it was already a place of worship—to the god of the sun. In that very place, Abraham established a sanctuary to God. He appropriated the tradition and the popular belief that this was a holy mountain, but transformed it from a place where people worshipped nature to one where they served the God of nature. There is a strand in talmudic tradition that continues this tradition and asserts that “the Shechinah is on the west.”15 On the Temple Mount, people bowed down toward the Holy of Holies, which was located on the western side of the mountain. Thus the old customs were precisely reversed. At a place where people had bowed down to the sun, the followers of Abraham’s religion turned their backs on the sun to worship God.
Mountain peaks are conceived in the human imagination as mystical places where heaven and earth meet. Primitive pagans tended to place their statues on mountaintops, trying to draw down the influence of heavenly bodies and channel it to people via the mediation of pagan priests. The Temple was also located on a mountain (or at least a hill), but at its summit was placed not a statue but, inside the ark, the tablets of the Ten Commandments, upon which were engraved, among other things, “You shall not make for yourselves any statue.”
This interpretation of the Temple Mount shows that part of the Torah’s approach to idolatry was to appropriate and transmute some of its critical ingredients. Another excellent example of this strategy is animal sacrifice. According to Maimonides, the sacrificial offering of animals was an ancient, idolatrous mode of worship. When the Jewish people lived as slaves in Egypt they were immersed in this practice. The only ways of worship that they knew were offering animals and burning incense. The Torah sought to align itself with people who were receiving it and therefore commanded that they continue offering animals and burning incense, except that now, instead of sacrificing to idols, they were to sacrifice to the God of Israel. Like the martial arts technique of defeating your opponent by turning his own strength against him, the Torah enlisted the power of idolatrous methods in order to overcome idolatry.
By means of these two approaches—anathematizing pagan rituals along with appropriating some of their essential elements and sublimating them into the system of mitzvot16—the Torah set out to defeat idolatry. In the Rambam’s view, the strategy was a tremendous success. Idolatrous culture, which had been pervasive, virtually disappeared.
In addition, there are mitzvot whose goal is to help believers internalize certain essential truths. An outstanding example of this type is Shabbat. The idea that God created the world was a subject of intensive discussion throughout the Middle Ages, and especially in the Guide.17 The Torah, however, does not give logical, philosophical proofs that the world was created of the sort advanced by medieval theologians. To implant the idea of creation in human consciousness, the Torah eschews intellectual argument, offering instead the commandment to keep Shabbat. As the Rambam explains:
Perhaps it has already become clear to you what is the cause of the Law’s establishing the Sabbath so firmly and ordaining death by stoning for breaking it. The Master of the prophets (Moses) has put people to death because of it. It comes third after the existence of the deity and the denial of dualism. For the prohibition against the worship of anything except Him only aims at the affirmation of the belief in his unity. You know from what I have said, that opinions do not last unless they are accompanied by actions that strengthen them . . . therefore we have been commanded rest in order to bring together two things: the belief in a true opinion, namely the creation of the world in time . . . and the memory of the benefit that God bestowed on us by giving us rest from under the burdens of the Egyptians. (Guide, 2:31)18
For Maimonides, Shabbat is the living embodiment of the idea of creation. Keeping Shabbat instills the idea of creation deep in the soul of one who observes it, because Shabbat itself was an inseparable part of the work of creation. For the Rambam, though, Shabbat is more than just a theological declaration translated into the language of action.19 Shabbat does not merely express faith in creation; it also molds and deepens that faith. As we saw above, Maimonides believed that the power and endurance of ideas depends not on the force of the intellectual arguments behind them but on the durability of the rituals, practices, and forms of life within which the ideas are embedded: “Ideas that are not rooted in actions will not last” (Guide, 3:31).
Judaism’s ritual commandments have been a subject of controversy since time immemorial. Beginning with the prophets who attacked the hypocrisy of ritual observance that neglected morality—from Jesus’s disciple Paul, who abrogated the practical commandments for Christians, to Rabbenu Bachya Ibn Pakuda—there have been many who have criticized halakhic Jews for excessive focus on detail at the expense of spiritual awareness.20 Among the modern exponents of this view were Spinoza and Kant. Each of these figures shared the general critique of Jewish ritual, namely, that mechanical observance of commandments anesthetizes human consciousness and causes us to forget fundamental religious truths.
The Rambam made the opposite claim, namely, that ritual observance does not distract us from fundamental beliefs, and actually is necessary for us to internalize those beliefs. The laws are the defensive wall of ancient monotheism that have enabled it to survive and spread.
Another belief that the Torah attempted to entrench in human consciousness was faith in man. The Torah teaches that human beings have free choice. People do not merely chart their own course in life; they also mold their own personalities. We are not entrapped by our habits or by life’s circumstances. Instead, we have the power to free ourselves from all of these and create ourselves anew. In Jewish tradition, this power is called teshuvah.
