REVIEW: A New Edition of Rambam’s Guide
Moreh Nevukhim, edited by Mordechai Plaut (Feldheim Publishers, 2019), 568 pp.
Rabbi Mordechai Plaut is an author of Torah literature, having previously written Six Constant Mitzvos: A Young Child’s Guide to Faith and Belief, and was editor for the English edition of the Hebrew Israeli daily newspaper, Yated Ne’eman. Most recently, he has turned his attention to re-publishing the Rambam’s Guide for the Perplexed in a newer, more accessible format.
In reading his opening comments of this new edition, it becomes clear that R. Plaut’s project is to open the Moreh to a new readership from the yeshiva world that is unfamiliar with Aristotelian philosophical concepts. In his “Foreword to the Reader,” he cites Rambam’s own words to explain one of his primary objectives in publishing this new edition of the Moreh. To paraphrase his opening comments: Rambam admonished his readers to carefully and thoroughly analyze and understand his words. Accordingly, it would be optimal to study the Moreh in its sequential order, from beginning to end. But since some might forsake that daunting project entirely due to its formidability, especially those who are unfamiliar with philosophical concepts, the author has attempted to identify those chapters of the Moreh which are accessible to even the layman who lacks philosophical grounding.
In keeping with this objective, R. Plaut chose to have two alternating fonts for the text throughout his edition of the Moreh. Those chapters and sections of chapters which are steeped in philosophy have a lighter font, and those sections which are more strictly “divrei Torah” have the more standard dark font that appears throughout the text. The implication is that if someone just wants to get to the “Torah” of the Moreh and skip over the “philosophy,” he now has an easy identifier in this work.
R. Plaut has done a great service in re-typesetting the classic Shmuel Ibn Tibbon translation from Arabic to Hebrew. The new edition is fully punctuated, which in itself immediately gives greater readability to the text.
More recent translations from the original Arabic have become favored of late over the Ibn Tibbon, early 13th-century translation. But R. Plaut explains his reason for sticking with the original Ibn Tibbon translation, as does Rabbi Dovid Cohen, in his approbation to this work. Ibn Tibbon’s translation should be favored because he lived during Rambam’s lifetime. He was closest historically to the original text and had the greatest affinity to Rambam’s mindset and language of the time. Although even an expert Arabist of a later era might be able to correctly translate difficult words, such a person might miss a nuance of language due to linguistic changes that invariably occur in every language over the course of centuries and even decades.
There are many added features to this volume, some of which I will detail. After his introduction, wherein he identifies what the Rambam’s objectives were in writing the Moreh (more on that below), R. Plaut cites various Rishonim and Aharonim who extol the study of the Moreh and/or cite from it heavily. This section reminded me of the impressive collection of authors cited before Sha’ar HaYihud in the Lev Tov edition of Hovot HaLevavot, revealing differing opinions on the value of incorporating philosophy into the study of Judaism.
Rabbi Judah Al-Harizi also translated the Moreh from Arabic, only 9 years after Ibn Tibbon, adding a brief one or two-sentence synopsis of each chapter. Al-Harizi’s chapter synopses are included in the classic editions of the Ibn Tibbon translation. But because Ibn Tibbon himself was unhappy with Al-Harizi’s work, R. Plaut provides a new abstract to each chapter as part of his book.
For many difficult passages and words in the Ibn Tibbon text, R. Plaut includes a short footnote and translates these into an easier Hebrew. This, too, provides a far greater understanding of the text.
The book’s appendices contain several useful features, including:
- Lengthy topical discussions on selected passages.
- Ibn Tibbon’s glossary of difficult words and phrases used in the Moreh Nevukhim.
- Sefer Milot Higayon, Rambam’s treatise on logic, with a focus on using precise language to express logical terms (the author indicates that he included this upon the advice of Rabbi Moshe Shapiro, zt”l).
- Several helpful indexes.
