THE MAIMONIDES OF THE ASHKENAZIM In assessing contemporary discussions of Maimonides some important basic facts should be understood: Maimonides

represented in his time a dual tendency in traditional Sephardic culture to affirm the values and organic links in the Talmudic tradition while reaching out, during a very creative time in Arab-Islamic history, to new trends and ideas. In medieval Islamic civilization a valiant attempt was made to integrate monotheistic religion with the scientific and philosophical legacy of Greece and Rome. Maimonides, along with the Muslim thinker and jurist Averroes Ibn Rushd, is perhaps the most important figure in Andalusia to present this heady synthesis which is best understood as Religious Humanism. According to my teacher Rabbi Jose Faur, the most important interpreter of Maimonides working today, Maimonides was very careful to affirm the chain of rabbinic tradition. Maimonides readings of the rabbinic canon were exacting and precise. He was a scholar who took great care in contrast to his Ashkenazi antagonists to ensure that the text he was expounding was completely authentic. On the other hand, along with his critical academic approach towards an accurate formulation of the traditional texts there was a searching and expansive foray into ideas that some Jewish authorities would see as unJewish. It would not take long for Maimonides radical views to come under attack from the North. Ashkenazi rabbis were disturbed not only by the integration of Greek science and philosophy into the framework of Judaic thought, but by the boldness and precision with which Maimonides articulated the Jewish legal tradition. So there is the famous polemic of the Ashkenazi rabbis against not only his philosophical masterwork Guide of the Perplexed (Arabic,

Dalalat al-Hairin), but also the first book in the 14-volume legal code, the Mishneh Torah, the Book of Knowledge, Sefer ha-Madda. Less wellknown is the battle waged more generally by the Ashkenazim of the Tosafist school against the Mishneh Torah as a whole. The idea of a comprehensive code of Jewish law, with its Aristotelian architecture, was a threat to the Ashkenazim who created a leadership cadre that demanded the supreme and unquestioned authority of the rabbi, and the absolute subservience of the layperson to that authority. Jewish law was the domain of experts and Maimonides had the arrogance and temerity to lay out in fairly simple and elegant Hebrew all the laws where any layperson could have access to them. So it is not just Maimonides purported Gentile tendencies that are problematic for the Ashkenazim, it is also his compulsion to make Judaism transparent and user-friendly for each and every Jew. The obscurantism and exclusivity of the Ashkenazi rabbis was emphatically rejected in his work. And so, the Ashkenazim and their Sephardi disciples anathematized Maimonides by placing what they considered to be his objectionable works under a formal legal ban. Over time this rejection better known as The Maimonidean Controversy has been transformed as has the Ashkenazi view of Maimonides, leading to serious complications in accurately assessing the great sages legacy. Menachem Kellner is a scholar who has written apologetically about Maimonides in his many books and articles. Here is a fairly representative passage from his 2006 book Maimonides Confrontation with Mysticism: The Jewish world in which Maimonides lived was uncongenial to the austere, abstract, demanding vision of Torah which he preached. Evidence

from a wide variety of sources shows that Jews in Maimonides day common folk and scholars alike accepted astrology, the magical use of divine names, appeals to angels, etc. Kellner all-too-willingly concedes that Maimonides approach was uncommon in his own day and by extension remains outside the general parameters of Judaism as it is lived by ordinary Jews. This concession maintains that even if Maimonides articulated a robust and deeply learned Judaism, he was an elitist whose views were outside basic Jewish norms. The complexity of this approach leads us to better understand Kellners discussion of Micah Goodmans popular Hebrew book on the Guide which has become a surprise best-seller in Israel. The two things left unmentioned in the review are the profound influence of the Maimonidean Controversy and its nefarious legacy on what is now an Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish world, and the profound transformation over the past few decades of Jewish intellectualism to reflect the important influence of the Hebrew University professor Moshe Idel. Goodmans book reflects the Idel-inspired trend to ascribe esoteric and mystical tendencies to Maimonides and to mainstream Jewish thought in general. In this new, and strikingly Israeli, context the standard paradigms of academic Jewish study since the time of the Haskalah have shifted. The Orthodox anti-Maimonidean norms have returned to the center of the discussion. Maimonides authentic thinking, as Kellner rightly points out, continues to be rejected, but what is new here is the abstract and iconic conception of Maimonides in the context of authoritarian Ashkenazi rabbinic culture. So Maimonides, whose actual ideas continue to be anathema to the Ashkenazi Orthodox world, gets integrated into a timeless pantheon of Gedoilim, rabbinic giants, whose views are sacrosanct and inviolable.

