There appears to be no end to the publication of books about Maimonides. This is probably a reflection of the fact that Maimonides is one of the few Jewish thinkers whose stamp is such that Judaism would look entirely different without him. Without Maimonides it is likely that there would be no Jewish orthodoxy; without him it is likely that there would be no Shulḥan Arukh; without him it might not be possible to find a place within Judaism for science and philosophy; without him Kabbalah might have overwhelmed Judaism, and, conversely, it is likely that without the creative reaction that his rationalism provoked, Kabbalah might have remained a body of esoteric doctrines known only to a coterie of initiates; without the example of Maimonides, it is likely that contemporary Judaism would be even more particularist than it is; and, finally, without Maimonides it would be hard to imagine how Zionism could be seen as the first flowering of the messianic redemption. This may be the reason that while I know of no one today who thinks of herself or himself as a Sa'adian, I know plenty of people who think of themselves as Maimonideans.
With the plethora of books available about Rambam, is there really room for another? If the book is written by Moshe Halbertal, the answer is a resounding yes. This remarkable book, elegantly translated by the late Joel Linsider, offers much, both to the “professional” student of Maimonides and to the nonprofessional reader. If you are going to read only one book about Maimonides, this is the book to read. Halbertal's Maimonides is not “just” an introduction, but is also a readable summary of wide-ranging scholarship that draws meaningful conclusions, and a useful guide to further reading.
Halbertal divides the book into eight chapters and a conclusion. A glance at the structure of the book says a lot about why it is so unusual and so unusually valuable. The first chapter is about the man Moses (ben Maimon); it is a remarkable piece of biographical writing. Reading between the lines of his works, and especially his letters, Halbertal draws a sensitive and convincing picture of Maimonides as an exceedingly complex individual: polemical in his youth, harsh in his criticism, arrogant in his disdain for most of humanity and at the same time sensitive, passionate, warmly devoted to family and community. There follow two chapters on the Commentary on the Mishnah and on the Book of Commandments. The next three chapters all deal with the Mishneh Torah (100 pages out of 370). Two chapters on the Guide of the Perplexed (60 pages) and a conclusion round out the book.
Mishneh Torah is thus placed at the center of the book, with the Commentary on the Mishnah and the Book of Commandments leading up to it, and the Guide, in effect, as a consequence of it.
Structuring a book about Maimonides in this fashion draws attention to an often ignored biographical fact. Maimonides was born in 1138 and, despite a life of considerable travail, managed to complete the first comprehensive commentary on the entire Mishnah by the end of his thirtieth year. The following decade was spent intensively on the Book of Commandments and the Mishneh Torah. Barely stopping for a breath, as it were, in a life which continued to be marked by upheavals, Maimonides then devoted roughly a decade, busy with the cares of profession, family, and community, to composing the Guide, which he completed around 1191. Thus, in his twenties he worked on the Commentary on the Mishnah, in his thirties on the Book of Commandments and Mishneh Torah, and his forties on the Guide. And what about the last decade and one half of his life (he died in 1204, at the age of 66)? So far as we he know, he stopped writing philosophy. This may have been a function of infirmity (about which he complains in many of his letters), the cares of professional responsibilities (as he writes in his famous letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon), or perhaps he had said all he had to say, or could say, or had the strength to say on philosophical issues. Or, there may be another reason, as I will suggest below.
