here's a sort of a modernized detailed version of the iconic uh image of maimonides that we have
today we have no idea if he looked anything like this but it's sort of like you see that picture
say oh my monitors you that is his signature up on top though uh which was taken from the
ganesa archives his dates are 1138-1204 he was born in cordoba spain we spoke about it a little
bit in the beginning of the golden age but he had to flee spain as a youth because of the
persecution of the north african muslim tribes that came into the iberian peninsula and started
demanding a much greater adherence to muslim orthodoxy and wanted to put a stop to the
excessive fraternization that they felt was going on between jews and muslims and christians so uh
his family which had been in spain for generations in his biography he lists i think 10 generations
of dayanim of judges of rabbis that preceded him a very illustrious family the the family had to flee
spain and uh over the course of his teenage years they made their way across the coast of north
africa from one place to another along the way from spain to egypt where he ultimately settled
he received a significant secular education he was especially trained in tunis where he learned to
be a doctor as we mentioned before this is kind of like the go-to profession of a jewish intellectual
of the medieval period um you know it's it's a portable trade it's a respectable trade
it's a well remunerated trade so therefore you know jews often chose this as their profession
although he dedicated himself during these years of his youth exclusively to study the mainstay of
their family economically was his brother david his older brother david who was a merchant uh
unfortunately when his uh when he died in a shipwreck and lost all of their wealth as well
the maimonides had to go to work and so he turned to trade as a position and he had to
abandon his full-time study of torah in order to do so to support the rest of his family
he is in many ways paradigmatic and at the same time exceptional paradigmatic in the sense that
as we discussed in the the golden age of spain he is one of these really unusual people who is world
famous for his secular activities specifically as a medical doctor and at the same time he exerts a
phenomenal you know light on all of jewish intellectual history for the next thousand
years he is so incredibly powerful in both areas simultaneously that's what makes him sort of like
the ideal of the spanish golden age and that's why i think uh so many schools are named after
him because you know you want to tell your parent it's your parent body that if you send your kid
to our school he's going to be like maimonides a great scholar of torah and a great breadwinner
in his secular field and so on i think that's what what kind of the the image that they're trying to
get across with that but at the same time he was exceptional because as i mentioned when we talked
about the rishonim uh his opinion in halacha is frequently ignored by later commentators i
shouldn't say ignored i should say it is overruled they'll say okay maimonides thinks this but
you know two other major figures uh the riff and the roche they disagree with my money so we're
gonna go with majority rule and maimonides will lose out he he does things that um
you know the he approves of things that the rabbis later would uh disagree with and so
although he has a phenomenal impact on jewish history and jewish thought many of his ideas were
outright rejected just to give you one interesting example he felt very strongly based on his
long-standing experience in his family that a person should not receive a check for serving
as a rabbi i know i'm going to get in trouble after saying this rabbis if you're watching this
the sephardic congregations sometimes continue this practice it's much more exceptional in the
ashkenazic reign and there are lots of ways to justify it like for example you know if a rabbi
does not receive a paycheck or also teachers you know if you're going to teach torah you should
not get paid to teach torah well that would like essentially sink the business model of so many
jews that would be terrible um but there are lots of halal exceptions the most important one being
that if a rabbi does not have another source of wealth or income then he would have to leave
off being a rabbi in order to be i don't know a plumber or an accountant or something like that
so there is kind of like permission given to pay your rabbis and your teachers so that uh they are
able to uh rabbi and to teach i face mayor uh but that's like kind of an unpopular opinion
that rabbi that maimonides pulls out of the talmud and really emphasizes by the way i should mention
that he is known popularly among jews as rambam or the rambam which is an acronym of his name rabbi
moses ben maimon the greek term maimonides means son of maimon that would be his father
okay so he's paradigmatic for being like kind of that that spanish golden age ideal even though
the bulk of his career was not in spain uh and he's exceptional because he's frequently
disagreed with and as we shall see uh very heavily criticized in his own lifetime and and beyond um
so he's very unusual in that regard now what did he write and why was this so important so
this is a beautiful manuscript called an illuminated manuscript of uh one of his works
let's break it down to several categories first of all in his youth he composed a very important
