Maimonides and the god of the perplexed
The great Jewish thinker laid the moral foundations of Judaism. Israel's regime and their enemies ought to read him...
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024). Join the journey!
Next Thursday: Inside the monasteries
GOD PROMISED the Jews a land of their own as the reward for their fealty to Mosaic law.
The Promised Land would be theirs if they obeyed Yahweh.
That was the message of Moses, the greatest Jewish prophet and transmitter of God’s laws.
Alas, the promise wasn’t clear. Was God offering an earthly or heavenly reward? Was the Promised Land a strip of land or a metaphor for a sacred place, possibly beyond death?
Early Jewish texts offer us little guidance. They say nothing about the afterlife. Nor is Jewish doctrine clear on the fate of the soul after death – and what it does say, as we have seen, is terrifyingly inconclusive.
The human side of the Jews’ covenant with God seemed unfathomable, inscrutable, a perennial mystery. That uncertainty bound rather than severed the Jews’ obedience to Moses’ mysterious laws.
Orthodox Jews thus read their sacred texts as a catalogue of commandments that demand complete loyalty to the word of Yahweh, even if his side of the bargain isn’t clear or assured.
They scour their Talmudic scrolls for hints, signs of Yahweh’s intentions, whose word they take literally and obey to the letter.
—
By the medieval era, those laws would be applied to every aspect of Jewish life. The Talmud decreed how every Jew should eat, drink, cleanse their bodies, marry, make love, socialise, do business, raise their children: in sum, how to live and how to die.
And yet surely the covenant required more of a Jew than rote learning and loyalty by numbers? Was ritual obedience to God’s law what Moses intended?
At the very least, shouldn’t the Jews make themselves worthy of being chosen by him, through action? Should they not strive to enact God’s will? Were they not bound to purify their souls in recognition of God’s grace?
Those were a few of the torrents of questions that perplexed a brilliant young Jewish doctor born and raised in Córdoba, who had once served as Saladin’s personal physician.
His name was Moses ben Maimon but he became known to the world as Maimonides (1138–1204). His exhaustive questioning of what it meant to be a Jew produced the greatest philosophy of religion in the Middle Ages, and probably of all time.
—
Though a medical doctor, Maimonides recognised the limits of science in explaining matters of faith.
Humankind, he believed, needed less surgical and more spiritual care if they were to lead a worthy life: that is, less unthinking obedience to the word of God and more active engagement with what God was saying.
There were clear meanings and feelings behind God’s exhortations to the Israelites, Maimonides insisted.
‘[B]ear in mind that by “faith” we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul,’ he wrote.
The apparent disconnect he saw between the core principles of Jewish belief and the ritualised enactment of God’s commands profoundly disturbed him:
‘If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them.’
—
Maimonides felt this in his guts, and he devoted his work to showing how one should interpret Jewish laws: not unthinkingly or unfeelingly, but with sincerity, love and devotion.
He drew up thirteen guiding principles, or beliefs, that every Jew should live by:
They should believe in the existence of God, the absolute unity of God, the incorporeality of God, the eternity of God, that God alone is to be worshipped, that God communicates to prophets, that Moses is the greatest prophet, that the Torah was given by God, that the Torah is immutable, that there is divine providence, that there is divine punishment and reward, that there will be a Messiah, that the dead will be resurrected.
Maimonides intended these thirteen precepts to form an integral part of Jewish life, not simply to be honoured in the abstract.
Consider, for example, how he thought the Jewish people should apply his principle that God alone be worshipped in their daily lives: ‘To love God’ (Deuteronomy 6:5) was the highest aspiration of the Jewish people, Maimonides believed.
And the greatest demonstration of the love of God was to show charity. ‘Nothing was more sacred or pleasing to God than bestowing generosity on the poor,’ he wrote, devising eight stages or ‘levels of giving’.
Charity should be given cheerfully for its own sake, not in a spirit of vanity or ‘haughtiness’ or with ‘a brusque or downcast demeanour’, as the historian Simon Schama explains.
The true aim of charity, Maimonides believed, was to teach the recipient how to become self-reliant. That was one way of showing love for God.
—
Maimonides loathed the rote learning of the sacred texts and the unthinking application of the laws of God.
Mechanical repetition tended to reduce the meaning and practice of Judaism to an insincere ritual. It demeaned the mystical relationship between Yahweh and the Jews, between the chooser and the chosen.
