by Rabbi Yisrael Rutman

Maimonides was Jewish.

This will no doubt come as a surprise to 43 percent of our readers, since according to the new Pew survey on religion that is the number of American Jews who do not know that salient fact about Maimonides.

For the record, Moses Maimonides was a Medieval sage (d. 1207) of towering significance in Jewish tradition. His works on Jewish law, philosophy, ethics and history are landmarks which have been studied intensively and used as the basis of innumerable rulings since he authored them in the 12th century.

What does it mean that so many Jews are ignorant of Maimonides? Obviously, it reflects the appallingly low level of Jewish literacy. It’s something like an average American not knowing who Abraham Lincoln was, or a Chinese who can’t give you directions to The Great Wall. But so what? What difference does it make whether you know about Maimonides or not?

The answer is that it is more than a gap in knowledge, an indication of what happens when people don’t read books. It is more significant than ignorance about this or that historical figure. As someone has observed, everyone is ignorant about many things. Especially in the era in which we live, in which the explosion of knowledge about so many things makes it impossible for anyone to master more than a small corner in the library of any major university. An astronomer, for example, though an expert on supernovae, is likely to be ignorant of cardiology, Sanskrit, Mozart, cricket, carpentry, and lepidoptery, as well as Maimonides. Yet, we would not think to classify him as an ignorant person. Why? Because none of those other areas of knowledge are necessary either to his own field of expertise or to his ability to function in general as a citizen, parent, friend or member of a social network.

But a Jew who shrugs at the name Maimonides is missing an area of knowledge which does have bearing on his own life. That is because, among other things, Maimonides, by explaining the fundamentals of Judaism and codifying all of the Torah and Talmud, offered an authoritative guide for everyday life for every Jew.

It is true, of course, that one may choose not to live by this code of law which comprises everything from the blessings on wakening in the morning to the blessing on blowing the shofar, to the laws of brit milah (circumcision) and the proper mode of Jewish burial. But someone who rejects them out of hand without investigation is, I would suggest, guilty of an unthinking secularity. That secularity which dismisses religion out of hand as obsolete, disproved and, thanks to radical Islam, a menace to civilization. Judaism, which provided much of the basis of Western civilization (starting with the Ten Commandments) deserves more serious consideration.

Some of the issues addressed in his monumental philosophical work, Guide to the Perplexed, are surprisingly relevant to the contemporary perplexities. Anyone who is unhappy with a fundamentalist approach to sacred texts, especially when used to justify violent fanaticism, would be interested to know that a major section of the Guide is devoted to refuting anthropomorphism. Maimonides explains that it is incorrect to take the references to God’s “mighty arm and outstretched hand,” for instance, literally to mean that He is a corporeal being. On the contrary, as Maimonides posits and mainstream Judaism affirms, God has no physical body. And so when the Torah says that the elders saw God at Sinai, it does not mean that literally, but that they reached a level of prophetic clarity such that they could say they “saw” him, but only in the sense that one “sees” the solution to a problem. Similarly, as the Talmud makes clear, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was never taken literally in Jewish tradition. While this does not mean that the Torah narrative is merely allegorical—there is no question about the historical fact of the miraculous Exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah at Sinai—it does offer a far more sophisticated approach to Scripture than your rank-and-file Al Queidaist would be comfortable with.

The approach is anything but simplistic. Indeed, in Maimonides system of thought, thought is paramount; and intellectual and spiritual perfection go hand-in-hand, the latter being unattainable without the former.

Yet, for all his intellectualism, Maimonides was no elitist. He wrote for the Jewish people as a whole, not just for the scholarly few. His Yad HaChazakah sets forth the entire Jewish legal system in a concise style whose purpose was to make the essential teachings of the vast and intricate discussions of the Talmud accessible to the average person. His Introduction to the Mishnah aimed at dispelling confusion about the Oral Law by tracing the historical roots of Judaism, generation-by-generation, revealing the Oral Law as an unbroken tradition from Sinai concomitant with the Written Law. The Guide was written for a generation of Jews who were living (along with everybody else) under the influence of Aristotelian thought, and offered a philosophical approach to Judaism that could speak to them.

In his time, Maimonides was a uniquely inspirational figure. His Letter to Teiman (Yemen), in which he explained the historical roots of anti-Semitism and the fundamental beliefs of Judaism, gave such comfort to the persecuted Jews of that country that they included his name in the Kaddish prayer. It is said that from Moses (of the Exodus) to Moses (Maimonides) there has been none like them.

It is a tragedy of the times we live in that the Maimonides who dedicated his great genius to bringing a knowledge-based faith to the Jewish people should today be utterly unknown to so many Jews. We can hope, though, that the Pew survey, by calling attention to the situation, will inspire some of that 43 percent to find out not only who Maimonides was, but what Maimonides means for all of us.

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