FOUR KINDS OF HOKHMAH

Rambam opens the last chapter of the Guide with a discussion of the word hokhmah, wisdom, which he sees as possibly having four meanings-- coming to understand deep truths (those that lead to a better understanding of God), learning any art (or skill), becoming moral, or knowing how to develop strategies for accomplishing any goal (whether good or evil). Of those four kinds of hokhmah, only two are provided by the Torah, the first and the third (rational truths and moral virtues).

That means, in case anyone thought otherwise, that Rambam does not accept the claims that Torah can teach (by itself) such skills as medicine or engineering. The Torah is about moral and intellectual improvement and it teaches only those kinds of wisdom. Furthermore, the Torah teaches those two kinds of wisdom in a traditional way, meaning that it just teaches certain facts, rather than engaging the student in speculation or intellectual consideration.

While that does not lessen the validity of the wisdoms taught by the Torah, it leaves room for a broader (or deeper) wisdom, even in these realms. Having learned wisdom in a traditional way, one can then verify and perhaps deepen it by means of thought and study. Thus, for example, I can be wise in the sense that the Torah teaches me the immorality of murder (or theft or various kinds of inappropriate sexual relationships), but I can deepen that wisdom by coming to my own understanding of the principles that underlie these truths taught by tradition.

Rambam, to stress the difference between traditional and speculative wisdom, points to a statement about Moshe Rabbenu, in which the Talmud calls him "father in wisdom, father in Torah, and father among the prophets (a forerunner to "first in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen"?)." The statement makes two important points for Rambam, that wisdom is clearly separate from Torah and yet that Moshe Rabbenu (not Solomon, for example) was first in that as well. That means, then, that true wisdom involves knowing the traditional truths of the Torah and then deepening that knowledge by thinking through those traditional truths until one has fully understood them.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS?

Rambam calls his discussion of the meanings of wisdom and of Moshe Rabbenu preliminary remarks. He is about to go on to a discussion of four different kinds of perfection, the last of which will be intellectual perfection. At that point, he will come back to this discussion, so that it is preliminary in the sense that we will not be able to understand his point there unless we keep this definition of wisdom in mind.

Let me add a preliminary remark of my own. Even more than the rest of the Guide, this last section has sparked many, many interpretations. The one I will present here is my own, although there are a small group of academics who agree with it (most do not). In addition, I am summarizing, rather than going through the whole thing, because I wish to be certain that we finish this week.

FOUR PERFECTIONS

Rambam says that the philosophers have identified four types of human perfection, which I remember hearing both Prof. Twersky ztllh"h and Prof. Avi Ravitsky (le-havdil bein hahayyim u-vein hahayyim) say that these perfections were sequential, meaning that the later ones could not be achieved without the earlier ones. (Prof. Twersky actually wondered about whether they had to be fully sequential or whether one could advance in a few of them at the same time, an issue he raised regarding the various areas of Torah study as well, where Rambam also refers to Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud as sequential areas of study). I do not, however, remember how they knew this, nor do I find it in rereading the chapter.

The four perfections are: monetary, physical, moral, and intellectual. Monetary perfection involves having possessions and/or money (Rambam mentions being a great king as a monetary perfection, so that he presumably includes prestige, political power and influence, and so on, as monetary perfections). This is the least of the perfections, since it is not a function of the person in any way (does anybody recall the movie Trading Places?); it may be a function of their position in life, or the possessions they have accumulated, but it is not who they essentially are.

Physical perfection for Rambam implies a perfection of physical skills, such as being able to break thick animal bones or to carry a heavy load. This is, clearly, a part of the person, and yet only part of their ephemeral physical self-- not their essential, eternal self.

The third perfection, the moral, involves treating others in a moral manner in all ways. This too, according to Rambam, is not an inherent perfection, since it only governs how we act towards others (Rambam apparently does not envision a morality towards oneself); a man without a society (Robinson Crusoe, as Prof. Twersky said) would have no need of morality I grant the possibility of arguing that morality is not only interpersonal, but that is how Rambam sees it.

