Maimonides · Theology
Maimonides’s insistence that every commandment of the Torah has a rational purpose - against the pious view that God’s laws are inscrutable decrees to be obeyed without question.
The Torah contains 613 commandments - some obviously ethical (do not murder, do not steal), but many puzzling: dietary restrictions, laws of purity, the details of sacrifice, prohibitions on mixing fabrics or crops. Why these specific laws? One traditional answer: they are God’s decrees, to be obeyed precisely because God commanded them, their reasons hidden or non-existent; to seek reasons is almost impious. Maimonides rejected this firmly. Every commandment, he insisted, has a rational purpose - and discovering those purposes is a worthy, even devotional, task.
Maimonides sorted the purposes of the commandments into broad kinds. Many promote right belief and remove error - above all, weaning the people from idolatry and toward the true conception of God (he argued, strikingly, that even the sacrificial system was a concession to a people accustomed to idolatrous worship, redirecting their habits toward God). Many promote social order and justice - the civil and criminal laws that make communal life possible. Many promote moral character, training virtuous dispositions and curbing vice. And some promote physical welfare - he read several dietary and purity laws as conducing to health and cleanliness. The Law, in sum, perfects the person in body, society, and soul.
Behind Maimonides’s search for reasons lies a grand vision of what religion is for. The Law, on his view, is not a set of arbitrary tests of obedience but a comprehensive system for human flourishing - a divinely-given curriculum designed to perfect human beings, individually and collectively, in body, in society, and ultimately in the soul’s knowledge and love of God. The commandments train, order, and elevate; they take a person and a people and shape them toward their highest good. Obedience matters, but obedience to purposeful commands, understood as such, is richer and more transforming than blind submission. To know why you do what the Law requires is to do it better, and to grow more fully into the human being it aims to make.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Maimonides sought the rational purpose behind each commandment. Explain his view, the opposing view he argued against, and one objection to his approach, in your own words.
Leads to Moses Mendelssohn.
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