History of the Rambam (PT V) | Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz

good morning everyone I hope you all had a wonderful porm and if you're a to a wonderful porush uh and just in case you didn't have enough uh sugar on porum itself uh the OU we are generously accommodating you uh outside outside there um uh I just want to have a a very few concluding comments about the mishna Torah then I want to move to theim and then we will eventually to the letters although probably not not this week uh first uh we looked at the table of contents of the rambam and I don't know I maybe I'm obsessed with table of contents but I I enjoy looking at the genius of the organization and the plan and the notion of the totality of halaka being organized in such a beautiful wonderful way as well as the amazing Source material that the rambam had to master the bavi the Yi all the Hal M the TOA and the rambam had to ascertain what is the final ruling that emerges from all of the discussions anyone that's ever learned the page of gamarra understands that to kind of ascertain what the is from a question and answer dialectical process is very very very difficult and took the rambam 10 years and the rambam was as I said frankly very proud of his work he he refer to what he refers to it often in his letters and he had hoped it would become the definitive final code of Jewish law as we pointed out uh the last time we talked two weeks ago about this uh that did not come to pass per se uh in in many ways the mishna Torah became what the rambam hoped it wouldn't become a springboard for further analysis argument discussion as opposed to being the final word the r wanted to kind of seal the discussion and give you final Pak instead it became the springboard for discussion that goes on to this very day I do need to mention that uh the rambam actually was critiqued you might call it fact checked in modern Parliament H by halaka by a younger contemporary who was a great great great scholar Ram B davit called the rivit who lived in France and the he went over the mishna Torah with a fine tooth comb and you will notice that uh every if you open up a rambam every few paragraphs there'll be something called Omar Abraham the riv it says and he'll either say once in a while he'll say good gak once in a while not not too often other times he might say something like or he might say come how much paper was wasted on this uh now these are called Theo the critiques of the rivit now the truth of the matter is in a way it's a disservice to the rivit because the first thing anybody thinks of when they hear the rivit is oh the rivid is the guy that goes around criticizing everybody the truth is the rivid was a phenomenally great uh Reon who wrote many many many commentaries of his own in which he elaborates in the rambam it's very just short like two line things but still still it is a staple of advanced Yeshiva learning to this day that you want to analyze what is the mlo the rambam and the rivit and what is it based uh based on in fact the rivid was so critical I don't mean that negatively but but he read the rambam so carefully that already in the rambam's introduction the riban has different points that he that he dis disagrees with and the like so one should be aware of the of the rivid I've also mentioned that although most of the controversies about the rambam's works concern the mor which we'll get to there were controversies concerning the mishna Torah itself and the controversies fall into what you might call three categories category one is mamash analogous to the morim controversy and that is the first four chapters of the mishna Torah in the section that's called yoda Torah the fundamental principles of the Torah is essentially an exposition of the Aristotelian concept of the universe that somehow the rambam found an excuse to stick it in AIC work and that's why you'll notice that although throughout the mishna Torah the commentaries of the rambam always give a talmudic source or something uh the first four chapters of yod Torah there are no sources that are given because frankly the only source is Aristotle uh so therefore the same types of critiques that we were going we're going to see about the guide to the perplexed were on those four chapters so for example there were communities that issued a ban not allowed to study morim and the first four chapters of of mish Torah which essentially were an Aristotelian distillation of the UN that was critique number one critique number two was the rambam's failure to site sources uh the rambam just tells you what the is he doesn't tell you where he got it from he doesn't explain his chain of reasoning and uh the issue was as the riv it himself the riv it himself comments he says if he would give me the sources I could evaluate whether his arguments are good or not good this way he's like playing God he's simply know standing on the mountain and giving me rules and who says that um I should follow those rules unless he tells me sources M now in truth in one of the letters of the rambam the rambam confesses that he wished he would have made a companion he didn't want to clutter up the mishna Torah with sources because that would defeat the purpose the whole purpose was to give a practical guide and not