Kellner correctly asserts the fallacy of this line of thinking, but does not replace it with the AraboAndalusian Maimonides of Jose Faurs scholarship; the Maimonides who worked tirelessly to set out a Jewish canon that promoted the development of a Jewish Humanism as he painstakingly reconstructed the many details of Talmudic discourse in all its complexity. Maimonides was not contrary to Straussian dogma (after the University of Chicago philosophy scholar Leo Strauss, whose 1952 study Persecution and the Art of Writing continues to dominate study of medieval Jewish thought) some charlatan who spoke out of both sides of his mouth. He worked to make clear the complex elements of the rabbinic tradition in the new context of Muslim Humanism as he learned it from Arabic literary, philosophical, and scientific texts. In Maimonides time this synthesis was unavailable to the Ashkenazim who had no access to the actual organic world of the Talmudic academies in Babylonia/Iraq; to the Arabic language of the late-period Geonim such as Seadya; to the intellectual trends of ArabIslamic Humanistic culture; or to the critical methodology of the Arab-Jewish rabbis that combined a fierce reverence for the past with an unquenchable desire to learn from the Gentile world as they developed a new Jewish civilization. For the Ashkenazi rabbis of Maimonides time and ever since there has been a foundational tension between Jewish culture and Gentile culture. Even in the work of the Modern Orthodox leader Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik there remains the idea that Orthodox Jews must be extremely judicious and careful when it comes to what they read and how they approach the Gentile world. For such people the expansive approach of Maimonides continues to be fraught with difficulty.

Maimonides combined a firm respect for Jewish tradition with a more open and liberal approach that valued truth over unthinking conformity. Maimonidean epistemology was not dogmatic as many Ashkenazim thought then and continue to think now, but was an ongoing discussion firmly based on the elementary principles and values of Jewish tradition. In an Ashkenazi world where tradition is static and unchanging, Maimonides views remain unsettling and disturbing. But, paradoxically, as Jose Faur has shown in his indispensable studies The Legal Thinking of the Tosafot and Anti-Maimonidean Demons, the Ashkenazi rabbinic position is deeply confused. On the one hand, the Tosafist school under the influence of Rashi felt completely free to emend the Talmudic texts, yet on the other hand they secured their rulings by means of authoritarian fiat. In this Ashkenazi rabbinical tradition there is a complex dialectic of rigid strictness combined with a laxness when it comes to the precision of formulating the text and framing the Law. Daniel J. Elazar, in his classic 1984 article on Sephardim and Ashkenazim, characterized Ashkenazi tradition as Romantic and the Sephardi tradition as Classical. Ashkenazi Judaism is far more stringent in its application of Halakhah, as opposed to Sephardi tradition which is far more accommodating. Much of the difference is based on the authoritarian model and how it functions in the context of Maimonides and his legacy. The great irony here rests in the fact that Sephardim and Ashkenazim strongly differ in how they approach the formulation and articulation of the Law. Sephardim are extremely strict in establishing legal principles, while the Ashkenazim are quite free about how texts are to be read and interpreted. It is therefore essential that we understand how these differences function in our reading of Maimonides.