The final perfection, which Rambam sees as most essentially human since it is part of the intellect, which Rambam sees as what makes us human, is intellectual. Intellectual perfection involves developing one's rational capacities as fully as possible-- which for Rambam means using them to understand issues of the Divine (as we've seen numerous other times). This would involve learning the traditional truths of the Torah (as well as deepening one's wisdom about those issues) as fully as possible, so that the person will have developed a sense of God that is as close as he/she can get to a real understanding.

AL YITHALEL ASHIR, ETC.

Rambam sees a verse in Yirmiyah (that we read in the haftarah for fast days) as making this point. The prophet warns against three types of people taking pride in their accomplishments, the rich man, the hero, and the wise man. Rambam interprets each category as one of the above named perfections-- monetary, physical, and moral (wise here would mean wise in morality, one of the meanings of wisdom Rambam had carefully postulated in his preliminary remarks). When the verse continues, "Ki im be-zot yithalel hamithallel, haskel ve-yado`a oti, but in this it is permissible to glory (a loose translation), developing one's intellect to know Me," it says exactly what Rambam wants-- that the first three perfections are not meaningful in the context of true perfection.

A somewhat side note. Prof. Twersky noted that the three categories that we are discussing-- monetary, physical, and moral-- are also referred to in the first Mishnah of the fourth chapter of Avot, where Ben Zoma redefines wealth, heroism, and wisdom as satisfaction with one's lot, control of one's desires, and learning from all people. Prof. Twersky wondered aloud (he did not actually take a position) whether Rambam might have thought of each of those as the standard of perfection in those areas-- might it not have been that monetary perfection meant a state of having all of one's monetary needs fulfilled, regardless of how much actual wealth that involved. (Economists have shown that people's sense of wealth depends less on what they actually have than on what they have in relation to their peers, suggesting that competition and jealousy govern their sense of wealth as much as objective need). For all his description of those perfections, then, he might have been aiming at our understanding the true way to prepare for intellectual perfection.

HOW MUCH OF AN INTELLECTUAL WAS HE?

The next section of the chapter is crucial to understanding Rambam's view of human perfection. While Rambam is studiedly casual about what he writes in these last couple of paragraphs-- he says that since he has mentioned a verse, he'll finish its interpretation-- it should be clear to all of us that he was never that casual, particularly not in the closing words of his great work.

Rambam notes that the verse in Yirmiyah (9;23) does not end with the words "haskel ve-yado`a oti," which would have meant that knowing God was the highest level for which to strive. Rather, the verse continues "ki ani Hashem, oseh hesed, mishpat, u-tsedakah ba'arets, that I am the Lord, Who does kindness, judgement, and righteousnes in the land." Rambam interprets this to mean that it is not enough to know God, but we must know Him in His attributes of action, meaning the way He affects the world. As a mark of that, Rambam says, the perfect person will always imitate these actions of God's, attempting to mimic God's performance of acts of kindness, etc.

Scholars have long debated what Rambam means by this last piece, since he seems to retreat from the perfect intellectualism that he had advocated. Some believed that he gave up on intellectual perfection (for complicated philosophical reasons we need not elaborate), some believed that he saw this last piece as a voluntary act of imitatio Dei (imitating God) that had no relevance to human perfection (perfection was purely intellectual, but such a person would nevertheless choose to act as God did). My own belief-- for reasons that would take many pages to explain-- is that Rambam thought that intellectual perfection itself could never be purely intellectual-- since the most direct knowledge of God we have is from the world He created (and runs, in some way), the only way to fully understand Him is by trying to imitate His ways of running the world.

As righteous people try (and succeed, to greater or lesser extents) to perform acts of righteousness, etc., in the same balance as will successfully set the world on the proper path, that person also learns more about God's world and, by extension, the Creator Himself. I think that is also the best understanding of the verse--we should glory in knowing that God Who does such acts in the land.

Pines closes his translation with four lines that do not appear in the medieval Hebrew version of the Guide, that read as follows: God is near to everyone who calls,

If he calls truly and has no distractions,

He is found by every seeker who searches for Him,

If he marches toward Him and goes not astray.

I hope we have engaged in such seeking together, that my summaries of Rambam have gone not astray in representing what the master would have wanted us to know about the true service of God, and that we have together moved ourselves closer to the true perfection of human beings. Shabbat Shalom.