The Guide for the Perplexed is a treatise about which people in the Orthodox Jewish community sometimes speak in low voices—as if they’re not sure they should even acknowledge its existence. It’s not quite the text whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken, but it is certainly one about which the community has some ambivalence.
Known in Hebrew as Moreh Nevukhim, the book was written by the great Jewish sage Moses Maimonides, aka Rambam, at the end of the twelfth century. A physician and a rabbi, Rambam became one of the leading Jewish authorities of his time and remains one of the most influential thinkers in the Jewish tradition and has long been respected in the non-Jewish community as an important philosopher.
But his ideas were not always so welcome. According to Rabbi Henry Abramson, this and other works by Rambam were so controversial that religious Jews actually incited the Church to collect and burn Maimonides’ books, a strategy that backfired ten years later when the same Church burnt volumes of the Talmud.1
I, myself, have seen a layperson land himself in hot water with his rabbi when he quoted The Guide to support the notion that animal sacrifice became obsolete with the destruction of the Second Temple. The rabbi publicly admonished him for comparing Rambam to Reform rabbis who also hold that position, pointing out that, in his book on Jewish law, The Mishnah Torah, Rambam maintains the standard Orthodox opinion, which is to say that we are looking forward to the return of animal sacrifice with the building of the Third Temple.
Abramsom suggests that for French Jews, the main problems with The Guide and other works by Rambam were that a. they weren’t reading the works in the original Arabic and so didn’t understand them correctly b. they didn’t like Rambam’s “over-reliance on Greek wisdom” and willingness to “accept truth from whoever speaks it” c. were skeptical of Rambam’s skepticism of “supernaturalism” (i.e. belief in demons, spirits, amulets etc.) and d. resented the economic implications of his belief that rabbis should not be paid for their work.
All this seems to dismiss the notion that there was anything truly threatening or disturbing about the work. It was just those small-minded medieval Parisian Jews. But my reading so far suggests otherwise. This does seem like a dangerous book—not that I’m calling for any burning of it.2
Rambam wrote The Guide for the sake of a troubled student,
a religious man who has been trained to believe in the truth of our holy Law, who conscientiously fulfills his moral and religious duties, and at the same time has been successful in his philosophical studies. Human reason has attracted him to abide within its sphere, and he finds it difficult to accept as correct the teaching based on the literal interpretation of the Law. . . Hence he is lost in perplexity and anxiety.
A guy after my own heart, the perplexed Jew that is. But as I read through The Guide a second time,3 I sometimes wonder just how helpful it was to him. Indeed, I’m about a third of the way through my reread, and I’m not just feeling perplexed but even a little disturbed. . . .
The book consists of 54 chapters and is divided into three parts. I’m just about finished rereading the first part, the bulk of which is devoted to a discussion of “homonyms” in scripture.
This word, or at least Rambam’s way of deploying it, was new to me. He does not use it in the conventional sense, i.e., referring to words that sound and look the same but mean very different things, as in “cleave”—which can mean to cut or to cling. Or “camp,” which can mean various things related to sleeping in tents or can denote an overrated theory of art by Susan Sontag. From what I can tell, such words, though appearing the same, often have different etymologies.
But these are not the sort of words Rambam is interested in. He’s looking at how various Hebrew words, with the same root, the same etymology, can mean very different things. Panim, for example, means face, as in that thing on the front of your head. But Rambam points out that it can also mean “the presence and existence of a person.” For example, he quotes a line from Job: “He will surely curse thee in thy very presence,” in which the word “presence” is paneka, the second-person possessive form of panim. Rambam points out that the word, though it looks like “face,” has a different meaning.
But calling this a “homonym” seems strange because what we are talking about is not so much a different meaning as a figurative vs literal use of the word.
If I say to someone, “Get out of my face,” I don’t mean leave the place you’ve been occupying between my eyes and mouth. I mean, back off. And that “backing off” too may be literal or figurative. I may mean “take a step back” or “stop criticizing.” Nonetheless, the metaphor is anchored in the literal face. I’m saying literally you are too close to my face, but figuratively that you are impinging on me in some way that may have little to no relation to my visage.4
This all hearkens back to my observations on translation. I would probably translate the line from Job more literally, as in “He will surely curse thee in thy very face,” having the faith that my reader would understand that “face” is being used figuratively.
