Like my other dives into Judaic texts, I’m going to keep this one simple and short. Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (more commonly known as Maimonides, or as “the Rambam” which is just an acronym of his title and name) was born in 1135 CE and was an astronomer, physician, and, apparently, a bit of a savant when it came to studying and summarizing Judaic scripture. By age 20 he was already writing books on Jewish philosophy, guides to daily living, and more. His magnum opus is a fourteen volume work called the Mishneh Torah, which is basically his rewrite of the entire Torah and associated rabbinic rulings into common speech. That’s to say, he recognized that the Aramaic and Hebrew that these texts were written in were basically unknown to a huge number of people by the Middle Ages, and he rewrote it so that the average person could read, study, and understand. There are two schools of thought on studying the Mishneh Torah, one is a chapter a day, which takes around three years, the other is a three-chapter a day cycle that takes a year. I’m going for the latter, since it conveniently starts up… today. I’m going to just keep this one on all one page.
- 3/1/25, Introduction – Maimonides starts by discussing the history of the Torah and rabbinic law, starting from Moses bringing the famed tablets down from Mt. Sinai, and writing out the original Torah scrolls – a copy of each of those being given to his disciple Joshua, and to the 71 elders of the Sanhedrin. He also notes that God gave Moses oral instruction on what it all meant. Here’s where it gets dicey for me. For forty generations, listed off, that instruction manual was transmitted orally and never written down. Certainly, opinions about it were, and various scholars authored books on different parts of it and their own personal views. But basically we had a mutli-century telephone game. The Chasidim address this, noting that each generation had hundreds, if not thousands, of followers of the designated elder who would help keep things straight. To me, that just seems like it’s more likely to cause chaos and misinterpretations rather than truing it up. Maimonides, however, was confident in his ability to suss out what’s accurate and what’s not, both from oral tradition and the various writings he had access to. I have my doubts.
- 3/2/25, Positive Mitzvot – Those of you who’ve been paying attention for these last few years know that there are 613 mitzvot, or commandments, principles to live by, in the Torah. Maimonides wants to make sure we have the list present, but organized in a more sensible fashion rather than scattered throughout the pages of the Torah. So he starts by listing all the positive ones, the “Thou shalts”, and puts them together by topic. Starting with things like honoring and praying to God, sacrifices and other offerings, then moving on to family, community, work situations, etc. He attaches no commentary, this is simply a list of the 248 positive ones. Interesting to note that 40% of the mitzvot are positive, leaving 60% that we’ll get to tomorrow that are negative, the “Thou shalt nots”.
- 3/3/25, Negative Mitzvot – As I said yesterday, this is still more or less intro stuff, with today being a listing in common language of the 365 “Thou shalt nots” of the Torah. At the beginning are dozens of prohibitions related to worshiping false gods, idols, etc., sacrifices, and various forms of magic. There are some one-offs that are interesting: a ban on living in Egypt; a ban on steps around the altar in the Temple (we had steps around ours in every Synagogue I think I’ve ever been in); never to put olive oil on a dish that’s prepared by a sinner; and more. I was momentarily captured by the prohibition on letting the “eternal flame” to be kept in each place of worship go out, rather than being a, to me, positive mitzvah of keeping it burning.