A condition for doing teshuvah, according to the Rambam, is belief in teshuvah. Someone who does not believe that he can change his basic patterns of behavior or the structure of his personality will never succeed in doing so:
It is manifest that repentance also belongs in this class, I mean to the opinions without the belief in which the existence of individuals professing a Law cannot be well-ordered. For an individual cannot but sin and err, either through ignorance—by professing an opinion or a moral quality that is not preferable in truth—or else because he is overcome by desire and anger. If then the individual believed that the fracture can never be remedied, he would persist in his error, and perhaps disobey even more because of the fact that no stratagem remains at his disposal. If, however, he believes in repentance, he can correct himself and return to a better and more perfect state than the one he was in before he sinned. (Guide, 3:36)
The Rambam locates his discussion of the mitzvot of teshuvah in the Guide in a surprising place: next to those commandments that he describes in the “Laws of Foundations of the Torah” (the first section of Mishneh Torah). That is to say, besides all of the theological claims that we are meant to believe in relation to God, teshuvah is the vital belief that we need to have about the potential for improvement and repair in relation to man. Faith in teshuvah is also established not merely by words and declarations, but through ceremonies and deeds:
For this reason, there are many actions that are meant to establish this correct and very useful opinion, I mean the confessions, the sacrifices in expiation of negligence and also of certain sins committed intentionally, the fasts, and the general commandment to repent from any sin. (Guide, 3:36)
According to the Rambam, the fast of Yom Kippur was also instituted to reinforce our belief in the reality of teshuvah:
Similarly, the penalty of being cut off is entailed by partaking of unleavened bread during Passover, and of food during the day of fasting (Yom Kippur) because of the hardship imposed by this kind of abstention and because of the belief to which these actions lead. For these are actions that fortify opinions that are fundamentals of the Law, I mean the Exodus from Egypt and its miracles, and the belief in repentance. (Guide, 3:41)21
Maimonides further explained the power that the Day of Atonement has on our consciousness when he elucidated the importance of the ritual of sending away the scapegoat to Azazel, which took place on the Day of Atonement in the Temple:
Since the goat that was sent forth into the wilderness served only to atone for great sins, so that there was no sin offering of the congregation that served as atonement in as great a measure as that goat, which was, as it were, the bearer of all the sins, it was not to receive at all such treatment as being slaughtered or burnt or sacrificed, but had to be removed to as great a distance as possible and sent forth unto a land that is cut off (Lev. 16:22), I mean one that was separated from habitation. No one has any doubt that sins are not bodies that may be transported from the back of one individual to that of another. But all these actions are parables, serving to bring forth a form in the soul, such that a passion for repentance should result: we have freed ourselves from our previous actions, cast them behind our backs, and removed them to an extreme distance. (Guide, 3:46)
The scapegoat ritual, according to the Rambam, is a parable acted out in dramatic form. The spectacle is meant to stir the souls of all who see it to do teshuvah. It dramatizes the idea that our sins have been taken far away and are no longer a part of our personalities. The psychological separation from our self-image as sinners is necessary for us truly to separate from sin. Belief in the possibility of change helps make change possible. The scapegoat ceremony is therefore not a substitute for teshuvah,22 but a facilitator of the process. This is also the deeper purpose of confessions and sin offerings: all these rituals inspire a sense that we can free ourselves from past patterns of behavior.
The goal of the Torah is the perfection of humankind. That, of course, raises the following questions: What is the perfect human being? What does human excellence consist of? This is an issue that preoccupied the ancient Greek philosophers, and the Rambam’s ideas about this were influenced by Athens.
According to Socrates, the “special excellence” of human beings is acquired through the intellect. Excellent moral characteristics are reached by applying thought and understanding. As a corollary, immoral behavior is caused primarily by ignorance. The identification of sin with intellectual error, which flows in turn from identifying moral excellence with correct understanding, goes against most people’s ethical intuitions.
Aristotle led the common-sense revolt against Socrates. According to Aristotle’s Ethics, it is possible for a man to know what is right and still do what is wrong. If Socrates were to see a doctor smoking, for example, he would immediately conclude that this is a bad doctor who obviously doesn’t know that smoking is harmful. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the man could be an excellent doctor. He could have a profound and detailed understanding of the damaging effects of nicotine on the body and nevertheless still smoke. According to Aristotle, learning does not necessarily affect a person’s will, emotions, or actions. Human personality is complex and multilayered. Bridging the gap between knowledge and its internalization requires an additional process. Just as we get our bodies in shape through training, so too, our personalities and emotions are also formed and developed through training. This training takes place through habituation to ethical actions.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Aristotle defined the perfect personality as the perfectly balanced one, in which all character traits are midway between the extremes; generosity is a balance between stinginess and extravagance, while courage is the proper balance between cowardice and foolhardiness.
The Rambam followed most of Aristotle’s views on this subject. Like Aristotle, he believed that our characters were our most important creations23 and that building character is a lifelong task. In his book Shmoneh Perakin (The Eight Chapters), Maimonides divided the human soul into five parts. Moral perfection is not located in the intellect but in the “appetitive part” of our personalities. Intellectual perfection does not necessarily give rise to moral behavior; these qualities reside in different parts of our souls.