commentary on the mishna which has a lot of the qualities that we see in rashi's work so made
him you know really uh much appreciated by his audience and it is standard printing every uh even
to this day the standard printing of the mishna includes the commentary of the rambam so what's
a little bit more different about the rambam is his very extensive for example medical writings in
arabic uh he was like the the go-to doctor of the age um he performed uh medical services for the
the royal house of egypt um he was specifically he describes in some of his writings how he gets up
early in the morning he has to commute from fustat to cairo where he treats all of the kids and all
the wives in the harem and zone he works there all day then he comes on by donkey the commute back to
fustat and there's a whole lineup of people who ask him all kinds of hallucke questions
he has to spend hours and hours answering their questions you know he wrote extensively
in his area of medical expertise fascinating writings which are preserved they are accessible
today uh and he writes on things like depression and anxiety sleep disorders family intimacy
all kinds of issues regarding to regarding the use of herbs and various medicinal products and so on
you know extremely important medical writing still studied even to this day he also wrote extensive
letters we have quite a bit of his correspondence to far-flung jewish communities since he was
unofficially considered the leader of all the jews of egypt and surrounding regions
they would frequently write to him for guidance and support and some of these letters you know
in which he's addressing a specific problem like i'm thinking in particular of one of the letters
that he writes to a convert to judaism who feels that he's being uh maltreated by the community
in which he lives and maimonides writes such a a passionate strong defense of the converts position
uh that it it just it shows his personality and shows how he stood up for the uh for the uh
for the lonely he stood up for the the less fortunate and so on and another passage
that occurs to me in the mishnah torah very important passage and when she says that the uh
you know it's very important that before every holiday uh person expend sums in charitable
fashion because if you don't take care of the widows and the orphans in your society
before you take care of your lavish meal for your family and friends then you're not celebrating
the holiday you're celebrating your stomach really powerful incisive kind of direction so
this gives you a sense of his his regional maybe even you could say global leadership
activities but what got him into a lot of trouble were two other groups of writings and these are
the ones that are most widely studied today the first are his philosophical writings of which the
most famous is undoubtedly the mora niv translated as the guide for the perplexed this was a work
written in judeo-arabic that is essentially arabic written with hebrew characters and it was written
for a particular student who was kind of like a a type he was a student who was struggling with the
apparent challenges posed by contemporary islamic philosophy and judaism and having a
lot of like kind of high level intellectual doubts and wondering you know boy these these arabs have
some great philosophical ideas and you know these are essentially the the great arabic tradition
that flows from aristotle of the greeks and uh he's wondering you know they they systematize so
many things and they're they seem so logical and you know does judaism really make that much sense
so the guide for the perplexed it addresses this student's concerns and essentially within
the context of arabic philosophy and in this regard it's it's a fascinating and brilliant work
that essentially defends judaism from the intellectual challenges of his age
but that was a book written primarily for the elite for people who were well learned people
who had a broad intellectual capacity who are not generally working for a living but were you know
sitting around thinking kind of things his other work which also got him to huge amount of trouble
was the mishna torah now the mishnah torah is this massive work and i'm going to show you a picture
of the kind of standard critical edition used today this is the edition i have in my own library
the frankel edition this is a phenomenal restatement of essentially all judaism in
about 20 odd volumes and what he does is he says listen judaism is complicated right you've got the
torah you've got the talmud you've got the mishnah you've got all these commentators and stuff like
that and you want to know how to be a jew so i'm going to help you out here i am going to write out
the entire torah in a code-like format right this is a code it it's a guide for living and you'll
be able to follow every single line of it it's written in in really basic hebrew like middle
school hebrew you know a talented 14 year old can easily make his way through the mishnah torah the
vocabulary is not complex and it's uh it's written in a very straightforward easy accessible fashion
uh which betrays again it's sophistication because when you really get into the weeds of why did he
say it this way and not that way when the talmud clearly says it this way why did he change the
order of things you see really what's going on in maimonides mind much like we saw with rashi but
this is a an unusual code that goes way beyond the much more modest codes that would eventually