According to Maimonides, the greatest obstacle to the love of God was the mistaken belief that ‘the only way to remain true to the Bible was to interpret it literally’.
Those who read the sacred texts to the letter but absorbed none of their spirit missed the point of faith.
The literal reading of the word of God amounted to idolatry, Maimonides believed. It reduced God’s laws to a screed of commands and the prophet Moses to the status of a mere messenger.
This, he considered sacrilege. Maimonides could not abide anything that diminished Moses and the lesser Hebrew prophets, all of whom he deemed superior to mere philosophers (like him) by virtue of their supreme faculties of perception, both rational and imaginative. Prophecy, he wrote, was the ‘highest degree and greatest perfection man can attain’.
The minds of the Jewish prophets were touched by the divine, Maimonides believed, illuminated as if by lightning.
Hence Moses lived in eternal daylight, he recounted in The Guide for the Perplexed, his greatest philosophical work:
‘We are like someone in a very dark night over whom lightning flashes . . . Among us there is one [Moses] for whom the lightning flashes time and time again, so that he is always, as it were, in unceasing light. Thus night appears to him as day . . .’
Each ‘lightning flash’ illuminated Moses’ mind with ‘a more penetrating grasp of metaphysical reality’.
In lesser prophets the flashes came but once a night, or at longer intervals. Most people lived in darkness, their minds unlit by a single flash.
Having fled the persecution of the Jews in Córdoba (by the victorious Almohad caliphate), in 1166 Maimonides arrived in Cairo.
There he completed his masterpiece, the Mishneh Torah, in which he showed that all Jewish laws served a rational purpose, and nothing was written ‘for the sake of mere obedience’. On the contrary, the laws were supposed to improve one’s body and soul by offering knowledge of how to live a worthy life.
The soul, like the body, was prone to sickness, Maimonides taught – he was a medical doctor, after all – and the acquisition of wisdom would heal the sickness.
He became a ‘doctor of the soul’.
One of his favourite psalms was 19:8: ‘The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.’
How should humankind obey a law that restored the soul? In the first place, human societies must shun the use of violence, Maimonides advised, and behave in the interests of their common welfare.
He taught that ‘good morals must produce a good social state’. How?
Maimonides proposed two mutually beneficial ‘perfections’ of human aspiration that would enhance individual and social harmony: the ‘wellbeing’ of the body and the ‘wellbeing’ of the mind or soul.
Only after our bodies were assured food, shelter, cleanliness, medical care and so on (‘the first perfection’) were we able to attend to the needs of our minds or souls – education, charity, usefulness, faith and so on (‘the second perfection’).
‘The second perfection of man consists in his becoming an actually intelligent being; i.e., he knows about the things in existence all that a person perfectly developed is capable of knowing,’ wrote Maimonides.
Both ‘perfections’ depended on social cooperation, since one person couldn’t lead a fulfilling life without help from his or her family, friends, community and government. It was the job of government, Maimonides believed, to fulfil the first perfection: to ensure that all people had access to food, shelter and medical care.
Only then would they be fit – in the sense of being physically able – to receive an education, to work and to practise their faith as contented members of a social unit (the second perfection). If that strikes you as self-evident, remember that Maimonides published his Guide for the Perplexed in 1190.
Wellbeing gurus who think wellness is a modern phenomenon (as well as those who claim there is no such thing as ‘society’) might pause to read his wisdom.
—
Maimonides recognised that nobody was perfect.
Curing a ‘sick soul’ required changes in human behaviour: above all, self-restraint and moderation in all things.
Maimonides championed the ‘Golden Mean’, the moderate path between extremes that pulsed through the work of the greatest thinkers, from Confucius to Democritus, Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius.
In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides wrote: ‘The right way is the mean in every one of a person’s character traits.’
And those traits could be taught, inculcated in the child.
The human mind at birth was a tabula rasa, a blank slate, he taught - 450 years before the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) was credited with the idea.
A human being was not born virtuous or vicious, Maimonides insisted, contradicting the Christian idea of ‘Original Sin’. Virtues and vices were acquired by the frequent repetition of good or wicked habits, taught by parental influence, education and culture – or the lack of them.
‘[T]he perfect man needs to inspect his moral habits continually, weigh his actions, and reflect upon the state of his soul every single day,’ he advised.
