20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Humility

HUl11ility Bernard Steinberg T o contemporary ears, the term humility strikes a discordant note. To minds shaped by the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, or Friedrich Schleiermacher, humility connotes social paralysis, infantile dependency, and obsequious obedience. Educated within a tradition of humanist, liberal thought, the modern Jew may regard humility as a threat to some of his most cherished values: the dignity of man, freedom, and human efficacy. Many Jews, sensitive to psychological nuance, share Friedrich Nietzsche's view that the Christian ethos of the humble is but an insidious ruse of the weak-minded to gain power, a symptom of ressentiment. During moments of apologetic polemic, the modern jew may even brand humility a specifically "Christian virtue," an alien and alienating relic not to be mistaken for an authentic life-enhancing j ewish value. Humility, it is argued, is the logical offspring of a Christian faith that, defined by agape (unmerited love), presupposes human depravity, engenders psychological passivity, and implies social quietism. judaism, on the other hand, is imbued with an ethical activism demanded by a conception of din Oustice/law), assumes human adequacy, and entails responsible 430 HUMILITY action in the world. Apologetics aside, however, the fact remains that the concept of humility contains a worldview, an ethos of interpersonal relations , and a psychology, profoundly jewish, that may prove seminal for contemporary religious thought. The focus of our discussion will be an analysis of Moses Maimonides' examination of humility. Maimonides can serve as a useful paradigm, not only because of his preeminent position in jewish thought as philosopher and halakhist, but also in a more specific sense: in Maimonides' teachings the virtue of humility becomes a touchstone of j ewish faith~ humility becomes precisely that virtue which unites theological worldview and ethical action and, at the same time, distinguishes judaism from Aristotelian thought. Humility becomes then a jewish teaching par excellence. In this vein, the Maimonidean formulation enters modern jewish thought through the writings of Nachman Krochmal and Hermann Cohen and emerges in our own century as a central theme in the writings ofjoseph B. Soloveitchik, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Abraham joshua Heschel. Despite revolutionary changes in the intellectual climate, the motif of humility serves as a thread of continuity, however slender, from the Bible to the present. Humility is at once both a halakhic prescription (norm of behavior) and an anthropological description of the religious personality. Maimonides codifies the norm of humility in Hilkhot Deot, which appears in the Book of Knowledge of the Mishneh Torah. The first two chapters of Hilkhot Deot are based upon Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and hence formulate ethical norms in terms of the doctrine of the "middle path," the mean between extremes of behavior. In Maimonides' formulation, however, the virtue of humility constitutes an exception to the rule of the mean: "There are some traits to which it is forbidden merely to keep to the middle path. They should be shunned to the extreme. Such a disposition is pride. It is not enough that a man be simply modest: He should be utterly humble and unassuming. It is therefore written, concerning Moses, 'very modest' [Num. 12:3] and not just 'modest'. For this reason do the Rabbis of Blessed Memory advise 'Be very, very humble'" (MT Hil. Deot 2:3). Two points must be emphasized in this unusual formulation. First, the exception of humility is a normative principle, as opposed to a therapeutic technique. In other contexts, Maimonides (and Aristotle) counsel extreme behavior in order to compensate for and to cure temperamental deficiencies . For example, the sexually indulgent are counseled to adopt an ascetic regimen and to abstain from sexual relations in order to curb sexual appetite and to introduce harmony within an imbalanced personality. Nevertheless, HUMILITY 431 asceticism and sexual abstinence are not considered the ethical norm, but rather are considered necessary and temporary correctives. In the case of humility, however, the norm itself is extreme. Second, the norm of humility is absolute. Commenting on the Mishnaic dictum, "Be exceedingly humble" (Pirkei Avot 4:4), Maimonides rejects the opinion of the talmudic sage Rava, who posits an extreme norm, and upholds the view of Rabbi Nal)man bar Yi?l)ak, who posits an absolute standard . In other words, the norm of humility differs in quality, not quantity, from the scale of the mean. This difference of kind hinges on the epistemological basis, the very rational...