necessarily give you vinous sources so he didn't regret not putting sources in the Mish Torah but he regretted he said not having a companion volume as you'd have the mishna Torah and then you'd have a companion volume that would give a lot of sources he didn't have time to to actually do that and strangely enough there were times where he himself could not remember because he would often be asked in the cham he would often be asked you say this in the Mish Torah where do you get it from now you say something in h Shabbat and I learned all of M Shabbat and it's not there where did you get it from and there are so a lot of most of the time the rambam said oh I got it from here some obscure place you know addresses it most of the time he was able to reconstruct it but there were times frankly that he was lost he forgot you know I have to say I mean been there done that I mean it often is the case although with the rambam it's always a surprise that even the rambam was prone to it maybe that's a bit of a comfort for us lesser Mortals uh but there were times where frankly the rambam could not remember meaning it's one thing if if a law of chabas is in M shabas okay so that he'll know but if a law of chabas is a is the T of M that's kind of mentioned as as an aside you know it's going to be hard to always remember those things and even the ramom was overwhelmed sometimes sometimes and it's amazing how in frequently that happens very very rarely but there were such times and as a result he said I should have annotated I should have made a note where everything was from and we would have it as a separate volume so that was a separate accusation that the rambam didn't give Source material uh the third accusation which is kind of related is that it almost seems as if the rambam wanted to displace the study of gamarra in other words the rambam's claim that the reason he called his book mishna Torah the second Torah is because he said all you need is Kash and my book and that's everything I'm the I'm the oral Torah well so you're basically saying forget about gumar why do I have to do questions answers dialectical so the rivot actually accused the rambam of of wanting to just get rid of studying talmud and the rambam actually wrote a letter in which I didn't mean that you know Etc although uh I actually suspect he did mean that in in many many ways uh but okay so th those are the three main accusations one is the philosophical material the other is lack of sources uh the third was the uh attempt or at least the accusation that he wanted to replace study of talmud and there was a fourth issue which is more specific and that is uh you know who gave him the Sam the authority to choose among conflicting views I mean let's imagine that in the gamorra we have five opinions and the rambam paskins like opinion number three well who says opinion number three is the maybe it's one two four and five uh so that's a separate issue which is really more more of a halic debate issue meaning what is the basis now I do want to point out that remember that between the end of the gamarra and the rambam is almost a thousand years of a period that we know as the gim in B and the gim uh were centered in B but they were the world leaders so to speak of jewelry and Sh were sent to them from the whole diaspora as you just showed me you had to pay though because that's how it was funded the Govern was funded by money that people would pay to get sh vot to their communities and the like uh in truth interestingly enough the rambam did not have a a tremendous respect for the gaon meaning although we have this idea that you know the generations go down and therefore we don't argue with the talmud and the ramam is absolutely clear we don't argue with the talmud but he felt that anything after the talmud has no particular binding Authority so when the rambam liked what the gim said he followed them when he didn't like what the gim said he didn't really bother him to argue with the gim he did not regard the gim as that authoritative I mean they were like all and as a result in the to the Mish he very much emphasizes the centrality of the talet as the basis of all of all Hal so that's a little bit about the controversies of the mishna Torah uh again I I want to go on to a new thing but just to finish up that topic [Music] yeah yeah no no you're you're you're correct you're correct but but again it goes back to sources but but but but but you have but but you have to justify it meaning meaning you can't just flip meaning that's again it goes back to the source issue meaning the ramban made a choice granted but G given the fact that he didn't give you sources he didn't give you the basis for his choice now sometimes the choice is simple because the T itself lays down a number of rules regarding choice I mean one example is of course so if you have a majority of the sages versus an individual person the is like the majority of the sages other rules are when Raba argues with anybody we follow reab AA other times there are there are many Hill and shamai so there are around 20 or 25 rules so when you have a talmudic rule for choosing and the rambam was simply following the talmudic rule that's fairly simple in other words the Rama Pi picked opinion three because it's RAB aka's