Until now, I have detailed what I find to be laudatory about R. Plaut’s work, which undoubtedly entailed painstaking effort, and for which the editor deserves our praise. In order to explain my reservations, allow me to share my own history. Many years ago, when I was a teenage yeshiva bachur, I kept hearing about the importance of studying Maharal, from people whom I respected for their intellectual and philosophical curiosity. I knew nothing about Maharal, but was made to feel that I was a “nobody” if I didn’t familiarize myself with his teachings. I immediately immersed myself in his writings, initially understanding very little. An example of a concept that I found completely foreign appeared in several essays, where Maharal made reference to two terms that I had never heard before: “homer” and “tzura.” I tried my best to make sense of these terms, but for the life of me, I hadn’t encountered these terms in my Tanakh or Talmud studies, and none of my contemporaries seemed to know very much about what these words meant.
It was only years later that I studied ancient and medieval philosophy and realized that these are the Hebrew words for terms coined by Aristotle, “matter” and “form,” respectively. Viewing the world as a bifurcation between matter and form was an essential part of Aristotle’s science, and so much of what Maharal (and those who preceded him, such as the Rambam) believed should be incorporated into a Jew’s religious philosophy. For example, the ontological differences between male and female (whether human beings or the constructs of male and female that pervade all of reality) are represented as a divide between “homer” and “tzura” Obviously, Maharal studied Aristotle (although he lived in the height of the Renaissance, when Aristotle would become passé). I wish that someone had sat me down and told me, “If you’re going to study Maharal, you need to understand that he understood physics and metaphysics through an Aristotelian lens. Here are the basic concepts and a lexicon of Aristotelian science and logic.”
But that talk never happened. Perhaps my teachers felt that the idea that many of our medievalists based their understanding of Jewish concepts on a foreign, non-Jewish thinker, could be dangerous in the hands of a young novice. Maybe they feared that I would conclude that since the modern world views Aristotelianism as completely debunked science, we should reject those Jewish writings that are based on his obsolete positions.
With this background in mind, I hope that I will be excused for my lack of unqualified enthusiasm for R. Plaut’s work. As mentioned above, R. Plaut signals those sections of the Guide that he deemed to be purely philosophical in nature with a distinct font. To me, it seems impossible to study the Guide without having a modicum of knowledge of Aristotelian philosophy, since it is the central current that runs through the entire Guide. By excising the philosophical sections from the Guide – or at least giving the yeshiva student a “pass” to skip them – it makes so many of the other sections of the Guide completely unintelligible. Moreover, removing the philosophy of the Guide defeats its very function – as laid out by Rambam himself in his introductory letter to his student, Joseph ben Judah, for whom the Guide was written – which was to demonstrate to the believing Jew that one’s Judaism is completely compatible with the established Aristotelian science of the day.
I’ll provide just one illustration of this design flaw, but there are literally dozens of similar examples. There is a large section of the second part of the Guide that deals with the concept of creation. For Rambam, the importance of believing in God as Creator is second in importance only to a belief that He is unitary (II:13). Rambam therefore devotes 19 chapters, from II:13–31, to demonstrate the Torah’s belief in creation ex nihilo. In order to properly explain why this is the correct belief, Rambam tells us that in addition to the model of creation ex nihilo, there are two other approaches to cosmogony (the origins of existence): One is Platonic and the other is Aristotelian. Ultimately, both approaches are rejected by Rambam. But the two approaches are very different from each other, and it is important to understand both of them in order to appreciate why the Torah’s creation narrative is the only acceptable approach even from a philosophical point of view.
Plato believed in a creation of sorts, but a creative process that started with an eternally existent primordial and formless matter that was given form at the time of creation. Aristotle did not believe in creation at all, but rather subscribed to eternal existence, that is, everything that we see today in its current form has always existed in the same form. Both the views of Plato and Aristotle are informative about their respective beliefs in an omnipotent and overarching Deity. Plato believed in a volitional Deity who can impose His will upon existence. However, Plato also believed that this Deity must conform to the laws of science. Creation ex nihilo is such a drastic departure from the natural laws of science that Plato surmised that his Deity must have used pre-existent materials with which to create our world.