So when we read any analysis that neglects to present the organic Sephardic understanding of Maimonides, it is perfectly understandable that we are very likely to become mired in the various controversies that continue to plague the Jewish world. From the standpoint of Moshe Idel and his Israeli school, Maimonides must be understood as Goodman seems to do in the context of Kabbalah-mysticism which is an implicit affirmation of the superiority of the Ashkenazi tradition into which Maimonides is then embedded. In this mystical context what Faur has insisted as being Anti-Maimonidean Maimonides thought is completely transformed. Maimonides the scientific rationalist is redrawn to make him appear to be a Kabbalist. It is equally true that the Ashkenazi Maskilim wrongly transform Maimonides into a Greek philosopher who rejects Jewish tradition while duplicitously seeming to affirm it in his books. This is essentially the approach of Leo Strauss that we mentioned earlier, which has been so influential in contemporary intellectual circles. The forced absence of Sephardic thinkers from this discussion ensures that the debate remains mired in the dysfunction of the Ashkenazi tradition which is grounded in its rejection of Maimonides Religious Humanism. Maimonides is thus manipulated as an iconic authority like other Ashkenazi rabbis to reflect certain static and timeless ideas that are then integrated into the ongoing Orthodox discussion. Maimonides is turned into just another authority without any sense that the paradigm(s) he set out were dynamic in the way that they were able to bring rabbinic learning into the Arab-Islamic civilization without losing the precision of the classical Talmudic formulation.

The seemingly endless litany of Ashkenazi figures presented in this article represents the new hegemony in contemporary Jewish culture. Maimonides becomes, as Kellner rightly states, all things to all people and is reconstructed in the image of his beholders. Historical accuracy and the cultural specificity based on that history is elided in favor of an uncritical, anti-intellectual analysis that is geared to affirm the various dogmas of contemporary Jewish factionalism. Maimonides is seen as a tabula rasa, an empty signifier, who is used as a screen on which to project the views currently in vogue in various Jewish intellectual schools. Maimonides, the same Maimonides who worked so diligently to open Judaism to new and transformative values and influences, has been re-appropriated by the Ashkenazi dogmatists to act the part of a combatant in their various wars of attrition; wars that mark a Jewish world that emphatically rejects his Religious Humanism a term that is not used in the discussion while it continues to seek dogmatic certainty. The key to understanding Maimonides is to realize that his Judaism is a process that is based on the firm foundations of the tradition. There is a wonderful flexibility inherent in his thinking that seeks to balance the foundational elements of the Talmudic past with the need to investigate and discover the truth in the context of scientific analysis. This Maimonides is a rabbi who reveres the past, but who knows that the past cannot be allowed to remain static. We must continue to learn and grow while refusing to eviscerate our moral-legal heritage. This is the essence of Jewish Humanism. In the Ashkenazi tradition where truth must remain fixed under the iron-fisted authority of the rabbi, such a dynamic and creative Judaism remains impossible. The truth in Ashkenazi Orthodoxy is not bound to temporal concerns or to scientific analysis; it is ahistorical and static, always already known through the correct reading of Gods revelation.

For Maimonides, revelation is an evolutionary process based on solid foundations. Rather than giving in to the binary impulse of being either completely scientific or completely traditional, Maimonides taught Jews to build from the traditional texts, but to never lose sight of the fact that the world is a complex thing whose reality is multiple and whose actuality we continue to discover over the course of time by means of rational critical analysis. The rejection of Maimonides Religious Humanism is thus a product, as we see in Kellners discussion, of a serious internal conflict in Ashkenazi culture between tradition and modernity. In the authentic Maimonidean-Andalusian tradition, a tradition that is not reflected by the approaches presented in this article, this conflict is non-existent. Maimonidean Religious Humanism, best articulated by Jose Faur in his many scholarly studies, remains outside the bounds of contemporary Jewish thought; Maimonides himself a mere cipher in the larger constellation of Ashkenazi luminaries. David Shasha