opinion or the ran picked opinion three because it's the's opinion those are simple cases and they tend to be non-controversial cases but there are other times where a particular talmudic rule is not going to tell you which of those five opinions are right and the ramban picked number three and usually in chuot he addresses this people would ask people would ask him questions why did you pick opinion number three and he would explain it to a chain of reasoning which in the mishna Torah is absent the chain of reasoning is not explicated so again that's I wouldn't call that uh an overall critique but those were specific MIM that would come up at various at various points yeah from what I understand is kind of like if you don't want to go through all the critiques and the criticism you want to know the bottom line because a lot of times people try to teach and people are said well what should we do and there's no answer everybody offers opinions that's correct his work is valuable and if people don't want to know the bottom line so quickly and they want to study everything they have the option of studying everything yeah well that's yeah yeah so uh you're a good defender of the rambam essentially no essentially makes a lot of you are rest you are restating what the rambam said the rambam says I'm not taking away gamorra from anybody but there are people who are not able to follow the complexities of these arguments uh they get confu they get confused well he he didn't want to say I'm writing it for people who don't want to learn Tomar that would have been a little a little too close to the heretical line but he said you enjo yeah I I know I know I know but that would have that see if if he would have said it that way that would have fed a little bit into the rivits critique that you're telling people not to bother with gorah instead the rambam's argument was many people can't follow things and many people uh even if they follow the discussion they don't really know what the bottom line is so therefore I'm doing a service to clais that was the rambam's uh definition and the rambam even apologized you know I have students and I learn gumar with them I don't just learn my my book with them I myself you know learn gar he had to say he had to protest and say you know I do gamarra too uh and and uh and and and the like so that's one point now a second point about again I A A few miscellaneous observations is the rambam created This Magnificent organizational table of the totality of in these 14 books with all of the subdivisions but there were a few sore thumbs there were a few that the rambam actually couldn't figure out where to put it and he stuck it in some very odd places so I'm going to give you three examples of things that don't really fit where they are but the rambam like had no other place uh to put it uh the very last book the 14th book uh if you you'll recall or if you have your table of contents is called the book of schaum The Book of like the book of n but the book of the judicial system you have the laws of the Sanhedrin the laws of uh punishments the laws of um actually the laws of kings and their Wars that's also considered to be a form of the justice system meaning essentially the criminal code of Judaism and the judicial structure now there are two things in the Book of Judges that seemingly don't belong there one is hilos the laws of mourning and the other are the laws of honoring father and mother now why why would they be put there and the technical reason that's given is well after the rambam discusses all the laws of execution and death penalties well since people are dead I might as well discuss the laws of mourning so Hil just got stuck in because there was no other particularly logical place to put it so he put it in conjunction with people who get killed by the Sanhedrin the funny thing about that is that that's exactly a case where the laws of mourning are not observed it's a very odd situation if someone is killed by the Sanhedrin the families Do not sit shivba for such I mean it's a rare situation Sanhedrin that kills every seven years or every 70 years was called a bloody Sanhedrin but when that happens the family does not observe morning so to say the Raman put in morning you know incidental to the people getting killed by the Sanhedrin is actually a logical non seor but that's where he put it in what about k well here is the train of Association that that kind of becomes necessary um since the rambam discusses the court system he has a whole section devoted to those who refuse to accept the authority of the Sanhedrin this is the para in the Torah that is called Zak mamre the Elder who refuses to accept Authority now that's talking about authority of the Sanhedrin so the rabam says well okay refusal to accept authority of your Superior that could also apply to children and their relationship to their parents therefore in hilos M the laws of rebellion the ram puts in the laws of K again it's not thematically really connected but there was no better place to put it uh finally in a book which is devoted to one might think it's a little odd that we have two chapters the last two chapters of the mishna Torah devoted to mashia very very fascinating in the there's nothing called Mas you know it's not not there