Maimonides by Abraham Joshua Heschel

Author:Abraham Joshua Heschel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

David had run a business and traveled, as though to demonstrate the precept about the position of the wise in this world. Did this not pose a question, did David’s death not arouse the most tormenting qualms in Maimonides’s philosophical conscience? A discreet confirmation of this surmise can be found in a line he wrote about grief during this critical period: “The man who does not grieve for someone who has passed away … is cruel and brutal. One should be more anxious, test one’s own conduct and do penance.”10 These words, unsupported by any Talmudic sources, written in his Codex out of personal experience and attitude, betray his stance. The sorrow, which first bored through the stratum of his feelings, was obviously beginning to torture his conscience. The self-testing he demanded of other mourners was something he now applied with heightened rigor to himself.

Several years after David’s death, Maimonides described the ills “that come to every single human being as a result of his own actions … All people complain about this kind of disaster, for there are few men who have not sinned against themselves. Such ills are the consequence of all vices … and the cause of all physical and spiritual ailments. These ailments occur when the soul becomes accustomed to unnecessary things and the desire for things that are not needed, for the survival of the individual or the species becomes second nature to the soul. Such desire knows no bounds. The necessary things are actually few in number, the superfluous things are unlimited. If, for instance, you wish that your utensils were of silver, then would it not be lovelier if they were of gold? Others make them of sapphire, some even of carbuncle stone or ruby, or anything one might devise. A fool with such a poor way of thinking never stops being sad and sighing that he cannot afford superfluous things that this man or that man can afford. Often he puts himself in great danger; for instance, by sea voyages.”11 Do these words not contain a sense of guilt and a veiled but relentless confession?

“We lament and are dissatisfied because of our defectiveness. We feel pain from the ills that we inflict upon ourselves, and we attribute them to God.”12 Here lies the pivot of pessimism for him.

Alfasi, who was still popular, had written in the tenth century that evil was more frequent than good, and life a punishment. In contrast, Maimonides polemicized with the most unequivocal formulations of his new standpoint: “The cause of the entire error lies in the fact that this fool and those of a similar opinion among the masses contemplate existence only in a single human individual. Yet every fool imagines that the whole universe exists only for his sake, as though no other being existed outside of him. But if he meets with the opposite of what he wanted, he decides that all Being is bad. However, if he were to contemplate and understand all Being and recognize the insignificance of his share in it, then the truth would become obvious to him.

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