MYMONIDES AND HISMONIDES: READING RAMBAM IN ISRAEL TODAY By: Menachem Kellner Micah Goodman, Sodotav shel Moreh haNevukhim (Secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed). Or Yehuda: Dvir, 2010. For eight centuries Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed has been a prime example of Churchill's riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. For these eight centuries Judaism's best and brightest have sought to crack the code of a

book whose author informed us explicitly in his introduction that he wrote it esoterically. Interpretations range from those who see Maimonides as a kabbalist, as an eastern European-style yeshiva head, all the way through to those who, like Leo Strauss, were convinced that Maimonides was an Aristotelian epikoros. In his new book, Secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed, Micah Goodman joins the list of creative readers of Maimonides. His book also serves as a window into important aspects of contemporary Israeli spirituality, and it is on that facet of the book that I will focus in this review. The mysteries surrounding the Guide of the Perplexed are surprising, since Maimonides (1138-1204) is the best known (and the least known) of all major Jewish figures. Here in Haifa where I live, the largest hospital is named for him, the grade school my children attended is named for him, and there is a grandiosely named (but inactive) Maimonides Research Institute--all this only in Haifa, a relative backwater in the Jewish world. Any person half-literate in the Jewish tradition will know that Rambam, as he is known in Hebrew (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon), is the author of the only authoritative statement of Jewish dogma. Maimonides' statement is so authoritative that in his attempts to get Habad/Lubavitch ruled heretical and excluded from the Orthodox world, David Berger, dean of Yeshiva University's graduate school of Jewish studies, relies entirely on Maimonides--as do the Lubavitchers themselves in their arguments concerning the "messianic" stature of their late rebbe. There is a very large Jewish bookstore in a New Jersey shtetl called Lakewood, boasting a huge section devoted entirely to Rambam (by which they mean only his code, Mishneh Torah). Sitting on my desk as I write these words I have a cake of "Rambam Soap" ("natural hypoallergenic soap, made of medicinal herbs, according to the teachings of Maimonides"). In bus and train stations across Israel one can purchase special

"Rambam rings" with all sorts of wondrous properties. Jews who like to visit the graves of the righteous flock to the (alleged) tomb of Maimonides in Tiberias. In the decade leading up to the 800th anniversary of his death (1204-2004) over five hundred academic books and articles were published on Maimonides. On the other hand, very few of those rabbis who exclude others as heterodox on the basis of Maimonides' "Thirteen Principles" have ever read the full text of the Principles (let alone in the original Arabic)--especially not in its Aristotelian context. Anyone who practices "Maimonidean medicine" today would be dismissed as a charlatan by Maimonides himself. Judaica Plaza in Lakewood stocks a variety of editions of the Mishneh Torah and scores of commentaries upon it, but keeps the few copies of the Guide of the Perplexed that it stocks, in a section called "Kabbalah" (of all things!). Nor is it likely that we will ever see Artscroll editions of the Guide (or others of Maimonides' not strictly halakhic works, since many of them are considered "too hot to handle" in the yeshiva world). I would rather leave poor Maimonides in peace than even begin to wonder how he would react to Rambam soap and rings. There is something amazing about Maimonides: few have read him, fewer have understood him, and yet everyone wants him in his or her camp, from the Rebbe of Lubavitch to the Rebbe of (Yeshayahu) Leibowitz. Why is that? Maimonides is one of those rare Jewish figures whose stature is such that if he can be shown to have held a position, then that position is considered Jewishly legitimate. He is also one of those rare figures without whom Judaism as we know it would be different. Aside from R. Judah the Prince, editor of the Mishnah, it is indeed hard to think of any figure from the time of Moses of Egypt to the time of Moses ben Maimon, who lived in Egypt, about whom this could be said. Indeed: "From Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses!"