Character traits are an inclination toward certain kinds of actions. A good indication of the presence of a certain quality in a person is how easy—or hard—it is for him to fulfill the kind of action that typically flows from that trait. For example, a generous person is not necessarily one who gives to charity each day, but rather one who, when called upon to give, can do so easily. A courageous man is not necessarily one who performs deeds of valor all the time, but one who can, without too much difficulty, act bravely when required.
The generous man is able to give and the courageous one to endanger himself not because these acts transcend natural inclinations, but rather because they are an expression of their characters. If a stingy man begins to train himself in giving, it will be hard for him at first, but after a few times something loosens up and it becomes a little easier and, after still more practice, giving will start to come naturally. When this happens, he knows that generosity has taken root in his soul. Character does not only generate action; action also forms character:24
Know that these excellences and flaws in character only take root in the soul through frequent repetition of the actions that come from those characteristics. If the actions are good ones then the result will be excellent character traits, and if the actions are bad then the result will be character defects. (Introduction to Avot, 236)
Just as an athlete trains the body in order to come closer to physical perfection, so too, one who aspires to ethical perfection must be constantly training the personality.
These ideas give us a new perspective on the mitzvot. If deeds form character, then the mitzvot, as a system of habitual actions, will have a profound and far-reaching effect on the personality of one who fulfills them. The Rambam’s conception of the soul is crucial to his understanding of the reasons for mitzvot. The purpose of most of the commandments is to form character, or in Rambam’s words, “in order that the character of each individual should tend toward excellence. Most of the commandments are designed to achieve this kind of moral perfection” (Guide, 3:54). The mitzvot are a system of actions whose repetition has a therapeutic and edifying effect on the personality.
Aristotle’s teachings in his Ethics turn out then to be key to interpreting the underlying reasons for many of the mitzvot.25 Let us look at a few examples of how Aristotelian psychology helps the Rambam to discover the inner meaning of some of the commandments. Recall first of all that for Aristotle, intellectual excellence does not guarantee ethical excellence. A person can fail to do what he knows to be right. Aristotle attributes this failure to ekrasia, or weakness of the will. Remember our smoking example: someone can be fully cognizant of the damage he is doing to his health by smoking yet still not be able to kick the habit.
Aristotle’s view suggests a different way of understanding human immorality. Most people who do bad things are not inherently cruel or evil; they lie, cheat, and commit adultery not because they are bad but because they are weak. Ethical failings signify weaknesses in the soul. If so, then the solution for people who know what is right but cannot do it is not to lecture them but to help them to strengthen their wills by training their characters. According to the Rambam, this is what large parts of the Torah are all about.
For example, practicing kashrut, the mitzvot commanding us to only eat certain types of food, has the effect, in the Rambam’s words, of “cutting down the desire for sensory gratification that can turn eating, drinking and pursuit of what is most pleasurable into an end in itself” (Guide, 3:35). The role of kashrut is to restrain the excesses of human behavior in everything that has to do with food. Kashrut creates mindfulness around the act of eating, compels us to forgo opportunities to satisfy our desire for food (if is not kosher) or to delay gratification (e.g., by waiting between eating meat and milk). Kashrut is a daily training in disciplining our desires. As the Rambam puts it: “The commandments and prohibitions of the Torah come to restrain all of our basic physical impulses” (Guide, 3:8).
Another example is the Rambam’s understanding of the mitzvot of first fruits and other offerings to the Temple. The Torah requires a person to give up some of his property, whether fruits or flocks or money, and give it over to God. Fulfilling these commands can have a profound effect. The act of giving some of what we have to God loosens attachment to property and cultivates generosity, making it easier to give, not just to God, but also to those around us.
The Torah’s explicitly ethical commandments, such as “Do not steal” and “Do not commit adultery,” are accompanied by another group of mitzvot that train human character. How should we categorize this latter group, whose purpose is to strengthen the will for good and restrain destructive desires? Are they mitzvot “between a person and his fellow man,” or are they rather between man and God? In a remarkable passage, the Rambam seems to create a new category for these commandments:
All the other groups deal with the relation between man and God. For every commandment, whether it be a prescription or a prohibition, whose purpose is to bring about the achievement of a certain moral quality, or of an opinion, or the rightness of actions, which only concerns the individual himself and his becoming more perfect, is called by them between man and God, even though in reality it may sometimes affect relations between man and his fellow man. (Guide, 3:35)
According to the Rambam, many mitzvot that are traditionally termed “between man and God” are better described as “between man and himself.” More than serving God, they strengthen our characters. Mitzvot between a person and himself are indirectly connected to the mitzvot between man and his fellow man, because without the capacity for self-restraint, ethical laws are virtually meaningless. A person who has undergone the training of keeping kashrut should be better able to withstand the temptations of lying, stealing, and adultery.
The mitzvot thus have a dual effect: they cultivate correct beliefs and they build character, contributing thereby to the perfection both of the soul and the body. Over the course of twenty-five chapters of the Guide, Maimonides reveals the deeper reasons for the commandments. His interpretations make the pursuit of human perfection central to the meaning of the mitzvot. Because of this, The Guide for the Perplexed has stood for centuries as the major alternative to the streams in Jewish thought which argued that the primary purpose of the mitzvot is to please God.