My wife likes to remind me, when I teach Maimonides: “remember to tell them that he was also a rabbi.” It one of the many great strengths of Halbertal's Maimonides (as is evident from his table of contents) that he focuses the book on Maimonides's rabbinical career. But, of course, Maimonides was no ordinary rabbi, and as Halbertal continues to remind us implicitly, the Guide of the Perplexed was written as part of Maimonides's rabbinic career. It is important to emphasize this, since many fine scholarly interpreters of Maimonides, under the influence of Shlomo Pines and Leo Strauss, focus their attention on the Guide, treating the Mishneh Torah as at best secondary to Maimonides's life and self-understanding. So, what sort of rabbi was Maimonides? He was a rabbi who sought to ground the basis of religious experience in the wisdom in the natural order, not in miraculous deviations from it (128). Philosophy in and of itself is surely important, but from a Jewish perspective, “the life of philosophical contemplation has a redemptive religious dimension” (162). Further: “…by integrating the philosophical ethos into a halakhic code, he sought to bring about a transformation unprecedented in Jewish history…” (163). From this it follows (although Halbertal does not make the point explicitly) that the Guide ought to be read as a kind of halakhic responsum.
Halbertal makes his points about the philosophical import of the Mishneh Torah elegantly and convincingly, but they have surely been made before. What makes his discussion of the Mishneh Torah exciting and important is his argument that the work is not simply a representation of Halakhah, but actually the Halakhah itself (167). It is not, as it is ordinarily taken to be, a brilliant summation of earlier literature, but a replacement for that literature (184). The Mishneh Torah is thus meant to reshape and transform the traditional Jewish curriculum (195).
Halbertal shows (to my mind convincingly) that Maimonides hoped that the Mishneh Torah would achieve the canonical status of the Mishnah and of the Talmud. Indeed, if Halbertal is right, then Maimonides hoped for something more: that his work would (as he notoriously put it at the end of his Introduction to the Mishneh Torah) not simply become another link in the chain of tradition, but would replace that tradition altogether, rendering all books written between the Torah of Moses and the Mishneh Torah of Moses Maimonides obsolete.
Halbertal is not shy about drawing out the implications of his interpretation, namely:
(1) The talmudic give and take has no inherent value…
(2) The conclusions of talmudic give and take are presented in Mishneh Torah in a clear and accomplished manner and … become Halakhah itself.
(3) Reference to Mishneh Torah will be all that is needed, at least in the vast majority of cases, to derive practical Halakhah without recourse to any of the earlier halakhic literature.
(4) The matters worthy in their own right of constant reflection are “the Account of Creation” (Genesis 1) and “the Account of the Chariot” (Ezekiel), that is, physics and metaphysics, respectively (186–187).
Attributing these views to Maimonides helps us to understand the place of the Guide in Maimonides's life's work. Integrating philosophy into the heart of the Jewish tradition (and the Guide, if nothing else, is a philosophical midrash on the Bible) is part of the project of turning the Mishneh Torah from a supremely well-organized collection of halakhot into the Halakhah itself, since only thus is Halakhah complete. Halbertal does not make this point explicitly, but it was suggested to me by his book and I have a hard time believing that he would not accept it. It also helps us to understand why Maimonides stopped writing philosophy in the last decade of his life: he was immersed in an attempt to have the Mishneh Torah accepted as widely as possible, so as to transform it from a yet another halakhic work (however brilliant) to the Halakhah itself.
Halbertal's discussion of the Guide itself is exceptionally clear and informed by his wide reading in the extensive scholarly literature on the book. He introduces the reader to four different ways of reading the Guide: skeptical (basically nothing can be known about God, and, if human immortality depends upon such knowledge, then life after death is impossible), mystical (philosophy is a tool for achieving mystical illumination and experience), philosophical (Judaism must be reinterpreted in naturalistic terms), and conservative (philosophy supports traditional Jewish beliefs). Each of these readings has its enthusiastic partisans. Nothing in these chapters will be unfamiliar to seasoned students of the Guide, but even such readers will find great pleasure in Halbertal's lucid account of the main points of the book, as understood through the various approaches. Moshe Halbertal's sympathetic presentation of these interpretations may well help reduce some of the partisanship with which Maimonides is often presented.
To repeat: if you are going to read only one book about Maimonides, make it Moshe Halbertal's stunning Maimonides. Even if you have read many other books by and about Maimonides, you have much to learn here.