Had Maimonides not created the first systematic and only comprehensive code of Jewish law (Mishneh Torah) it is not likely that his successors in that project, R. Jacob ben Asher, author of the Arba'ah Turim, and R. Joseph Karo, author of the Shulhan Arukh, would have had the vision and courage to embark on what would have been, if not for Maimonides, a revolutionary innovation. Had Maimonides not placed Judaism on a firm dogmatic footing (with his "Thirteen Principles"), it would not be possible to speak of Jewish orthodoxy (orthos + doxos =3D straight beliefs) in any technical sense of the term. Had not Maimonides thrown the massive weight of his considerable authority behind the project of integrating science and Judaism there would have been little room in the medieval Jewish world and in the Orthodox world today for rationally oriented Jews--without Maimonides' authority it would be next to impossible to carve out a normative Jewish niche for those convinced that God gave human beings brains to use in an independent and rational fashion. Had Maimonides not sought to lower messianic fervor by treating messianism in the most naturalistic way possible, as a process which takes place in this world, without overt divine intervention, and with no violations of natural law, religious Zionism of the Rabbi Kook version would be impossible--for good or for ill, depending on your perspective. It takes a Maimonidean understanding of messianism to see draining swamps, building a secular state, establishing an army, etc., as stages in the athalta de-ge'ulah (beginning of redemption). Finally, had Maimonides not enunciated a universalist vision of Judaism it is likely that almost all Jews today would be even more particularist than they are. My wife once pointed out to me that Maimonides' writings are like a Rorschach test: the way a person interprets Maimonides tells us a lot about that person. The late Rabbi Joseph Kafih, perhaps the twentieth century's preeminent

Maimonidean, said much the same thing: Maimonides is like a mirror--people look into his writings and see themselves. Micah Goodman's new book, Secrets of the Guide of the Perplexed, adds a new dimension: the popularity of books about Maimonides tells us much about the societies in which they are popular. Goodman's new book may be the most hyped book ever published on Maimonides; it is also probably the most successful, remaining week after week on Israeli best-seller lists, no mean accomplishment for a book which makes considerable demands upon its readers. There are many reasons for this success: Goodman himself is well known in intellectual circles in Israel; he appears often on television; a charismatic teacher, he founded and runs the Israel Academy for Leadership (a pre-army institute for both observant and secular youths in a settlement between Jerusalem and Jericho). The book itself in extraordinarily well-written: clear, full of the arresting plays on words and vivid contrasts to which Hebrew lends itself so well, dramatic, and plotted like a novel-Goodman builds up expectations, only to smash them. He is also willing to take risks, presenting Maimonides in ways guaranteed both to delight his readers and at the same time raise the eyebrows of his colleagues in academia. Who is the Maimonides presented by Goodman? He is a Maimonides who has no "grand narrative," a Maimonides for whom God is the greatest threat to religion, a Jewish thinker for whom the Torah comes to serve as therapy--the main aim of the Torah according to Goodman's Maimonides is to heal human beings, not to grant them philosophic certainty, since there can be no certainty about the central doctrines of religion (the nature or even existence of God, creation, providence and human suffering, among others). For Goodman's Maimonides the Torah is only divine in the sense that Moses understood the nature of reality better than any previous human. For the Midrash, God looked into the Torah in order to create the world, while for Goodman

Moses, as it were, looked into the mind of God in order to write the Torah. The upshot of all this is to place human beings firmly at the center of philosophic attention (the culmination of a process which began with Descartes' cogito--which is one of the many reasons I have trouble reading Maimonides in the same way that Goodman does). Goodman's Maimonidean hero inherits all the roles traditionally ascribed to God, designing his/her own life, world, and consciousness. This heroic (Nietszchian?) human also takes control of the Torah, the text of which is no longer authoritative, since the interpreter takes control of the text. For Goodman, Maimonides no longer guides the reader out of perplexity; rather, he accompanies the reader on the route to perplexity (since only the philosophically unsophisticated individual can confront God and the cosmos without perplexity). Only the selfdeluded think they have achieved certainty, and self-delusion is the greatest sin; hence, one assumes, for Goodman's Maimonides--and quite clearly for Goodman himself--enlightenment of a certain type (acknowledging what Albert Camus would have called the absurd nature of the universe) is the highest virtue. Maimonides, who single-handedly created Jewish dogmatics, is presented as the greatest opponent of what Goodman calls the "dogmatic trap" (thinking you know what you cannot know). For Micah Goodman, Maimonides' philosophy is in many ways an expression of his biography (just as God introduces the Decalogue with the highlights of His biography). Maimonides also comes across as a bit like Stalin, who, it said, used to wander the halls of the Kremlin shouting to one and all, "I am Ben-Gurion! I am BenGurion!"--i.e., as a megalomaniac who places himself on a chain starting with the first Moses, continuing through R. Judah the Prince to Maimonides himself, and culminating with the Messiah.