at all but the rambam actually ended the mishna Torah uh about uh describing mashia and where do you stick it in the laws of Kings because mashia will be from malus so when the laws of kings and War the last two chapters are devoted to mhia and I should also mention that that's where the rambam sticks the seven laws of Noah the no that non-jews are obligated to keep is in the middle of the laws of Kings uh it's not particularly clear why it belongs there uh the point basically is the rambam had a very very human problem the rambam had a huge tremendous mass of material that he had to organize and the organization was totally original he did not follow the mishna or the talmud he followed his own unique organization and he managed to do us you know to get this 99.9 percent rights but there are some things that just didn't fit and he had to stick it in in various various places yeah uh well well in the talmud it's in M Kad but but again you can't ask kasas on the talmud because the talmud is totally disorganized uh that's for sure uh the T goes with free association in every topic so one cannot ask on the T oh why is it here and not here I mean the nature of gamorra is it goes on but but since but since the rambam was very very meticulous in in orderly uh uh systematic presentation and organization so on the rambam there's there is always going to be a question why is something here on the gumar itself it's not so much of a question yeah yeah yeah okay I I hear you and that that that that makes sense and I I I've heard I've heard that idea that that idea Advanced and that makes sense but once again you have to remember that that was normally not the way the rambam proceeded in fact the rambam even writes in the hak that he will not be following the the order of the ways things are presented in the gar will be following more of a logical order unlike his great predecessor the Riff and the Riff was the model for the rambam's at least that apply today but the ri simply followed the way the order of the gar in presenting it the rambam said he was creating a new order so it could be that when he was stuck he reverted maybe to an original plan now let me mention another aspect I saw very fascinating a very fascinating article many of you might might have heard of um Dr Kim salv he was okay okay well I tell you in Thea World many have not so maybe I have to you know have greater respect for my OU audience uh but um uh Dr was of course is of course the only son of R Sal yes University in Boston and uh phenomenal really he's a great great t and a great historian brilliant trillian person uh he a few years ago three volumes of his collected essays were uh issued and they are amazing amazing reading just fascinating fascinating reading uh in fact he devotes uh a long article uh to the the the letter will be looking at the M kesem about apostasy and and giving up your life uh and he actually wrote a a long a long critique a long discussion of that letter and he also published many responses to people who disagreed with him so I'm going to be using I'm going to be using that in our when we finally get to that particular letter uh but in one of his articles he discusses various problems in the organization of the rambam in the Mish Torah and one of them and I'll just mention one point because this is a long article 100 pages but is Hil shabas uh you know in the first peric of Hil shabas the rambam lays down the fundamental principles of what is a definitionally what is a forbidden act to do on chabas and he talks about the elements of intention because intention plays a very important point and it's really you know sistic but then uh Dr salek points out that quite logically one would have expected that after describing the general elements of Mala he should then go on and discuss the 39 MOS I mean that would be it you give your introduction then you go on to MOS instead the rambam seems talks about uh things that are not malos per se but he talks about what you do Friday afternoon and leaving food on the oven or on the stove top uh before chabas to cook on chabas but he hasn't discussed the prohibition of cooking yet there he seems to be discussing rinic perip laws which are based on the prohibition of cooking rically but he doesn't discuss the M of cooking till much later so R Sal actually rev also but Dr salek makes the interesting point that the rambam had a certain agenda here and that was an anti- carite agenda you have to know there are Kim even today but they're very very small in number and they're not significant kid they have you know they have a schol and they have a few uh whatever 100 people whatever it would be but in the ROM's time uh the kites particularly in Egypt were a huge huge community and of course the kites were threatening the whole authority of the A and in in in in their way they were not like reform in their way they were very religious they were very observant they were very meticulous in what they were keeping and they posed real real threat to the to ofal so salic tries to show that in various places in the mishna Torah the rambam was kind of attacking the carites without mentioning the Kites and as you know one of the characteristics of the Karim is that they believed that uh you could not have a fire on