The Rambam

"From Moses to Moses there has been no man like Moses," said Israel's President Itzhak Ben-Zvi, and the audience assembled in Jerusalem's Rav Kook Institute one day last week recognized the old Jewish saying. They had assembled to honor the second Moses, the great philosopher Maimonides, who brought the Law and tradition of Judaism within the compass of Western thought. Around the walls of the institute were some 3,000 old and battered volumes, stained from centuries of diligent study. The exhibition of his work was the first of many celebrations of Maimonides Year--the 750th anniversary of his death.

The Jewish Creed. Moses ben-Maimon, often referred to as "the Rambam" (from his title of rabbi plus the initials of his name), was only in his teens when persecution drove his family from their native Spanish city of Cordova to Morocco, and thence to Egypt, where his father died. In old Cairo, young Maimonides became a physician, a profession in which he achieved such great eminence (his works on hygiene, asthma and sex were remarkably ahead of his time) that he eventually became personal doctor to the court of Sultan Saladin. But philosophy was Maimonides' greatest love, and his voluminous writings, almost all in Arabic, spread his fame through Europe and Africa, as well as the Middle East.

Maimonides' two greatest works are the Mishneh Torah (The Second Torah), completed in 1180, and the Moreh Nebuchim (Guide to the Perplexed), which he finished ten years later. The Mishneh Torah organized the entire body of Jewish Law into one code. In the commentary on the Mishneh is Maimonides' most widely known production--the 13 articles of faith, which most subsequent rabbinic opinion has held every Jew must accept: 1) God's existence, 2) His unity, 3) His incorporeality, 4) His timelessness, 5) His approachability through prayer, 6) the validity of prophecy, 7) the superiority of Moses to all prophets, 8) the divine origin of the Law as revealed to Moses in the Pentateuch, 9) the immutability of the Law, 10) God's omniscience, 11) God's justice, 12) the coming of the Messiah, 13) the resurrection and human immortality.

Foundation of Foundations. The Guide to the Perplexed applied Aristotelian philosophy to Judaism, as Aquinas applied it to Christianity. Maimonides' interlocking of Aristotelian metaphysics with the ethical and personal religion of the Old Testament is one of the great philosophical achievements of the Middle Ages.

"Some of the Rambam's scientific theories, particularly where he leans on Aristotle, may be outdated," said Chief Rabbi Herzog at last week's ceremonies in Jerusalem. "But where he draws from his own spirit he remains the giant, unsurpassed since his own lifetime. Let us hope and pray that a second Rambam will rise up in our times . . . to guide the perplexed of our own people and of the entire world." Rabbi Herzog glanced upward to an inscription on the wall above him from the Mishneh Torah:

Foundation of foundations and firmest pillar of all wisdom

is to know that there is a First Being, that He caused all beings

to be and that all beings from heaven and earth and from between them

could not be saved but for the truth of His own being.

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