RUSES ACCORDING TO RAMBAM

In last week’s discussion, we saw that Rambam claimed that sacrifices were a way to gradually wean people from a practice that was otherwise inappropriate. People were so used to sacrificing to various idols wherever and whenever they wished that it was not feasible for Qudsha Berikh Hu to require that they stop completely in one fell swoop. We mentioned then, and will have more opportunity to discuss this week, how that raises the question of whether Rambam believed sacrifices would be part of a third Beit haMikdash.

To exacerbate the problems in this chapter, Rambam refers to the commandment of sacrifices as a ruse, a way to direct us towards Hashem’s real goals without our knowing it. Here, then, he seems to portray sacrifices in Jerusalem to God as a ruse to get us away from sacrifices to idols, etc. The word ruse in English (or "trick" or "device" or any such) can mean something one does as a way to achieve a desired result, with the actual act having no meaning whatsoever. If Rambam means that here, he would be saying that sacrifices have no real religious meaning, but were a necessary tool to take the Jews away from idolatry. Why, however, would we wish to reinstate them in a third Temple?

IT GETS WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

Rambam also refers to two other areas of religion as ruses in this chapter; those are even more of a problem than sacrifices. First, when he is explaining why God could not simply ban sacrifice, Rambam wants to give a contemporary example, so he says that banning sacrifices would have been akin to someone in his time banning prayer to God. Imagine, he says, if a prophet said, "Don’t pray to God, don’t turn to God in your times of misfortune; just meditate about Him, without any acts at all."

At face value, this, too, seems to say that prayer and observance of the commandments are only meant to teach us a lesson about God. Once we know that lesson, we might not need those mitsvot or that prayer any more. It also suggests, by the way, that prayer is not efficacious in any way, since if it were, there would be no thought of a prophet banning it. The notion that prayer does not work would fit in as well with Rambam’s notion of God as perfect and unchanging.

The second example, more problematic still, comes when Rambam (p. 528) refers to reward and punishment as a ruse. He says that benefits and vengeance are a ruse from God intended to promote observance, used instead of God simply instilling in us the will to obey Him. [As an aside, R. Hasdai Crescas in the 14th century famously said that reward and punishment are not, in fact, retribution for our actions. Rather, they were instituted to help tilt the scales of factors deciding us on whether to obey God, not to actually reward or punish us. Rambam seems to be indicating a similar position here; the reward is not really a benefit for the act, it’s a ruse of God’s to get us to listen to Him.]

IN WHAT SENSE IS REWARD AND PUNISHMENT A RUSE?

The beginning of the answer—assuming Rambam doesn’t mean that there is no reward and punishment and that prayer is completely worthless—is in considering what Rambam says elsewhere about reward and punishment. While I believe there are even more explicit statements of this sort, I know offhand that Rambam at the end of Hilkhot Teshuvah warns against keeping mitsvot for the sake of achieving a reward. He says that one who observes the Torah in order to receive the various rewards mentioned, or, alternatively, who avoids sin out of fear of the various punishments mentioned in the Torah, is not keeping the Torah in the highest way possible.

He defines such a person as an oved mi-yir’ah, one who worships God out of fear. The higher level—that of the Sages and the Prophets—is to worship God because that is the truth, and solely for that reason. This position, by the way, is clearly attested in traditional sources, such as Antignos Ish Sokho’s famous statement in Avot that we should not worship God in order to receive the reward, but rather we should worship God with no thought of receiving reward. In another version, Antignos actually ordained worshipping God with thought not to receive reward.

Claiming that it is better to serve God without thought of reward does not, however, suggest that there is no reward. Both Rambam and Rashi in their commentaries to Avot mention that the original Saducees were students of Antignos who mistakenly took that statement to mean there was no reward at all. Rather, Antignos is teaching us a lesson about the proper motives in worship of God, not the philosophical truth of the existence of reward and punishment. The "ruse" that Rambam is referring to, then, is that God gives us an incentive to worship that is not the true underlying incentive. Really we should worship just because it is the best way to act, it brings us closest to the Divine truth of the world; since most of us are not at that level, however, God threw in the (lesser) incentives of reward and punishment.

