Maimonides on Sacrifices
The best-known, as well as the most controversial, interpretation of the place of sacrifices in the religious life is that of Moses Maimonides in The Guide for the Perplexed.
Maimonides, the greatest rabbi of the Middle Ages, had already written a systematic commentary to the Mishna as well as the Mishneh Torah, the greatest of all codes of Jewish law, before writing The Guide for the Perplexed. He was internationally recognised as a supreme authority on Jewish law, and was turned to for guidance by Jews from as far afield as Provence, Marseilles, and Lunel in France, to Yemen and Baghdad. He had become a physician in service to the Sultan Saladin in Cairo and was the author of many medical texts. He had long had an interest in philosophy – one of his first published works was a treatise on logic – and he believed, as he wrote in his code, that natural science and philosophy were ways of arriving at the love and fear of God.1Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 2:2.
These views were not shared by the vast majority of his contemporaries, who if anything thought that too deep an encounter with “Greek wisdom” could only lead to heresy or at least the dilution and diminution of faith. A chance encounter, however, led Maimonides to set out his views on these subjects at greater length.
Maimonides had been approached by a young Jewish scholar named Joseph ibn Aknin from Morocco. Joseph, who had been educated not only in traditional Jewish studies but also in medicine and philosophy, found his faith challenged until he read Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. He sensed that its author was a man to whom he could bring his questions and doubts, so he wrote to Maimonides asking if he could come study with him in Fostat, near Cairo, where the master lived. Maimonides agreed, and starting in 1185, for two years Joseph lived with him, becoming not only a disciple but almost an adopted son. Thereafter he moved, first to Aleppo then to Baghdad, but they continued the relationship in the form of regular letters, always circling around the same topic: how to reconcile the traditional teachings of Judaism with the discipline and doctrines of neo-Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy that had come back into favour through the work of Islamic philosopher-theologians like Averroes (1126–1198).
For the next three years, in what limited spare time was left to Maimonides from his duties as physician, communal leader, and authority on Jewish law, he developed his answers at length in the form of the book known as The Guide for the Perplexed. Maimonides knew that his ideas would be controversial and might seem disturbing to those without philosophical training. But as he writes in the introduction: “When I have a difficult subject before me – when I find the road narrow, and can see no other way of teaching a well-established truth except by pleasing one intelligent man and displeasing ten thousand fools – I prefer to address myself to the one man, and to take no notice whatever of the condemnation of the multitude.”2Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, introduction.
So it was when he came to explaining the sacrificial system of the Torah, for it was here that he developed a historical approach to the nature of biblical law. The whole purpose of the Torah, he argued, was to wean people away from idolatry. But this could not happen, as it were, overnight. As in nature, so in human nature, evolution rather than revolution is how change occurs. “It is impossible to go suddenly from one extreme to the other; it is therefore according to the nature of man impossible for him suddenly to discontinue everything to which he has been accustomed.”3Ibid., III:32.
Proof of this, says Maimonides, is to be found in the Torah itself, when it says: “It came to pass, when Pharaoh let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, ‘Lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war, and return to Egypt’” (Ex. 13:17). To go suddenly from slavery to fighting battles for the possession of the land of Canaan was demanding too much too soon from the Israelites. They needed the experience of hardship in the desert to give them courage. The conquering of Canaan needed a new generation, born in freedom.
If we were to ask why God, who can change nature by way of a miracle, cannot change human nature also, Maimonides replies that that would be to deprive human beings of their freedom. God, precisely because He has given humans freedom, is under, as it were, a self-denying ordinance never to intervene directly in the human heart. If people are slow to change, God exercises patience. So it was that God wanted to wean the people from the various religious practices of those days, but it had to be done gradually:
The custom which was in those days general among all men, and the general mode of worship in which the Israelites were brought up, consisted of sacrificing animals in those temples which contained certain images, to bow down to those images, and to burn incense before them.4Ibid.
To suddenly discontinue this mode of religious practice would have been impossible: “It would have been contrary to the nature of man, who generally cleaves to that to which he is used.”
So instead of banning sacrifices, God restricted them by specifying that they could only be offered in one place, the Sanctuary; they could only be offered by one subsection of the population, the priests; and there was a limit as to which animals could be offered and when. The aim was to circumscribe and restrict the practice of sacrifices, while at the same time gradually weaning the people from the idolatrous beliefs they had once held under the influence of the prevailing culture of the time.
That is Maimonides’ first point, and the most controversial – introducing a developmental perspective into the commands, by seeming to suggest that what may have been necessary at one time might not be so at a later stage when the Israelites had been fully weaned from their reliance on sacrifice.
This conflicts with Maimonides’ categorical statement a mere two chapters later in the Guide that Torah law does not change over time: “The laws cannot vary…according to the different conditions of persons and times…. It would not be right to make the fundamental principles of the law dependent on a certain time or a certain place.”
Nor does it accord with his position in his law code, where he speaks in praise of the ḥukkim, “divine decrees” for which the reasons are not known, adding:
All the laws concerning sacrifices are in the category of decrees. The sages have said that the world stands because of the service of the sacrifices, for from the performance of the decrees and laws, the righteous merit life in the World to Come. Indeed the Torah put the decrees first, as it is said: “Keep My decrees and laws, since it is only by keeping them that a person can [truly] live. I am God (Lev. 18:5).” 5Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Me’ila 8:8.