chabas even if it was lit before chabas and as a result they only ate cold food on chabas and they had to be in darkness and uh that's why the say anyone who does not eat you don't eat cholent on chabas WE arees that maybe you're a carite so if you don't like cholent rethink that because you might be accused of being a carite and therefore the rambam mfka very early introduced the idea of putting warm you know putting food on the stove before chabas in order to have warm food even though in terms of the overall these are Rabin laws they're not the basic M but they were kind of an anti- carite agenda similarly he ends H shabas the last H shabas is he talks about the the importance of Tash shabas marital intimacy on chabas now it's interesting that in many many ways this is really a talk that needs to be much broader uh the rambon was not a great fan of physicality like the r writes that the the physical sense of touch is the most inferior of all senses because it's the most animalistic and the like so he was not a great fan unlike ramban who extol you know you know physicality of the sh sh the ramb tended to be aesthetic in many many ways so why does he all of a sudden want to glorify you know Tash shamita and Shabbat again rabic suggests this was again an anti- carite measure they basically took the position of that you had to have abstinence on chabas it's a holy day every Shabbat should be like yum kipur and the like so this is an interesting agenda that can be carried through in many many parts of the mishna Torah in which the rambam was very very concerned with karaite influence which today is very very insignificant uh but in the rambam's time was a very very Major Force Kim and MIT in particular were very very large by the way there's another yeah sorry I'm sorry how many about cares were there there I mean there were thousands I can't I can't give you an exact number but it ran in some place to find out yeah yeah yeah you could look up look up carites in Wikipedia I'm sure you'll you'll get numbers um now let me just mention another community that the ram had to fight interestingly enough he had to fight Israeli Yim you know there were people from ER Israel religious people who for whatever reason went to mitraan and uh they wanted to keep their old Customs now the talet itself records that the original custom in ER Israel was to finish the Torah every three years the triennial cycle of the minog of Babylonian was one year as we do and uh it seems that even in erel they eventually went to the one year but there were some holdout congregations that were still doing the three-year cycle and apparently they came to mitzraim a group of them and they established their own B knesset where in Cairo in Cairo in the rambam city in F which was the Jewish the old Jewish part of Cairo they established their own Manan where they did the Torah threeyear cycle now uh the rambam considered this very very dangerous because essentially it was a against the decisions of the Babylonian talmud and remember the rambam held that the talmud was the highest highest level of halakic authority and the ramban fought very ferociously to close down that minion uh and uh and and the like so he was well a threeyear cycle no no that's correct that's correct there's a lot of uncertainty how the three-year cycle works but yeah uh parat bit would be read over three weeks no they divided they divided the paros very very differently in fact if you want to know how the cycle might have works if you look at look look for example at the medish Raba of saer braus at vus rabba and you will see it's divided I don't remember the exact number but approximately partiot and it's not clear what where the divisions are how do you get 92 but but someone to say that this reflects the old that it took you know 92 weeks to finish K Braes you know uh you know a year and a half they divided it that way other paros they they they did you know uh in fewer weeks and and and and the like so the rabam had attackers from the left and from the uh from the right um one other point about the mishna Torah just to be sure I've mentioned before that the rambam wrote the saer hamitzvos in Arabic and he wrote the uh the Parish of mishas in Arabic and he wrote the Moren in Arab Arabic the Mish Torah was written in Hebrew I just want to make clear that when I say the ROM wrote it in Arabic you'll often see this described as judeo Arabic but I want to explain what that means judeo Arabic is not Latino uh judeo Arabic is the term that's used for Pure Arabic that is written in Hebrew letters so the rambam's Arabic work works are written in Hebrew letters but it's not in a jargon AR it's in a pure Arabic with Hebrew letters people sometimes misunderstand and they think it was Latino no it's in regular literary Arabic but they used Hebrew letters um uh well it was very common I don't know why well he did it because it was common when Jews would correspond in Arabic they used Hebrew letters it's not clear to me why that was so maybe they didn't want to honor Arabic which after all was yeah well I'm sure many of them knew I'm sure many of them knew I'm sure the rambam the rambam could read and write in regular Arabic letters but whatever okay Al righty so that's kind of what I just wanted to conclude