FROM THERE TO PRAYER

If that is the meaning of "ruse" in the case of reward, perhaps a similar case can be made for prayer. Rambam, remember, gave prayer as an example of a practice that a contemporary prophet would not be able to outlaw since people are too attached to it. At the simplest reading, that would suggest that Rambam thought prayer was a meaningless activity that God allowed simply because He could not yet prohibit it.

Rambam himself, however, notes a difference between prayer and sacrifice. While prayer was commanded by the Torah as it existed previously (obviously, with the caveat that it be directed towards God), sacrifice was commanded only in a truncated way (as we discussed previously). That difference means that prayer, as humans originally conceived of it, came closer to the "real" goal—which Rambam named in this chapter, simple meditation—than sacrifice. While prayer might still be a "ruse," it is a ruse that is closer to the goal than sacrifice.

Is the ruse of prayer that it doesn’t work? If we follow the example of reward and punishment, we don’t have to say so. Just like reward was real, but not ideal, I think Rambam might think that prayer to God, seeking things from Him, might work, but is not the ideal way to be worshipping Him. In Rambam’s ideal, people would simply meditate about God; in cogitating about Him, they come to understand Him better, become closer to Him, and thus closer to their own personal perfection.

Since God recognized that people were incapable of simply meditating, He provided them a way of focusing their thoughts on Him. By mandating that we pray (in the Torah’s view at least once a day), the Torah was giving us the order to utilize our petty troubles and worries (or not so petty) as vehicles for greater focus on God. In that sense, prayer is a ruse tricking us into the real goal, spending as much of our time as possible focusing our thoughts completely on the Creator.

DOES PRAYER WORK?

That explanation of prayer does not yet address the question of its efficacy. If, as Rambam has stressed so many other times, God is unchanging, how can prayer have any effect. And, if it doesn’t, doesn’t prayer become a ruse in the simple sense of the word? Here, I would suggest, Rambam’s views about providence might explain the efficacy of prayer. Rambam has previously said that those who have a more activated intellect, meaning that they spend more of their time focused on God, also gain a higher level of providence. Rambam might then believe that one who prays to God with sufficient fervor, attention, and consistency changes his or her status with regard to providence. The act of prayer, perhaps, changes the person praying sufficiently that the outcome of his life changes as well.

Regardless of whether that works as Rambam’s position, I think it sufficiently explains what he means by a ruse. Rather than being a trick with no ground of truth to it, in each case, the ruse of reward and the ruse of prayer use a lower ideal to entice people to achieve a higher one. That lower goal is a real one, and the enticement will be achieved. The only point is that people will eventually realize that the enticement is less valuable than the ultimate goal, and will then shift their priorities towards that ultimate goal.

SACRIFICE IN THE THIRD TEMPLE

As I mentioned last week, Rambam might then think a similar thing about the sacrifices. In their original form, they were certainly not worth having as part of a religion. However, in the form which the Torah prescribes, they might indeed be useful for enticing people to a fuller relationship with God, and that in some continuing fashion. It might be, in other words, that—as prescribed in the Torah—sacrifices are not as far from the goal as they seem, so that they can be a productive part of a continuing religious experience.

"FOR I DID NOT COMMAND YOU REGARDING SACRIFICE"

In the course of the discussion, Rambam notes Yirmiyahu’s admonishment of the Jews, that God did not command us regarding sacrifice when we went out of Egypt. On the face of it, the verse is strange, since God did command us regarding sacrifice in the Torah. Rambam (in his 2nd explanation, see the first one inside) instead focuses on the first group of commandments, those at Marah. Rambam notes that sacrifice was not on the list of commandments Hazal mentioned in that first batch. He says that what Yirmiyahu means is that that first group of commandments indicates all the important categories of commandments (those that improve the body and soul), and sacrifice is not among them. Of course, he has to leave out the Paschal lamb to read the verse that way, but he notes that that was commanded before they left Egypt, a distinction he promises to clarify further on. It also leaves out prayer, but perhaps Rambam thinks prayer has been sufficiently distinguished from sacrifice in the chapter as a whole.