—
Nurture was paramount: education and acculturation were sown in the seedbed of the newborn mind, hopefully to produce a moral and socially useful human:
‘[A]ll humans are born with basically the same moral potential and the same absence of fully formed character traits. This being the case, moral qualities . . . can be [acquired] if we are willing to work at it, especially if we avail ourselves of the guidance of the wise, the “physicians of the souls”.’
There were rare human exceptions, he thought, who were predisposed by nature to faith. And there were inexplicable, esoteric ideas embedded in the holy texts, he detected, that addressed the mystical relationship between God and the universe and so were beyond reason – ideas that profoundly influenced the Kabbalists, the Jewish mystics whose interpretations of the Torah appeared in a collection of writings called the Zohar, first published in 1240.
—
Maimonides believed that heavenly bodies – planets, moons, stars – were also ‘endowed with a soul’.
Conceding that the idea seemed ‘unintelligible or even objectionable’, he reasoned that planets and moons were ensouled because they appeared to move in an incessant circular fashion, without beginning or end.
He decided that Aristotle’s idea of the ‘unmoved first mover’ explained this planetary movement: ‘The spherical bodies have life, possess a soul by which they move spontaneously; they have no properties by which they could at any time come to a state of rest.’
The planetary movements were bound by a strange, unidentifiable force, he observed, 300 years before Nicolaus Copernicus discovered the heliotropic solar system and 450 years before Sir Isaac Newton explained universal gravitation.
Finding no source or ‘engine’ for the circular motion of the spheres, Maimonides concluded that an intelligent being, or soul, must be propelling them: ‘The spheres must have a soul, for only animate beings can move freely.’
This took him back to Aristotle’s Metaphysics: the intellect is the source of an idea, but the force that moved us towards that idea was desire. ‘It is only when a desire arises for the thing imagined,’ Maimonides wrote, ‘that we move in order to obtain it.’
Here, then, was Maimonides’ case for the existence of God:
‘We have thus shown that both the soul, the principle of motion, and the intellect, the source of the ideas, would not produce motion without the existence of a desire for the object of which an idea has been formed. It follows that the heavenly sphere must have a desire for the ideal which it has comprehended, and that ideal, for which it has a desire, is God . . .!’
With those words, Maimonides made one of the earliest attempts to reconcile science and religion, demonstrating Schama’s dictum that ‘an enquiry into the nature of understanding and knowledge was not at war with faith but, on the contrary, its indispensable condition’.
—
Maimonides’ works survived the bonfire of Jewish thought ignited during his lifetime in France, and later in Spain.
In 1241, a jury at the University of Paris decided the Talmud was blasphemous. A year later more than 10,000 scrolls were seized and burned in Paris.
In 1263 the Spanish king, James I of Aragon, threatened to burn thousands of Talmudic scrolls, as well as Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, unless passages deemed insulting to Christians were excised.
The mass incineration of the holiest texts in Judaism made Maimonides’ point in a tragic way: the text is not enough. The faithful must remember, believe in and live according to their sacred principles, even if the words enforcing those laws no longer existed or could not be found.
Faith lived in the memory, and Jewish fidelity to their faith owed so much to the mind of Maimonides and his philosophy - above all, to act charitably and do no violence.
Next Thursday, 21st August 2025: Inside the monasteries
Selected sources and further reading:
Barash. D.P. (20 March 2023) ‘Stuck with the Soul’, Aeon.
Frank, D.H. (ed.) (1993) A People Apart: Chosenness and Ritual in Jewish Philosophical Thought, Albany NY: SUNY Press.
Inglis, J. (ed.) (2013) Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition, London: Routledge.
Kreisel, H. (2015) ‘Sage and Prophet in the Thought of Maimonides and the Jewish Philosophers of Provence’, in Judaism As Philosophy: Studies in Maimonides and the Medieval Jewish Philosophers of Provence, Boston: Academic Studies Press.
Maimonides, M. ‘Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity, 10:7–14’, Mishneh Torah, Chabad.org.
Maimonides, M. (2017) The Guide for the Perplexed, St Lucie FL: The Ephesians Four Group.
Schama, S. (2013) The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words (1000 BCE – 1492), London: The Bodley Head.
Seeskin, K. ‘Maimonides’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Twersky, I. (ed.) (1972) A Maimonides Reader, Springfield NJ: Behrman House.