But the problem, of course, is that when scripture quotes God as saying things such as He and Moses spoke “face to face,” such phrases can be taken literally by readers whom Rambam calls “ignorant and superficial.”
A wise reader, says Rambam, understands that God does not have a face. He’s incorporeal. When we read of Him “speaking face to face” with Moses, we are to understand that He is simply speaking to Moses in a more direct way than how he communicated with the prophets.
But it goes beyond that. Rambam also insists that “speaking” is a metaphor when speaking of God.
“You must not be misled by the statements that God spoke to the Patriarchs, or that He had appeared to them,” he writes (94). “Speech is attributed to God in the same way as all other actions, which are similar to our own,” i.e., by analogy (97). When, for example, we speak of the “hand” or “the finger” of God, we all pretty much get that we don’t literally mean an appendage. The same is true, Rambam says, when we hear of God “speaking.”
Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just one of those ignorant and superficial readers to whom Rambam alludes, but I find that revelation a little troubling. I never imagined that God literally took the Jews by the hand and led them out of Egypt. But I did kind of think that when God says to Abraham, “lech lecha,” he is communicating in words. If it’s just a metaphor, why has so much ink been spilled on parsing the grammar of this phrase, which seems to say something like “go to yourself.” If the words were never spoken but only metaphorical, what difference does the grammar make?
I suppose we can say that if the Torah speaks to man in the language of man, it makes sense to subject it to what we in English Departments used to call a “close reading.” But, still, it’s disorienting to have to rewrite in my mind all those scenes, such as the one in which God takes Abraham outside and says, “Look now toward heaven and count the stars, if thou be able to number them. . . .So shall thy seed be.”
So that didn’t really happen? It was more like Abraham felt compelled to walk outside and look up at the night sky and sensed that these stars represented his offspring?
St. Paul5 says, “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
Okay, I get it, but do I need to put away all those scenes of Abraham conversing, even arguing, with God? What about Adam and Eve? Did they not have a whole sit down with God after the whole Forbidden Fruit machlokes? Yes, of course, it kind of feels more “realistic,” less Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-in-the-Sky to suggest all those speeches in the Bible are metaphorical renderings of internal inspiration, but it also feels less. . . . I don’t know. Less something. . . .
Rambam’s God is, dare I say it, akin to The Tao.6
“That which can be named the Tao is not the Tao,” says Lao Tzu.
Likewise, Rambam insists, somewhat less elegantly,
Every time you establish by proof the negation of a thing in reference to God, you become more perfect, while with every positive assertion, you follow your imagination and recede from the true knowledge of God. (84)
God, in Rambam’s view, is radically unlike us: “He is a Being to whom none of His creatures is similar, who has nothing in common with them. . . .” (82). Thus, when we say God is “like a father” or that he is “merciful” or “loving,” we are using the language of metaphor to describe an entity that has no “similarity to any existing being” (79).
So much for “made in his image. . . . ”
It may be “good for me” to think of God in this way, but I don’t much enjoy it. I feel like Leila, at the end of the Star Trek episode “This Side of Paradise,” who, when she is relieved of the influence of bliss-inducing poppy plants, says to Spock with no little irony, “And this is for my good?”7
Look, the thing is, once you go down this road of “everything we say about God is metaphorical,” where does it end? Rambam firmly asserts that God “is immutable in every respect” (23). But isn’t “immutable” a word? Isn’t it an “attribute?” May it not then be also considered a metaphor? Which then leads to the question of a metaphor of what?
The thing about metaphors is that they are a useful way of comparing two things that are unlike but familiar. If I say of a person, “he works like a dog,” the saying is only useful if you understand both who “he” is and what a dog is. If the he or the dog is also a metaphor, what are we talking about?
This is making my head hurt.
Rambam himself acknowledges the danger of his own work. At one point, he reflects that “this likewise should not be divulged to the multitude. . . . .a reflection of this kind is fitted for the few only” (87). But there’s no keeping secrets after Gutenberg, much less the World Wide Web.
