Converts, Heretics, and Lepers: Maimonides and the Outsider

Introduction

1 Introduction O ver the course of my lengthy, and often interrupted, intellectual journeys I have repeatedly returned to Moses Maimonides and his rich corpus of writings, seeking an anchor for my Judaism . Beginning in the yeshivah, or traditional rabbinical academy, and through numerous detours eventually landing me within the academy, every genre of his thought—be it law, Talmud, exegesis, or philosophy—spoke to me as no other Jewish thinker could. Maimonides had assorted audiences in mind when crafting such works as his groundbreaking code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, or when articulating his lifelong struggle to reconcile the faith into which he was born, and to which he would remain unflinchingly loyal, with equally cherished reason in the Guide of the Perplexed. In many ways these audiences are reflected in the various stages through which my own journey has passed from the yeshivah to the academy. The constituents of a public readership mirror the various stages reached by an evolving reader, whose repeated turns to a worthy text draw him into greater depths of meaning. The text increasingly discloses itself as the reader liberates himself from his social and literalist constraints. When Maimonides took his prized student Joseph aside for private instruction, he took all his prospective readers aside for the very same purpose. When he abandoned his earlier project to “explain all the difficult passages in the Midrashim” (GP Intro., 9), he gave up any attempt to write for the public at large. His experiment with different literary forms ended in frustration, amounting to the simple exchange of one parable for another and defeating the goals he had set for himself of clarifying , explaining, and ultimately resolving doubt and confusion. Straightforward explication would have offended the very principles that underlie the rabbinic literary form of midrash, since the general public would not find its message palatable. Jewish law, or halakhah, had also imposed severe restrictions on the public teaching of the esoteric material that is the subject matter of the Guide (m. Hagigah 2:1), limiting Maimonides’ options even further. He was left with no choice but to both disclose and conceal at the same time.1 Those who do “not find impossibilities hard to accept” (GP Intro., 10) could be comfortably ignored since they already understood midrash and contentedly operated in a world of the absurd. Rabbinic authority sculpted their world, and so there was never a clash between midrash and science that required any reconciliation. For them, if the prophet heard God then God has a larynx and vocal chords. God is what the prophet describes or sees. There is no standard outside of the text by which to judge prophetic language, and so the prophet shapes the world and God and bequeaths them to an undiscriminating posterity. Maimonides had an entirely different posterity in mind when he chose the format of the Guide to preserve his esoteric teachings. Aside from the obvious philosophical and rabbinic proficiency he expected of his intended readers, the most essential qualifications he anticipated as an entitlement to read his work were angst and confusion caused by “the externals of the Law” (ibid., 5). He was not interested in generating that angst; nor, I believe, was he interested in altogether quelling it. Without the Guide the Jew who pledged his allegiance to Torah and sophia could only hold on to both by leading an anxiety-ridden life that “would not cease to suffer from heartache and great perplexity” (ibid., 6).2 The tension between the two would have to be so overpowering as to demand the surrender of one of them; the choice would be determined by the greater of the pull of either intellectual honesty or religious conformity. Maimonides offered to transform these opposing pulls from repellent forces into convergent ones by attuning those “distressed” seekers to the literary genre of metaphor. Once prophetic language was understood to be equivocal and its narratives parabolic, a new dimension would 2 ■ Converts, Heretics, and Lepers open up in which the religious and philosophical flourish. Metaphor was the remedy to restore a bifurcated existence into a holistic one in which religion , law, and science meld into one seamless truth. Maimonides cautioned his readers, however, that the process of attunement to the figurative nuances of prophetic and rabbinic language would itself entail its own angst. He warned them to be realistic in their expectations, for...