eclipse it uh for example maimonides code the mishnah torah deals with all time meaning
most of the later codes like the shohan they said okay there are a lot of laws in the torah
about how to offer sacrifices but we don't have the temple today so we can't offer sacrifices so
we'll just skip that whole part and mahmadi says what are you talking about it's in the
torah we're going to go through it similarly it's only in the mishnah torah that we have the laws
of the messianic era how to recognize the messiah how to what will it be like in the messianic area
how are we supposed to conduct ourselves in the messianic era right the other codes say hey i
think we'll figure that out when we get there but maimonides said no it's in the torah i'm going to
explain everything he also explains some amazing things that others might think really is not
legislatible like how to have an opinion what kind of opinions should you have anyways it's in his
code of law which is brilliant one of my favorite areas that that i i'm very uh attached to is that
he wrote on how to repent and i'll just take a quick moment it's sort of a book plug but
i guess i can't do that uh i have a personal project where i study his laws on teshuva which
means repentance every year and uh starting in 2012 i i wrote up a little uh translation
and i put it on the internet and people liked it so i i revised it when i went over it the next
year and then the year after that and so on and now we are in because i didn't i missed some years
now we're in the uh eighth edition is out and i'm waiting i'm hoping to work on the ninth edition
uh and i always release it on the anniversary of my father's passing but he writes on how to
repent how to like take a take charge of your own behavior and how to change your behavior
these are amazing books but he got into tremendous trouble over them for exam there are several waves
of controversy surrounding his work uh some that occurred in his lifetime when he died in 1204 and
several that went on for another couple hundred years uh these conflicts especially erupted
when uh the ibn tibben family of translators produced a hebrew translation of his judeo-arabic
guide for the perplexed and it circulated in northern europe where the jews there had no access
to the arabic text this caused a huge uh hue and cry against maimonides what were the charges
one of the charges was he was overly reliant on greek wisdom meaning he has a huge respect for
aristotle and his nicomachean ethics had a massive impact on certain sections of
maimonides thought especially the laws of opinions that i mentioned earlier uh he disagrees with uh
with aristotle in some key areas but otherwise he he openly calls him haffila the philosopher and
uh his his synthesis of greek thought and jewish thought is is brilliant but a lot of the northern
european rabbis said this is treif this is not kosher you can't build a jewish philosophy with
such heavily reliance on a non-jew like aristotle another major charge was that the mishnah torah
doesn't have any footprint footnotes so what is going on here you're looking at the text and
here we see how maimonides tells us to behave but the way that we've always been studying
the law is you look at this opinion you look at that opinion you argue about them you figure it
out you come to a conclusion and here my monies just told us the conclusion without offering us
the background debate and so you know it's dangerous we don't know how he arrived at
his decision secondly and related to the first really a lot of people accused him of arrogance
because as he says in the introduction to the mishnah torah he says essentially
look you have this big book that i just wrote it essentially takes care of everything you need
obviously you should still be studying torah but the truth is if you want to know how to be a jew
the whole thing is laid out right here and many authors felt that many rabbis felt this is a type
of arrogance i've spoken in other lectures really a bit running out of time but there's
also economic factors involved here because he essentially challenges the uh the business model
of rabbinic expertise in a very serious way uh it turns out to not have not be that way because you
know an even greater uh industry was created of commentary on maimonides but sadly jews denounced
the works of maimonides to the dominican friars who gladly seized these books with who which were
charged with heresy and burned them in paris in 1232. so it was a huge tragedy that the jews were
that some jews in northern europe were so incensed with maimonides that they preferred to see his
books consigned to the flames than to have them studied um ten years later there would be another
repetition of this when the talmud itself would be burned in in exactly the same spot in paris
there are other ramifications for example the spanish rabbis continued discussing this
for quite some time and the only way they sort of compromised about maimonides was they
agreed to a europe-wide ban on the study of philosophy for anyone younger than 25 years
of age and that was supposed to say essentially that maimonides has a lot of useful things to say
but he is kind of dangerous so we want students to achieve a certain level of maturity
before they look at something like the god for the perplexed and so on uh so that's that's basically
how he remained controversial but ultimately his overpowering legacy uh makes him one of
the most towering figures of the richonim and of future generations to the present day