So, where does this leave me? In suspense, I suppose. I still have two more parts to read.
You know, it’s funny, I was procrastinating my rereading of The Guide until a couple of months ago when we were at a friend’s house for a Shabbat meal. His like six-year-old daughter came up to me out of nowhere and put a book in my hand.
Which book? You guessed it, The Guide to the Perplexed, translated by M. Friedlander. Now, if that was not the finger of God, I don’t know what is. Even if that finger was a metaphor.
I ordered it from Amazon the next day.8
That same friend told me the really good part is at the end, when Rambam explains what we are to do with all this information, how to put it into practice. I haven’t gotten there yet.
I wonder if I ever will.
This account is disputed in a Wikipedia entry that suggests, “although there are stories about this being initiated by anti-Maimonideans who brought the books to the attention of the authorities, the historical situation is more than unclear.”
As a side note, I’ve noticed over the years that many people who object to “book banning” generally straw-man the motives of those behind such calls. Oh, it’s just a book. What harm could it do? Oh, those small-minded conservatives. As if books have not driven revolutions and cultural paradigm shifts. It’s one thing to argue for the “free marketplace of ideas”; it’s another to deny that some ideas can be pernicious. (And, if ideas and books are not influential and important, why bother defending them?) I’ve also noticed that the same people who react with outrage when books consistent with their ideologies are “banned” are strangely silent when books inconsistent with their ideologies are banned. (I’m not the only one to have noticed this. See this recent article in The Free Press.) Lastly, I’ve observed elsewhere that “banned” is a hysterical term in a culture where almost anyone with an Internet connection (pretty much anyone over the age of two) can get almost any book they want, often for free and certainly with a credit card. People seem not to understand the difference between curating and banning. Of course, no one is going to sign up for a book group of the top ten “most curated books” or click on an article that says, “Librarians are curating these books.”
I read it the first time a couple of years ago and retained virtually nothing.
When I was a dean, a student once accused me of “getting up in his grill,” which may be a reference to a LaCross face guard. He didn’t mean I was too physically close or that I was interfering with his Weber. He meant I was somehow getting on his case (which doesn’t mean I was standing on his luggage, but that I was criticizing him).
Yeah, I know, wrong religion. . . .but, hey, Paul was also a Jew. Unless he wasn’t. . . .
Yes, I know, even worse than comparing Rambam to a reform rabbi, not that there’s anything wrong with that . . . .
I’m kind of obsessed with this episode, much like the character in my short story named after the planet upon which Spock is reunited with Leila.
Prior to this, I was using the Shlomo Pines translation, which is more academic, i.e., more boring and more pedantic.
Try this out: It’s not God who is the metaphor, it’s US
who are the metaphor. When we say, “The hand of God,” God’s hand (whatever that means) is the REAL hand. Our hand is a metaphor of this thing that God has, which He calls (in His Torah) a hand. Don’t you get it? The real world is the spiritual world. What we have down here is just a rough equivalent of the real thing which is up there.
Here is a metaphor of a metaphor for you. The hand of a child’s doll: is that a real hand? No, it is a facsimile of a real hand, in this case, the child’s hand. Get it?
The eyes of Hashem, the finger of Hashem, Hashem laughs, Hashem is angry (actually, God never changes), these are the real thing which have different effects on our world. We can gain a vague sense of what these concepts are by looking at the metaphor: OUR eyes, fingers, laughter, anger. But His are the thing itself. The real thing (not coke…)
This is a very interesting read. I believe you are correct to pose the situation this way. An interesting note is that as far as I understand, Maimonides understood this way leads to a Spinozian outlook. Spinoza's famous triangle analogy (a triangle cannot think of a God of another shape) is the flipside of the Maimonidean coin in my view. The main difference, as I understand it, is that through the Maimonidean perspective, the negation of corporeality leads to increasing the magnificence of God (Like St. Alsem's Onltological Argument - God is that of which greater than cannot be thought). Spinoza's outlook however, is that the negation of corporeality leads to the negation of God. For what is undescribable is not (according to Spinoza).