Lawrence J. Kaplan is Professor of Rabbinics and Jewish Philosophy in the Department of Jewish Studies of McGill University, Montreal Quebec, where he has been teaching for over the past forty years. Born in 1944, he received his B.A. from Yeshiva College, his M.A. and PhD. from Harvard University, and Rabbinic Ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elkhanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University. He was a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies of Harvard University in 2005, a Tikvah Fellow at the Tikvah Center for Law and Jewish Civilization of New York University Law School in 2011-2012, and a Polonsky Fellow at the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Judaic Studies in 2013.
The following exchange will focus on Maimonides – Between Philosophy and Halakhah, a book edited by Professor Kaplan which features Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik’s lectures on Maimonides..
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Dear Professor Kaplan,
We like to start these exchanges with short introductory questions to let our readers get acquainted with the theme, so here’s yours:
This book is based on very detailed student notes from lectures given by the influential Rabbi-philosopher Joseph Soloveitchik about Maimonides. Whom is this new volume intended for? What does it teach us about Maimonides and what does it teach us about Rav Soloveitchik?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
The full sub-title of the book is “Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s Lectures on the Guide of the Perplexed at the Bernard Revel Graduate School (1950-51).” The Bernard Revel Graduate School, more popularly known as “Revel,” is Yeshiva University’s graduate school of Jewish Studies. In 1950-51, as opposed to today, all the students enrolled for rabbinical ordination at YU’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary—the “Yeshiva” proper—also had to enroll in an M.A. program in Jewish studies at Revel. If I may generalize, then, the original audience for these lectures were rabbinical students whose primary interest was in their Talmudic studies, and who had only a secondary interest in Jewish philosophy. As a result, the philosophical discussions in the book, are, on the whole, not highly technical, and address, in an accessible fashion, fundamental issues in philosophy of religion, and, more specifically, Judaism. Still, it is clear both from these lectures and from R. Soloveitchik’s writings in general that he took philosophy very seriously, and the reader of this book should expect to encounter challenging passages that may require some concentration. Overall, however, the book’s passages glow with passion and eloquence, and the lectures, as a whole, present a sweeping and dramatic argument that will carry along most readers in its wake.
While R. Soloveitchik in many of his essays, in the course of developing his arguments, drew upon Maimonides’ philosophy as presented in the Guide of the Perplexed, this book is R. Soloveitchik’s first work specifically devoted to an analysis of it. Obviously, then, anyone interested in either Maimonides or R. Soloveitchik, not to mention those interested in both figures, will want to read this book. But beyond those potential readers, given the fundamental issues in philosophy of religion and Judaism addressed by this book, as mentioned above, I believe that educated thinking Jews, and indeed, many educated thinking non-Jews will find R. Soloveitchik’s take on these issues suggestive and illuminating, if, of course, open to question.
As for what the book teaches us about Maimonides and what it teaches us about R. Soloveitchik, this is not an easy question to answer. My teacher and R. Soloveitchik’s son-in-law, the late Professor Isadore Twersky, often commented that all of Jewish intellectual history subsequent to Maimonides could be read as a series of conflicting interpretations of his work. To evaluate the interpretive cogency of R. Soloveitchik’s understanding of the Guide in light of the most recent Maimonidean scholarship is not an easy task. Generally, one can broadly divide interpreters of Maimonides into two camps: the radicals who minimize the differences between Maimonides and the philosophers (particularly Aristotle), sometimes going so far as to deny that there are any differences between them; and the traditionalists, who emphasize these differences. R. Soloveitchik clearly belongs in the traditionalist camp.
Very generally, I would argue that R. Soloveitchik’s stress in these lectures on human subjectivity and the subjective nature of religious experience, particularly as reflected in the fear and love of God, have a modern flavor and reflect his emphases more than those of Maimonides. But perhaps it might be more useful to focus on the key problem that R. Soloveitchik addresses in the book, namely, the claim that Maimonides follows Aristotle in espousing ethical relativism, that is, in maintaining that theory, knowledge, is superior to morality, both moral virtue and moral action, and, furthermore, in arguing that only intellectual knowledge possesses intrinsic value, while morality possesses only instrumental worth, serving only as a steppingstone to attaining intellectual perfection. From this it would follow that Halakhah, Jewish Law, dealing with action, is of lesser worth than science, and that Talmud Torah – that is, the study of Halakhah – is inferior to the study of the sciences. While many of the radical interpreters of the Guide maintain that this is, indeed, the case, for R. Soloveitchik, by sharp contrast, the validity of this claim, in light of the many years and towering intellectual effort that Maimonides devoted to composing his great code of law, the Mishneh Torah, is almost impossible to conceive, for, if admitted, it would result, so R. Soloveitchik maintains, in making Maimonides into a schizophrenic. One can say that the book’s overall argument is devoted to showing that there is a higher level of ethics that follows upon the intellectual perfection attained through scientific knowledge of the cosmos, as opposed to serving only as a steppingstone to attaining that intellectual perfection, an ethics of the imitation of the divine attributes, which not only is of value in itself, but is superior to scientific knowledge, even if, as stated immediately above, it is dependent on it. But to spell this out with the fullness it deserves and evaluate its scholarly cogency are tasks for another essay.
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