Maimonides and the Book That Changed Judaism by Micah Goodman

Author:Micah Goodman [Goodman, Micah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL040040 Religion / Judaism / Sacred Writings
ISBN: 9780827611986
Publisher: The Jewish Publication Society
Published: 2015-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Just as an athlete trains the body in order to come closer to physical perfection, so too, one who aspires to ethical perfection must be constantly training the personality.

These ideas give us a new perspective on the mitzvot. If deeds form character, then the mitzvot, as a system of habitual actions, will have a profound and far-reaching effect on the personality of one who fulfills them. The Rambam’s conception of the soul is crucial to his understanding of the reasons for mitzvot. The purpose of most of the commandments is to form character, or in Rambam’s words, “in order that the character of each individual should tend toward excellence. Most of the commandments are designed to achieve this kind of moral perfection” (Guide, 3:54). The mitzvot are a system of actions whose repetition has a therapeutic and edifying effect on the personality.

Aristotle’s teachings in his Ethics turn out then to be key to interpreting the underlying reasons for many of the mitzvot.25 Let us look at a few examples of how Aristotelian psychology helps the Rambam to discover the inner meaning of some of the commandments. Recall first of all that for Aristotle, intellectual excellence does not guarantee ethical excellence. A person can fail to do what he knows to be right. Aristotle attributes this failure to ekrasia, or weakness of the will. Remember our smoking example: someone can be fully cognizant of the damage he is doing to his health by smoking yet still not be able to kick the habit.

Aristotle’s view suggests a different way of understanding human immorality. Most people who do bad things are not inherently cruel or evil; they lie, cheat, and commit adultery not because they are bad but because they are weak. Ethical failings signify weaknesses in the soul. If so, then the solution for people who know what is right but cannot do it is not to lecture them but to help them to strengthen their wills by training their characters. According to the Rambam, this is what large parts of the Torah are all about.

For example, practicing kashrut, the mitzvot commanding us to only eat certain types of food, has the effect, in the Rambam’s words, of “cutting down the desire for sensory gratification that can turn eating, drinking and pursuit of what is most pleasurable into an end in itself” (Guide, 3:35). The role of kashrut is to restrain the excesses of human behavior in everything that has to do with food. Kashrut creates mindfulness around the act of eating, compels us to forgo opportunities to satisfy our desire for food (if is not kosher) or to delay gratification (e.g., by waiting between eating meat and milk). Kashrut is a daily training in disciplining our desires. As the Rambam puts it: “The commandments and prohibitions of the Torah come to restrain all of our basic physical impulses” (Guide, 3:8).

Another example is the Rambam’s understanding of the mitzvot of first fruits and other offerings to the Temple. The Torah requires a person to give up some of his property, whether fruits or flocks or money, and give it over to God.

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