As Isadore Twersky notes, the evolutionary explanation Maimonides gives for the sacrifices in the Guide is “not easily integrated” with his position in the Mishneh Torah, where the sacrifices are seen as virtuous in their own right, and as commands that have no known rational explanation.6Isadore Twersky, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), 413–15.
There is a real tension here which does not admit any simple solution.7For an attempt to reconcile the two positions, see David Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1976), 181–83.
In fact, however, Maimonides is making two important observations. One is that the commands do not constitute an undifferentiated set of imperatives and prohibitions, each standing, as it were, alone. For Maimonides, there is an overall logic to the law. The Torah is a system designed to bring about certain fundamental transformations: a society built on justice and compassion, individuals schooled in what is today called “emotional literacy,” and a set of true opinions widely diffused within society as to the nature of reality and our place in it. The Torah also takes into account what philosophical systems rarely do, namely the dimension of time in social transformation.
Philosophical systems aim at simplicity: that is both their strength and weakness. It makes them easy to understand but impossible to apply – because life is never as simple as philosophers take it to be. By contrast, the Torah works with the grain of human nature. It recognises that change in human affairs takes a long time – far longer than a single generation. The result is that commandments are ranged across a spectrum. Some are close to an ideal, the endpoint of the journey, while others are closer to existing reality, the starting point of the journey.
Within any sphere of Judaic concern, there are inner and outer dimensions. Thus, for example, there is the leadership of power (king-subject), and the leadership of influence (teacher-disciple). Power relations are necessary for the maintenance of society, but are not an ideal. Influence relations – as in education – are ideal, but are not sufficient (in pre-messianic times) for the governance of a nation. Kingship is thus an outer dimension of Judaism, while teaching is an inner dimension.
The best way of knowing what is outer and what is inner is to see whether Jewish law seeks to minimise or maximise the phenomenon in question. When it comes to kings, the Jewish tradition is restrictive (don’t multiply horses, wealth, or wives; no arrogance, etc.). When it comes to teachers, it is expansive (honour teachers more than parents and only a little less than God). The phenomena the Torah seeks to minimise, like the power of kings, are outer commands, more like concessions than ideals. Those it seeks to maximise, like the relation of teachers to disciples, are ideals.
Maimonides’ argument is that the same applies to avoda, the service of God. Prayer is an inner layer, sacrifice an outer one. That is why, he argues, the entire sacrificial structure in Judaism is restrictive rather than expansive. Sacrifices may only be offered up at certain times, and only by the hereditary priesthood, using specified animals, and in a central place. The emphasis is on limitation. Prayer, by contrast, may be offered anywhere, at any time, by anyone (only later, in the days of Ezra, was prayer also structured). It follows that prayer is close to an ideal; sacrifice is more like a concession.
The result of this complex structure is to create a dynamic over time. We can see this in the case of slavery. The Torah permits slavery, though it also restricts it. At the same time, it creates an ideal, a day, Shabbat, in which all relationships of hierarchy and dominance are suspended so that, one day in seven, the slave is as free as his or her owner. Historically, it took several millennia for slavery to be abolished – in America, not until the nineteenth century and not without a civil war. This is one of the glorious paradoxes of Torah, that it is a timeless system which nonetheless operates in and through historical time.8See Nachum Rabinovitch, Darkah shel Torah (Jerusalem: Maaliyot, 1998), 3–102.
Maimonides helps us to understand the prophetic critique of sacrifices. The prophets, in his view, were saying that sacrifices were not an end in themselves. They were a means of establishing firmly in the minds of the people that God alone was to be served. However, people confused the means with the end, seeing sacrifices as an end in themselves, as if there were no deeper content to the idea of serving God.
It is an understatement to say that Maimonides’ view received a mixed reception from Jewish thinkers in subsequent ages. After all, they asked, if sacrifices were only a temporary concession, why do we pray daily for them to be restored? But Maimonides provides a compelling answer to another, no less significant, question: How, if sacrifices are central to Judaism, was it able to survive the destruction of the Second Temple? How could Judaism live, as it were, without its heart? His implicit answer is that while sacrifices represent one form of avoda, “service” of God, they are only one form, and a relatively peripheral one. Prayer is far closer to Judaism’s inner ideal. Thus Judaism was able to survive the destruction of the Temple because although sacrifice was lost, prayer remained.
Are sacrifices a timeless ideal or a way station on the slow journey to pure monotheism? On this, Maimonides the philosopher says one thing; Maimonides the halakhist and author of the Mishneh Torah says another. The contradiction may be more apparent than real. Or it may simply be that the tension within the mind of this great thinker mirrors the tension within Judaism itself between the linear time of the prophets, in which the world changes, and the cyclical time of the priests, within which everything stays the same. The important fact remains: Judaism survived the loss of the sacrifices, for as the psalmist had long before declared:
You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it;
You do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart
You, God, will not despise. (Ps. 51:18–19)