about the mishna Torah now let's go to the third great work of the rambam and that is the morim which Guide to the confused Guide to the perplexed uh is the name uh the rambam wrote this around between 1185 and 1190 so he's between 50 and 55 right it's shortly he began it shortly after he finished uh the mishna Torah and um it is interesting that the initial impetus for this work was uh one student that he had that he had met all the way back when the rambam was a young man in Fez in Morocco before he even came to mitzraim so he met uh a young man a little bit younger than the rambam who became his disciple Yosef Ben Yehuda and uh even though they separated and didn't see each other uh shortly thereafter there was a lifelong bond between them the rambam considered this talmid very precious very intelligent very Discerning uh a pure heart and the rambam essentially wrote theim as a series of letters to this tal now I want to correct a very common bibliographical error error that that is often made uh there was somebody called Ys Ben Yehuda IB AK I AK so it's the same ysep and same name Ys and so you'll often sometimes see in older books older books that the rambam wrote his saer for YB AK that is actually a mistake uh yose Ben Yehuda ibben aknin who the rambam knew actually the rambam did know him and the ramam had a correspondence with him but that is not Yos and Yehuda For Whom the rambam wrote the mor B him so it's a mistake that older books make but in in more recent history uh that is uh that is corrected uh and indeed to this uh day if you open up aim you will actually see it begins with it's not really an introduction it's a letter to his talet saying that I'm writing this for you because I want to share with you insights regarding the true meaning of the Torah and the true understanding of the Torah and he writes that even though we are separated by Distance by Miles uh we are joined in the heart and um you will I will be sending you these chapters as I finish them and you will then come to a true understanding of how to serve God and how to understand the mystical parts of the Torah right so this is called this is the this is the opening of theim which essentially is his dedication now the truth of the matter is it is a mistake to say he only wrote it as a private letter and then somehow it got published the ramam did intend to circulate the safer but the advanced copy so to speak meaning ysep and Yuda got it chapter by chapter by chapter uh when the rambam then finished the book took five years 1185 to 1190 it was then U distributed uh to the world initially in Arabic uh this was what 1190 uh it was translated into Hebrew 1204 shortly before the rambam's death the translation was completed by the rambam's official translator rabish shmuel iben tibon right the ibben tibon family were the famous Arabic to Hebrew translators uh in the Middle Ages the saer mitv and the parish mishas was sho's father Yehuda ibon theim Yehuda had already died so it was Shu Ian tibon who actually you as he was translating he actually asked the rambam he would check with the rambam what uh the right translations would be and in fact the rambam issued a very famous letter about translations interestingly enough where the rambam says a translator should not aim for a word to word translation because the rambam said language have different syta syntactical Arrangements um I mean let's take a very simple example Hebrew vem if I translate that literally and said God but in English that's not how you talk you don't say you don't put the verb before the noun you don't say and said God you say and God said so you're already changing the order of words so the ramban wrote to to that it's very very important that you not become slavishly over literal you have to master the content of what is said and then you need to express it in the words of the language to which you are translating that's an important guide to translation of course translation is a surprisingly difficult art because on one hand you're not going to do word for word on the other hand you don't want to imp ose your commentary on it meaning a sentence is some espe especially in the where the r warns us of this sentences are sometimes deliberately ambiguous they are deliberately written to convey mult a multiple meanings now you're trying to translate and you're saying well this is going to be ambiguous I need to clarify it but no you're you're you're defeating the purpose here you're using your translation to be a commentary so in truth translation is a very very difficult art because on one hand you want to avoid being overly literal on the other hand you don't want to take sides if a sentence can have many interpretations you want to leave as many nuances as the original had of course by definition you're by definition you're going to lose something whether it's translating the Torah or anything else by definition you're going to lose quite a lot but you try to preserve as much as possible uh interestingly enough I think I had mentioned the very famous letter of the rambam where the rambam says you know I work all day as a doctor and I don't eat you know at the uh in this in the Ci's court and then I come home and it's already night and there are hundreds of people waiting for me