All these generating stations, whether in the country or in the cities, are welded together in our thought, and appear to us as a single national centre, which even now, in its infancy, exerts a visible and appreciable influence on the Diaspora. Hence a man need not believe in miracles in order to see with his mind’s eye this centre growing in size, improving in character, and exerting an ever-increasing spiritual influence on our people, until at last it shall reach the goal set before it by the instinct of national self-preservation: to restore our national unity throughout the world through the restoration of our national culture in its historic home. This centre will not be even then a “secure home of refuge” for our people; but it will surely be a home of healing for its spirit.
And afterwards?
Ask no questions! In our present state of spiritual disorganisation we have no idea of the volume of our national strength, nor of what it will be able to achieve when all its elements are united round a single centre, and quickened by a single strong and healthy spirit. The generations that are to come afterwards will know the measure of their power, and will adjust their actions to it. For us, we are not concerned with the hidden things of the distant future. Enough for us to know the things revealed, the things that are to be done by us and our children in a future that is near.
THE SUPREMACY OF REASON
(TO THE MEMORY OF MAIMONIDES)
(1904)
At last, after the lapse of seven hundred years,[[86]] the anniversary of Maimonides’ death has been raised to the dignity of an important national day of memorial, and has been honoured throughout the Diaspora. In earlier centuries our ancestors do not appear to have remembered that so-and-so many hundred years had passed since the death of Maimonides; still less did they make the anniversary a public event, as we do now, although they were in much closer sympathy with Maimonides than we are—or, to be more correct, because they were in much closer sympathy with him than we are. They did not feel it necessary to commemorate the death of one whom in spirit they saw still living among them—one whose advice and instruction they sought every day in all their difficulties of theory and practice, as though he were still in their midst. In those days it was almost impossible for an educated Jew (and most Jews then were educated) to pass a single day without remembering Maimonides: just as it was impossible for him to pass a single day without remembering Zion. In whatever field of study the Jew might be engaged—in halachah,[[87]] in ethics, in religious or philosophical speculation—inevitably he found Maimonides in the place of honour, an authority whose utterances were eagerly conned even by his opponents. And even if a man happened to be no student, at any rate he would say his prayers every day, and finish his morning prayer with the “Thirteen Articles”: how then could he forget the man who formulated the Articles of the Jewish religion?
But how different it is to-day! If a Jew of that earlier time came to life again, and we wanted to bring home to him as forcibly as possible the distance between ourselves and our ancestors, it would be enough, I think, to tell him that nowadays one may spend a great deal of time in reading Hebrew articles and books without coming across a single reference to Maimonides. And the reason is not that we have satisfactory answers to all the spiritual questions which troubled our ancestors, and have therefore no need for the out-of-date philosophy of Maimonides. The reason is that the questions themselves are no longer on our agenda: because we are told that nowadays men of enlightenment are concerned not with spiritual questions, but only with politics and hard, concrete facts. If Maimonides in his day accepted the dictum of Aristotle that the sense of touch is a thing to be ashamed of, we in our day are prone to accept the dictum that “spirituality” is a thing to be ashamed of, and nothing is worth notice except what can be touched and felt. When, therefore, we were reminded this year that seven hundred years had elapsed since the death of the man with whom the spiritual life of our people has been bound up during all the intervening period, the fact made a profound impression throughout the length and breadth of Jewry. It was as though our people were quickened by this reminder, and stirred suddenly to some vague yearning after the past—that past in which it was still capable (despite all the Judennot[[88]]) of looking upwards and seeking answers to other questions than those of bread and a Nachtasyl.
Be that as it may, Maimonides has become the hero of the moment and a subject of general interest. Many an address has been delivered, many an article has been written in his honour this year; but nobody, so far as I have seen, has yet used the occasion to unearth, from beneath that heap of musty metaphysics which is so foreign to us, the central idea of Maimonides, and to show how there sprang from this central idea those views of his on religion and morality, which produced a long period of unstable equilibrium in Judaism, and have left a profound impression on the spiritual development of our people. Since none else has performed this task, I am minded to try my hand at it. If even those who are expert in Maimonides’ system find here some new point of view, so much the better; if not, no harm is done. For my purpose is not to discover something new, but to rehearse old facts in an order and a style that seem to me to be new, and to be better adapted to present the subject intelligibly to modern men, who have not been brought up on medieval literature.
I
Can Maimonides claim to be regarded as the originator of a new system? This is a question which has exercised various authors; but we may leave it to those who attach importance to names. We may give Maimonides that title or not: but two facts are beyond dispute. On the one hand, the fundamental assumptions on which he built up his system were not his own, but were borrowed by him almost in their entirety from the philosophy of Aristotle as presented at second hand by the Arabs, who introduced into it a good deal of neo-Platonic doctrine. But, on the other hand, it is indisputable that Maimonides carried to their logical conclusion the ethical consequences of those assumptions, as the Greeks and the Arabs, with whom the assumptions originated, did not; and in this way he did say something that was new and hitherto unsaid, though it was logically implied in the fundamental principles which he took from other thinkers.
If, then, we would understand the ethical system of Maimonides, we must set clearly before our minds the metaphysical assumptions on which it was built. Those assumptions are so far removed from the philosophical and scientific conceptions of our own time that the modern man can scarcely grasp them. But in those days even the greatest thinkers believed these airy abstractions to be the solid truths of philosophy, rock-based on incontestable evidences. Hence it is not surprising that Maimonides, like the rest, was convinced beyond doubt that this “scientific” teaching was the uttermost limit of human understanding, and could never be changed or modified. So absolute, indeed, was his conviction that he went so far as to put this teaching in a dogmatic form, as though it had been a revelation from above.[[89]]