Throughout this stimulating book Goodman uses language which, I fear, misleads many of his readers. He uses terms such as eros, sod, pardes, maskil, and expressions, such as the "redemptive character of knowledge," and "spiritual journeys," all of which mean very specific (and limited) things in a Maimonidean context, but which to a contemporary reader carry with them heavy overtones of Kabbalah. I am confident that Goodman does not mean to mislead, and equally confident that that is precisely what happens--and reading Maimonides in this mildly Kabbalistic key may be part of the explanation for the book's success. So, what sort of Maimonides does Goodman present to his reader? Simply put, a postmodernist, anti-Leibowitzian Maimonides (it is only after two-thirds of the book have passed that Goodman lets this cat explicitly out of the bag, insisting that his book is meant to save the true Maimonides from what one might call the hypermodernist reading of Yeshayahu Leibowitz). Leibowitz (1903-94), Israel's most prominent pubic intellectual during the last third of the twentieth century, attributed to Maimonides (with some degree of justification) a Judaism in which God is entirely at the center, the Torah does not at all serve the needs of human beings (since it fundamentally involves a demand to live a holy, God-centered life, and has no binding theology). In Goodman's presentation, we have a Maimonides for whom "the quest for certainty"-which, according to Abraham Joshua Heschel, motivated R. Sa'adia Gaon and subsequent medieval Jewish philosophers (emphatically including Maimonides)--is replaced with a quest for perplexity. In reading Maimonides in this fashion Goodman understands and presents him in terms appropriate to much of the contemporary weltanschauung. This is certainly one of the reasons for the book's great success. But there is more going on here than this. Sitting in shul this week I noticed a young man, recently married (and who has chosen to defer army

service to spend more time in yeshiva), reciting the amidah prayer with his tallit over his head (rare in our circles) and with every indication of profound involvement in his prayer. Looking up from reading Micah Goodman's book during the recitation of An'im Zemirot, one of the most "spiritual" passages in the liturgy, I noticed that this young man was also reading--a volume of Talmud. It struck me that standard Israeli Orthodoxy has no answer for a person seeking spiritual fulfillment: it is not that Orthodox Jews are necessarily spiritually unfulfilled, but that the spiritual fulfillment they find would be unrecognizable to anyone who looks for sublimity in mystically inspired poems like An'im Zemirot, rather than in abstruse Talmudic discussions. Anyone familiar with Israel today is struck by the huge variety of alternative "spiritualities" on offer. These reflect a deep yearning for meaning on the part of many Israelis. Some satisfy this need by dropping out in Southeast Asia; others through adoption of Jewish Orthodoxy, including the eccentricity of Bratzlav; and yet others through the many varieties of non-standard religions which now dot the Israeli landscape. Indeed, my own university (Haifa) is running a huge conference (for the third year in a row) on new religious phenomena in Israel. Goodman's Maimonides--skeptical, almost agnostic, latudinarian in consequence if not in intent, and therapeutic--taps into this yearning. Micah Goodman's Maimonides is not my Maimonides, but his Maimonides certainly demonstrates the perennial significance of the Great Eagle for Jews (and perhaps, for Judaism). From H-Judaic, December 6, 2011