Two Understandings of Torah Judaism: Nahmanides vs. Maimonides (Nitsavim 5766)

By Rabbi Alan Yuter
Posted Monday, December 11, 2006

Deuteronomy 30:12 tells that a certain commandment "is not in heaven." For Rashi and Maimonides, this commandment is the entire Torah, and based apparently on context. Nahmanides contends that the commandment to which the Torah refers is repentance. This innocent debate goes to the heart of the nature of Torah Judaism.

We must examine the world views that Maimonides and Nahmanides bring to their study of Hebrew Scripture, which view is publicly taught, and which view resonates to modern Jews.

Nahmanides was a mystic who believed that his intuition was able to parse the mind of God. The revealed Torah, while necessary, is not sufficient to please the Creator of the World and Giver of the Torah. The authentic tradition was not given only at Sinai, but to the inspired soul of the rabbi who knows the privately revealed divine secrets. When the Torah teaches that one must "perform the right and good," [Deuteronomy 12:28] we are not taught what is right and good in every conceivable situation. We need an informed moral intuition to determine what is pleasing to God. The Torah commands Israel to "be holy" [Leviticus 19:2] and apparently does not say how to be holy. Nahmanides rejects both the Midrash Aggada, which is his right, and more daringly, the Halakhic Midrash, by explaining that we must act above and beyond what the Torah demands, we must stay away from impurity, we must not act according to the letter of the law of the Torah and still act improperly. In other words, one can be unpleasing to God by observing the Torah but not observing God's will that is not written in the Torah because they do not have an ethical intuition.

For Nahmanides, "Tradition" is mystical and known to the rabbis who are endowed with the ability to read the mind of God. Only rabbis endowed with this sense of "Tradition" possess the intuition to apply the Torah to everyday life. Without the secret, mystical tradition and bereft of the Divinely inspired intuition needed to please God, a person with access to the revealed religious canon of Israel is hopelessly lost. Since "the commandment" that is "not to hard to observe" is placed next to the command to repent, Nahmanides contends that "the commandment" in question is repentance. Repentance is not too hard too accomplish, but the Torah, being the word of God, may be understood only the elect and select, to whom the secret, mystical tradition was transmitted, and this Torah is in heaven and is mediated by the great sage who is endowed with "Tradition", "intuition," and no body can understand the will of the Father except through them. Secular learning, like philosophy, secularizes and deadens the mind because critical thinking of the lay person renders the lay person unwilling to submit on faith to the authority of the mystic to whom God reveals, through intuition, updated Torah information.

The alternative, competing version of Jewish Orthodoxy was developed by Maimonides. For Maimonides, "Tradition" is not secret or mystical, but publicly transmitted, and accessible to all. Maimonides wrote his Mishnah Torah to render the entire oral Torah canon accessible to all Israel, just as his biblical namesake, Moses the son of Amram, taught the entire Torah to the entire nation of Israel. Intuition is appropriate when the law is unclear, and educated guesses must be made. His theological tract, Guide to the Perplexed, is better understood as "Signposts for the disoriented." But there can be no prophecy or intuition in conflict with God's public, democratically accessible divine law. Torah is from God but located publicly in this world. Reason is applied to the law before feelings, intuitions, and claims to secret Traditions. Only pagans have secret revelations, to which they appeal to control, manipulate, and dupe people out of their humanity. Doing what is "right and good" is the moral equivalent of observing the commandments. Being holy is accomplished by observing the commandments. Intuitions do not make people holy; obeying the real life commands of God makes people holy. It is arrogant to claim that one can, short of prophecy, read the mind of God. In order to train the mind to think with reason, philosophy provides a useful tool. It is no sin to be consistent, and it is not heretical to be reasonable. For the charismatic fascist, reasonable, consistent people are very threatening, because they are able to expose the wrong of those who would manipulate the minds of the masses.

It is Nahmanides' intuition that there is a transmigration, or reincarnation of the soul. Nowhere in the dual Torah canon does this doctrine appear, but it is recorded in the writings called "Kabbalah," that calls itself the "Tradition" of secrets. Maimonides' rationalist predecessor, Rabbi Saadia the Fayyumite, wrote that the doctrine appears among Indians, but not Hebrews. So if God gave a Torah to all Israel, how is it that God did not include this doctrine in that Torah? When teaching in Beruriah, the Orthodox High School for Girls in Elizabeth New Jersey, the Nahmanidean position was taught as dogma, and the students complained. Rabbi Yaakov Love, now of Yeshiva Chovevei Torah, called attention to R. Saadia's alternative view. Similarly, the girls were taught that repentance can be done, but not the Maimonidean view that Torah is indeed public and accessible. They were taught, instead, that the Torah is given to gedolei Torah, the parochial Orthodox rabbinic elite who alone have the right to read, understand and apply the Tradition.

The problem with the Nahmanidean view is that it contradicts the plain sense of the Written as well as the Oral Torah. The Torah is accessible to all. When Eldad and Medad were getting unofficial revelations, Joshua, at the time Moses' squire, wanted to arrest them but Moses knew that inspiration comes from God and cannot, indeed may not be regulated. The Torah is not subject to addition or subtraction. After all, "these are the words that Moses said to the Israelites," and no other words were revealed, mystically or otherwise. When some claim that "there is an ethic outside of the law," we must ask the question raised by Professor Harris of Harvard, "how do you know that?" Did God talk to you and no one else?

When religion is defined with intuition, buildings fall, because the biased intuition of bullies does not allow those whom it takes to be wrong to have rights. When belief is tempered with reason, we fulfill the Isaiah mandate, "come let us reason together." [Isaiah 1:18] It is the Maimonidean reason that is ultimatelygentler because it is convincing. Islam is advanced with the sword and the charisma of the imam. Torah will endure precisely because words give life, and cannot be cut and do not bleed. The sefer, the book, and the sayyif, the sword came down from heaven. The sword and its violence rend reality; the word redeems what is rent by the violence wrought by wrong.

B'nai Israel Congregation  • 27 Lloyd Street • Baltimore, MD 21202 • 410-732-5454 • Fax 410-732-4850