for shilas or sta or or Rua and I just let ask him to let me alone for a half an hour so I can eat and then I meet people till two hours into the night and then I try to learn you know till midnight and after midnight and then the next day it starts all over again um I think I mentioned that letter to you about how hard the rambam worked uh he says only in Shabbat I have a little bit of rest and what I do is I learn with people the whole day and Shabbat that that's what he says so I want you to know I I don't think I mentioned this this was actually a letter to Rao IB tiban who wanted a personal meeting with the Ramba to discuss theim and uh apparently someone said the ram just didn't want to meet in person he didn't have time so he just said you know get been there done that he says don't have time my schedule is so packed so may have been so who knows maybe I I don't know I mean obviously I don't know but maybe the Rabon schedule was not exactly as totally totally busy as he said but he didn't want to have a personal meeting he said you just stay where you are and we can correspond by writing and that's going to be that's going to be fine so so again 128 I'm sorry 1185 to 1190 is the composition of theim 1204 is the completion of the translation by rmu iben tibon and that had become that had did become the standard translation for hundreds and hundreds of years uh in recent decades uh we've had both new Hebrew translations in more modern Hebrew rapak the great yemenite Rabbi retranslated all of the rambam's Arabic Works into a more modern Hebrew and uh there's a professor Mel Schwarz who did a new translation of the morim in Hebrew in Hebrew from the from the Arabic and then we have new English translations The Standard English translation was Michael freedlander which by the way is available for free online uh freedlander translation is I believe the late 1800s it's a good translation uh it goes all the way back but then we have more modern things uh uh including very some very very recent very recent just last year very recent new translation uh I've read an interesting critique of the new translation that it it attempts to make theim so readible that it eliminates some of the mysterious complexity meaning some books are not meant to be oversimplified uh and the accusation against the newest translation is it tries to be so clear that it eliminates some of the ambiguities and yet the rambam did have a Shea which sounds a little strange to us that he said he he said to his tment I am introducing some deliberate ambiguities and contradictions in this PUK because I'm writing it for Discerning Minds who will be able to put the pieces together again this sounds very strange to a um to a modern reader because we assume you know that's a normal assumption whether you know some authors are not that good at it but we assume that the purpose of an author is to be as clear as possible in communicating a message now again some people are better at it than others yeah granted but as a goal the goal should be I want to be understood and yet the rambam had a certain approach to certain mystical philosophical doctrines that I'm not writing this for the masses I'm writing this for special individuals and therefore I'm going to be deliberately obscure so the are going to be scared I'm not going to read that it doesn't make any sense but those who persevere right so this notion of deliberate obscurity the rambam himself introduces in the Morin and as a result as I say when translations try to be overly clear they say they're actually departing from The rambam's View okay now uh the mor itself uh uh is certainly one of the classic maybe the greatest book of Jewish uh philosophy no question about it it also had a tremendous influence on Christian theological thought you know the greatest uh systematic Christian Theologian is generally said to be Thomas aquinus who wrote the sum of theologic kind of The Logical principles of the faith and um I'm not going to say it's based on ra it's based on a lot lot of things but the mor was a m in Latin because it was had been translated to Latin too was a major major influence in Thomas aquinus other dun scotus you know various other Christian theologians it also had a great influence in Arabic thoughts over the years in fact the morim in Arabic in its original Arabic has never gone out of print in Arab countries I mean it's interesting and even in the Years when there was state of war between all of these countries in Israel but in the University libraries uh and even in the high highend bookstores uh the guide to the perplex was always available in Arabic as a philosophical work that was very relevant to Islamic theology so it was a very very important work that had a great deal of influence interestingly enough its influence within Judaism gone up gone down going up going down uh so for example in most yot uh you know you will not find uh the in the regular Bas Med you know you'll go to the shelf and you will certainly see the books of the Mish Tor every sazos certainly they're gon to be there then you ask well go to the side room here and uh get the key from the librarian you know and we'll we'll find you so it's interesting that just the past few years there seems to be a Resurgence of Interest new