MAIMONIDES AGONIST: This interview appears in Covenant, a new quarterly journal edited and published by Professor Barry Rubin, and Judith Roumani. It is available free via email and online.

Maimonides Agonist:
Disenchantment and Reenchantment in Modern Judaism
By Menachem Kellner

Introduction

The popular conception of modern Judaism ascribes a central place to Maimonides. The apotheosis of the putative 'Golden Age' of Spain, Maimonides the physician, the commentator, the rationalist, towers as the model of medieval learning. A Galenic physician and paragon of Jewish learning he is also, by implication, a model for the present, a foreshadowing of the balances inherent in modernity.

Moses Maimonides expressed a vision of Judaism as a remarkably naturalist religion of radical responsibility. His Judaism is a religion in which concrete behavior serves the needs of abstract thought; abstract thought is the deepest layer of the Torah and, at least in Maimonides' day, could be most clearly and accurately expressed in the vocabulary of the Neoplatonized Aristotelianism that Maimonides accepted as one of the highest expressions of the human spirit. This Judaism was simultaneously deeply elitist and profoundly universalist. Maimonides crystallized and expressed his vision of Judaism because the Jewish world in his day was, in his view, debased and paganized.

But a deeper view of contemporary Jewish life, especially within Orthodoxy, shows that Maimonidean reforms have failed to take hold. Maimonides sought to transform the Judaism of his day, most notably the nature of halakhah, its distinctions between holy and profane, ritually pure and ritually impure, the character of the Hebrew language, the notion of "created light," the distinction between Jew and non-Jew, and the existence of angels as popularly understood, and to reform the curriculum of Jewish learning. In each of these areas Judaism continued to develop as if Maimonides had never existed and never written. The implications for modern Judaism are vast, yet hidden from view. Orthodoxy today is a Maimonidean antithesis, an enchanted world whose spirit guides provide indispensable intercession, rabbis as prophets and magicians. In short, it is a kabbalistic world.

There are indeed areas where Maimonides' influence has been decisive. Maimonides succeeded in convincing almost all Jews that the God of Judaism is entirely incorporeal. Given the dramatic anthropomorphism of the Bible and rabbinic literature this was no mean feat. The project of creating comprehensive and logically organized codes of law, culminating in the publication of the Shulhan arukh, must also be seen as at least a partial success of Maimonides.

However, despite these achievements, his overall reform cannot be considered a success.

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