A TWO-WEEK CHAPTER

In this challenging and stimulating chapter, Rambam makes several important comments. The central one, about sacrifice and why God instituted it, we will deal with this week. Along the way, however, Rambam makes two comments that seem to support the academic view that he was a thoroughgoing rationalist who believed that Judaism was only necessary for the masses. In that view—which, let me reiterate, I do not accept—Rambam really thought that philosophers did not need religion or religious acts, nor that it had any ultimate meaning. We’ll get to that discussion next week, but I wanted to alert you to warn your friends and relatives about the importance of next week’s discussion. I would also hope for reactions to that discussion from readers.

SACRIFICES—THE LEAD-OFF TOPIC

Rambam opens his discussion of ta`amei mitsvot, reasons for the commandments, with a discussion of sacrifices. Although he does not explain his choice, I believe that he attaches great importance to the notion of religion as a gradual weaning from our ordinary human beliefs, a notion that is particularly relevant to sacrifices.

Rambam actually begins with an anatomy discussion, but that’s just to lead in to his real point. He notes that the world as a whole reflects the Divine plan, so that in studying the world we can learn important lessons of broader significance than just the fact in question. He points specifically to the gradualism of the body, noting that nerves are soft, too soft to actually move anything. They control body movements by gradually merging nerves into fibers, fibers into muscles, which are sufficiently rigid to move the requisite body part. To get from a point where a certain need cannot be fulfilled to the point where it can, then, a gradual approach is required.

It is the notion more than the anatomy that counts, so that our differing view of human anatomy need not excessively worry us here. Rambam says that in general when people need to move from one belief to another, that movement must be gradual. It is in that light, he says, that God used a "ruse" (remember, this is a translation, but Pines tries hard to capture the flavor of the words in the original Arabic) to wean people from the idolatrous and pagan sacrifices they were accustomed to.

WHAT KIND OF A RUSE?

By a ruse, Rambam seems to mean that sacrifice in and of itself has no religious meaning. In that perspective (and it’s a difficult one, no matter how we read it), it would seem that the Temple, the status of priests, the laws of ritual purity and impurity, were all a concession to the need to wean people from idolatry. Of course, it could be that I have taken Rambam too far—he might have recognized an essential need for a Temple, for officials of the Temple, for rules of treating that Temple well, as part of our directing our thoughts towards God. If so, the only problem with the system would be animal sacrifice-- since God clearly has no need of the sacrifices, there must have been only a human purpose. In Rambam’s reading, that purpose was weaning us from idolatry.

AN OBVIOUS PROBLEM WITH THE THEORY

The most obvious problem with this theory is that it doesn’t explain why sacrifice remains (as far as I know) an operative halakhah. If a Temple were built properly today, Rambam gives no indication anywhere (again, as far as I know) that the laws of sacrifice would be abrogated, suspended, or otherwise left out of a future Judaism. Yet, if their purpose was only to restrict idolatry, shouldn’t those commandments have been conditional?

A REASON OR THE REASON?

I can think of two answers, one that I heard from more ve-rabi R. Lichtenstein, shlit"a in the name of mori ve-rabi Prof. Twersky, a"h, and that I think Prof. Twersky also hinted at in class at Harvard. Prof. Twersky pointed out that Rambam’s concern in this section of the Moreh was demonstrating that the commandments have reasons, in contrast to those who claim that a reasonless religion was most divine. For Rambam, let us recall, a rational religion was one that could be explained even to those who did not belong to it. In identifying the reasons for the commandments, Rambam was helping insure that non-Jews would react to our religiosity in the way predicted by the verse in Devarim of "raq am hakham ve-navon," that we are surely a wise and insightful nation.

If so, Prof. Twersky believed, Rambam’s concern here was only to give some reasonable defense of the Torah’s commandments. By explaining sacrifice (a concept that was already obsolete in Rambam’s time) as a concession to the nature of the people at the time, Rambam was at least defending the fact that there was some method behind those commandments, that they were instituted to meet a specific need.

Prof. Twersky’s view of this section of the Moreh allows us to be less concerned if Rambam offers reasons for the commandments that we find unconvincing. If Rambam advanced those reasons only to convince his readers that the religion was rational, he may himself have had another reason that he chose not to share with his readers (perhaps because that reader was unready for it).

The problem, however, is that sacrifices are considered a continuing part of Judaism. There is every indication that Rambam believed this, too—his lengthy discussion of issues of sacrifice in Mishneh Torah is perhaps the best proof. Since other authorities at his time did not choose to rule on issues of the Temple and sacrifices, had Rambam really not believed that this whole topic was no longer relevant to Judaism, he could have left it out without that making an impact on anybody. His decision to leave it in suggests to me that he believed a future Temple as well would have sacrifices.

THE REASON AND THE RESULT—ANOTHER APPROACH

Distinguishing between the reason for a commandment and its result might suggest another line of thought. There may be times when a person does an activity for one reason, but gains another result as well. A person who lives on the 32nd floor but has a fear of elevators will walk up to his apartment on a regular basis. The reason that person does so is the fear of elevators. If, at some point, that fear dissipates, the person might nevertheless continue walking up, since it has many health benefits that make it worthy of remaining a continuing part of his life.

Here, too, perhaps, Rambam was only delineating the original reason God instituted sacrifices, but not exhaustively discussing their religious value. A line in this chapter suggests this as well. Rambam notes that God restricted sacrifices to the extent that the part that was left—sacrifices offered in only one place, with only hereditary priests allowed to offer them, so that for most people sacrifice was removed as a daily reality—did not need to be abolished according to the Divine Wisdom. "Did not need to be abolished," means at least that there was not enough negative to be problematic. It leaves open the possibility that there was also some positive.

Offering a sacrifice takes a great deal of time, effort, and expense, all focused on the worship of God. Imagine, for a modern example, if people who go to Israel for Pesah were focused primarily on their ability to daven at the Kotel, to express their religion in a central religious locale—the whole trip would then be a series of actions directed towards the service of God. Focusing one’s thoughts and efforts on the service of God are extremely important to Rambam, so that any event that did so could contribute productively to one’s religiosity.

Once the Torah converted what started out as pagan worship to a series of acts focusing one’s thoughts on God, it might therefore have been comfortable leaving that worship in place. Rather than that being the reason for the commandment, however, it is a collateral positive effect that justifies having sacrifice be an eternal part of the religion. The reason for sacrifice, in Rambam’s view, was to wean people from idolatry. Had idolaters never developed animal sacrifice, according to Rambam, the Torah might not have, either. Once it was necessary as a weaning process, however, it also had positive qualities of its own, which Rambam did not need to explain here.