translations English Hebrew uh not only translations but books like Guide to the guide you know books which are trying to summarize and clarify so it is interesting that uh for after many many decades if not even centuries in which the Moa was neglected by the mainstream uh Orthodox Community it seems to be coming back in many many ways as well uh the rise of cabala uh did not bode well for the mor the morim is a book of rational analytical philosophy uh the world of cabala is the world of mysticism and nonlinear uh thoughts and even though most of us don't learn cabala but you have to know that mainstream Judaism has largely become cabalistic we're all cabalists whether you know it or not uh and as a result the whole rational tradition of rapo before the rambam as well as the rambam kind of faded into the background because cabala became the new Theology of Judaism so there were different reasons why the Moa went up and the Moa went down uh but as I say it's it's a book that even people who don't learn have to acknowledge its great great importance for no other reason than uh Ram wrote it who are theim the guides to those who are confused now obviously he considered yose Ben Yehuda to be someone who was confused he wrote it for him but it's much more say again same same word that's exactly right yeah yeah yeah but I don't think I don't think he wrote it forish wouldn't aish wouldn't get it um so the r himself says that he's writing this book for those people who are faithful to the Torah they want to keep the Torah but there are things in the Torah which is called revealed truths which don't seem to be consistent with the philosophical truths that have been arrived at by human reason and thus they're perturbed because although they want to be observant they find that the observances or the mitv or the history or the account does not fit the inner logic of philosophy so in many many ways morim is an attempt to create a Reconciliation a synthesis between two sources of truth that we access one is the truth of revelation God just tells you something and the other is the truths of human reason and in theory truth ought to be unitary meaning to say uh if something is true in one one sphere it ought to be true in the other sphere and people were confused and therefore and it's been pointed out that the Mish Torah and the are kind of addressing two different audiences although they overlap a lot uh the mishna Tor is addressing every Jew who wants to keep the Mitzvah some Jews are philosophers some Jews are not some Jews have these problems some Jews are not either way Mish Tor tells you what to do is more limited in its scope it's limited to Jews with certain questions if you don't have the questions okay doesn't bother you maybe the book is not for you but if you have the questions this is a book that addresses them this is the na yeah yeah so see but you're already whether you know it or not you're already speaking cabala see see no no it it it's an amazing thing things that you know it's not that word kubala but things that we learn in Yeshiva things that we learn in seminary uh these are cabalistic ideas actually that have become mainstream uh the ramban belonged to an older tradition that said it's either EMS or sheer there's no like you know uh two types of ms two levels of mems and therefore the ramam attempts a Reconciliation now you have to you have to know that in the Middle Ages philosophy meant Aristotle Aristotle was the iso now remember how long this was Aristotle lived uh approximately 400 BCE BCE he was in of course Macedonia then Greece the rambam is living right the 12th century so we're talking about 1600 years after Aristotle's death the mainstream philosophy of Christianity in terms of philosophy of Islam and of Judaism within the rationalist tradition is Aristotelian now granted Aristotle had many meor just like rinic literature uh there were many Arabic commentators on Aristotle that the rambam Drew upon ABI Senna and Abu Rashad different ones so Aristotle was reinterpreted in many many ways but Aristotle was the Bible of philosophy in in Europe that that's what it was and therefore when the rambam wants to reconcile uh or explain contradictions between Torah and philosophy he is dealing with aristotelia philosophy now that immediately creates a certain mer that we'll have towards the mor simply because artian philosophy is no longer the normative philosophy generally so some of the issues that the rambam had to address are not always the issues that bother people today people today are bothered by other issues not necessarily the issues that the rhom was concerned with and that creates a difficulty in the Moa because if you don't have a grounding in Aristotle you're not going to fully understand what the rambam is trying to answer nevertheless uh the underlying insights are still very very valuable so again so next week I'm going to continue with this a little bit again I I do apologize for not getting to the letters yet but I I think uh it is very worthwhile to at least give you an acquaintance uh with the books because the books are referred to in the letters many many many times uh so the letters presuppose that you're familiar with the at least the structure of the swarmm have a wonderful week and the cult