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.

No, I don’t mean in terms of the sanctity of human life, that’s another issue. What I mean, is how important are humans to other humans? How important is it to live with other people? Or is going it alone a viable alternative?
In his play, No Exit, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”