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Appendix II New Worlds of Power Maimonides, John Coltrane, and Rabbi Akiva Leo Strauss concludes his account of the three kinds of progress found in Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed—intrabiblical progress, progress beyond the Bible, and progress beyond the sages and Onqelos—with the following obscure remark: “Maimonides’ link with the Torah is, to begin with, an iron bond; it gradually becomes a fine thread. But however far what one may call his intellectualization may go, it always remains the intellectualization of the Torah.”1 Strauss doesn’t explain what he means. He simply moves on and treats a different subject. But we can render his remark intelligible by examining two concepts that Maimonides develops in the Guide: “the doctrine of attributes” and “the Divine attribute of intellect.” The Torah tells us that “God is one.” However, it also describes God in anthropomorphic terms. Since anthropomorphic terms refer to physical bodies and physical bodies are compounds—comprising several elements— we are left to wonder about the meaning of God’s “oneness.” According to Maimonides’s doctrine of attributes, the Bible uses physical terms to describe God because it is impossible for most people to comprehend a completely abstract reality.2 The words “God’s attributes” are not to be taken literally. Properly understood, they indicate that God does not possess any imperfections. God is called “mighty” in the Torah because He is not weak, He is called “wise” because he is not ignorant, and so on. Maimonides’s doctrine of attributes thus teaches by way of implication God’s perfection. And because He is perfect, He is absolutely incomparable, absolutely unique, One. This doctrine of attributes is obviously not taught in the Torah. It is a philosophical doctrine that was discovered long after the time of Moses. But the virtue of the doctrine is that it enables Maimonides to overcome 193 194 Appendix II the Torah’s anthropomorphisms while remaining bound to its language. The doctrine of attributes “remains the intellectualization of the Torah.” “The Divine attribute of intellect” likewise expands upon the principle of God’s oneness. Maimonides teaches that “He is the intellect as well as the intellectually cognizing subject and the intellectually cognized object,” meaning that God is always knowing Himself and is one with His knowledge.3 The three aspects of God’s knowing are, however, only three in speech because in God the attribute of intellect is a perfect unity. “God is one” means in this context that God is a divinely simple and unified Mind. The Divine attribute of intellect is not taught in the Torah. Like the “doctrine of attributes,” it too is a philosophical idea that was only discovered long after the time of Moses. But the Divine attribute of intellect “remains the intellectualization of the Torah,” for it too remains connected to the biblical root of God’s oneness.4 By examining the doctrine of attributes and the Divine attribute of intellect, we see that no matter how far Maimonides goes with his highly abstract interpretations, he remains connected to the profound simplicity of the original text. This is what Strauss means when he refers to Maimonides’s “intellectualization of the Torah.” And while Strauss’s essay is devoted to explicating the educational, philosophical, and implicitly political dimensions of the Guide, his remark regarding Maimonides’s “intellectualization of the Torah” points in a different direction, to the creative dimension of Maimonides’s activity. Even if Strauss is right and Maimonides is at bottom a philosopher, Maimonides did not, like Strauss, rest content simply to contemplate the Jewish tradition, especially the tradition’s literary-spiritual dimension; he radically transformed it. And when Maimonides’s biblical interpretations are viewed from within the Jewish tradition, he does not appear as a philosopher, but as a creator, or shaper, of that tradition.5 Maimonides’s ideal Jew might be a religiously observant philosopher, but his interpretive activity in which he placed philosophers at the peak of the tradition was radically transformative. Maimonides’s creative approach to the Jewish tradition is not uniquely his own or even uniquely Jewish, of course. One finds similar approaches in other creative traditions. One particularly interesting and helpful example comes from the world of music. The tenor and soprano saxophone player, John Coltrane (1926–1967), is a towering figure in the world of twentieth-century American jazz. In the early 1960s, Coltrane made music that was technically dazzling, emotionally moving, and spiritually stimulating, a potent combination that, not...

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