Aristotle’s view also reflects upon his deism. He believed in a non-volitional God who does not insert His will into the affairs of this world, but rather simply “overflows” His essence naturally and automatically into our world. This is why creation was anathema to Aristotle, because his Deity’s perfection would not allow Him to essentially change or insert himself into our inferior existence at a given time.
Rambam discusses these two Greek philosophical approaches extensively. He ultimately concludes, in II:25, that creation ex nihilo is the correct account of creation. But he then delineates an important divide between Aristotle and Plato: One would not be deemed a heretic if one subscribed to the Platonic view of creation, and would still be within the acceptable dogmatic camp of Judaism. In II:26, Rambam even cites a Midrash that appears to subscribe to this Platonic view. By contrast, subscribing to the Aristotelian depiction of an eternal universe places one squarely outside of acceptable Jewish dogma, since it implies a non-providential Deity.
What becomes clear from the above is that in order to appreciate the nuances of acceptable belief about such foundational doctrines as creation and the nature of God’s providence, one should at least have a familiarity with the three views of cosmogony: (1) Creation ex nihilo, (2) the Platonic view, and (3) the Aristotelian view. And yet, R. Plaut, in printing chapter II:13, which sets forth these three beliefs in brief, signals to his reader who seeks only the “Torah” portions of the Guide, that it is acceptable to skip the bulk of the chapter, which literally forms the foundation of a dozen subsequent chapters of the Guide.
Furthermore, while it is true that there are certain chapters of the Guide that can be studied independently of knowledge of philosophy (especially at the end of Part III), those chapters are few and far between. In fact, the reason why the Guide is so heavily infused with Aristotelian science is because Rambam believed, with every fiber of his being, that Aristotle had accurately depicted all of sublunary reality, and that in order for a Jew to conjoin with God to the greatest degree, one needed to understand the machinations of the world given to us by God. I believe that to uncouple Aristotelian philosophy from the Guide in the way that R. Plaut suggests is possible, would have made Rambam himself cringe, because it is so antithetical to his entire oeuvre and worldview.
Rabbi Plaut also distorts the content of the Guide when he states, in the second sentence of his introductory section: “One who examines the Guide will discover that the vast majority of this work deals only with words of Torah, without any admixture, God forbid. Only a small fraction of the work includes words of the philosophers and other external matters.” Firstly, this assertion is incorrect; whole chapters of the Guide are drawn straight out of philosophic works of Rambam’s time. Moreover, there’s a great irony in that claim. Rambam viewed all of the philosophical beliefs with which he agreed and which are referenced in the Guide, as being part and parcel of Torah itself. He devotes the first four chapters of Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah to Aristotelian metaphysics and physics. His reason for doing so is clear, as he states in the text: Aristotle correctly, in his view, depicted what the Talmud calls Ma’ase Merkava and Ma’ase Bereishit, the workings of the heavens and the workings of our sublunary realm. This is precisely why the Guide so heavily cites Aristotle’s work, because his writings simply repackage Torah ideas that made their way to foreign nations. It would have been anathema for the Rambam to try to uncouple Torah and philosophy. For him, they were one and the same.
If you seek a clean, new typeset of the Ibn Tibon translation of the Guide, replete with improved punctuation, terse clarifications of difficult words and phrases, and excellent indexes, Rabbi Plaut’s work is very helpful and highly recommended. If you are looking for guidance on how to learn the Guide, I would suggest alternative resources.
N. Daniel Korobkin, honorary president of the Rabbinical Council of America, is Rabbi of Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto Congregation (“The BAYT”). He teaches the Guide for WebYeshiva.org and his Moreh Nevukhim podcast is available online in various podcast platforms.