Maimonides Quotes

Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.

The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it

When Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' we see the origin of every Jewish shrug from Spinoza to Woody Allen.

No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

If a person studies too much and exhausts his reflective powers, he will be confused, and will not be able to apprehend even that which had been within the power of his apprehension. For the powers of the body are all alike in this respect.

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.

We naturally like what we have been accustomed to, and are attracted towards it. [...] The same is the case with those opinions of man to which he has been accustomed from his youth; he likes them, defends them, and shuns the opposite views.

Your purpose...should always be to know...the whole that was intended to be known.

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.

In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary

The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.

All the evils that men cause to each other because of certain desires, or opinions or religious principles, are rooted in ignorance. [All hatred would come to an end] when the earth was flooded with the knowledge of God.

Commune with your own heart on your bed and be still.

I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

And so our rabbis decreed that a man should honor his wife more than himself, and love her as much as he loves himself.

As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,’” she replied. “Haven’t you read your Maimonides?

It is better to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death

The Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said that if one can only learn to say, “I don’t know,” he will prosper.

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides,

Answer a fool according to his folly” (Proverbs 26:4).

Every human being should regard himself as if he were exactly balanced between innocence and guilt. Simultaneously he should regard the world as being in the same case. It follows then that if he performs one good deed, he has weighted the scales in favour of both himself and of the whole world, and thus brought about salvation both for himself and for all the inhabitants of the world.

Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

Maimonides, said there are eight steps in helping the needy. The lowest of these is the handout; the highest is to teach them to help themselves.” •

Bit by bit they slipped back into their old strange talk. Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, Philosophy, Spinoza, and other such nonsense which went in one ear and out the other.

If God were corporeal, He would consist of atoms, and would not be one; or He would be comparable to other beings: but a comparison implies the existence of similar and of dissimilar elements, and God would thus not be one. A corporeal God would be finite, and an external power would be required to define those limits.

The quest for this unwearied inner peace is constant and universal. Probe deeply into the teachings of Buddha, Maimonides, or a Kempis, and you will discover that they base their diverse doctrines on the foundations of a large spiritual serenity. Analyze the prayers of troubled, overborne mankind of all creeds, in every age—and their petitions come down to the irreducible common denominators of daily bread and inward peace. Grown men do not pray for vain trifles. When they lift up their hearts and voices in this valley of tears they ask for strength and courage and understanding.

By the end of medical school, most students tended to focus on "lifestyle" specialities - those with more humane hours, higher salaries, and lower pressures - the idealism of their med school application essays tempered or lost. As graduation neared and we sat down, in a Yale tradition, to re-write our commencement oath - a melding of the words of Hippocrates, Maimonides, Osler, along with a few other great medical forefathers - several students argued for the removal of language insisting that we place our patients' interests above our own. (The rest of us didn't allow this discussion to continue for long. The words stayed. This kind of egotism struck me as antithetical to medicine and, it should be noted, entirely reasonable. Indeed, this is how 99 percent of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But thats the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job - not a calling).

The basic principle is that there is a First Being who brought every existing thing into being, for if it be supposed that he did not exist, then nothing else could possibly exist.

The definition of a thing includes its efficient cause; and since God is the Primal Cause, He cannot be defined, or described by a partial definition. A quality, whether psychical, physical, emotional, or quantitative, is always regarded as something distinct from its substratum;

The passage, “And He rested on the seventh day” (Exod. xx. 11) is interpreted as follows: On the seventh Day the forces and laws were complete, which during the previous six days were in the state of being established for the preservation of the Universe. They were not to be increased or modified.

Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.

the laws remain undisturbed (ch. xxvii.). Apparent exceptions, the miracles, originate in these laws, although man is unable to perceive the causal relation.

Maimonides, the medieval writer, says you can try three times for a reconciliation before giving up and that’s enough, then you can stop.

Maimonides

According to Maimonides, one should always walk the King's Road, staying away from the extremes, neither surrendering completely to one's emotions nor rejecting them entirely.

But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (1135–1204, also known as Maimonides), put it: Every time you find in our books a tale the reality of which seems impossible, a story which is repugnant both to reason and common sense, then be sure that tale contains a profound allegory veiling a deeply mysterious truth…and the greater the absurdity of the letter the deeper the wisdom of the spirit.16

WHEN reading my present treatise, bear in mind that by "faith" we do not understand merely that which is uttered with the lips, but also that which is apprehended by the soul, the conviction that the object [of belief] is exactly as it is apprehended. If, as regards real or supposed truths, you content yourself with giving utterance to them in words, without apprehending them or believing in them, especially if you do not seek real truth, you have a very easy task as, in fact, you will find many ignorant people professing articles of faith without connecting any idea with them.

… the philosopher Moses Maimonides declared that the return to Israel was the only hope of an end to Jewish suffering at the hands of the Arabs, of whom he writes that ‘Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.

The great philosophers of Islam were amateurs, and they pursued philosophy during their leisure hours: Farabi was a musician, Avicenna a physician and a vizier, Averroes a judge. Avicenna did philosophy at night, surrounded by his disciples, after a normal workday. And he did not refuse a glass of wine to invigorate him a bit and keep him on his toes. Similarly, among the Jews, Maimonides was a physician and a rabbinic judge, Gersonides was an astronomer (and astrologer), and so on. The great Jewish or Muslim philosophers attained the same summits as the great Christian Scholastics, but they were isolated and had little influence on society. In medieval Europe, philosophy became a university course of studies and a pursuit that could provide a living….You can be a perfectly competent rabbi or imam without ever having studied philosophy. In contrast, a philosophical background is a necessary part of the basic equipment of the Christian theologian. It has even been obligatory since the Lateran Council of 1215.

One should see the world, and see himself, as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed, the scale is tipped to the good — he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed, the scale is tipped to the bad — he and the world are destroyed.’” “Interesting. Who said that, your grandmother?” “Maimonides. The great Jewish scholastic.” “I didn’t know you read Jewish philosophers.” “It is said, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.’” “And who said that?” “Also Maimonides.

I understood where I had come from: from a dreary tangle of sadness and pretense, of longing, absurdity, inferiority and provincial pomposity, sentimental education and anachronistic ideals, repressed traumas, resignation, and helplessness. Helplessness of the acerbic, domestic variety, where small-time liars pretended to be dangerous terrorists and heroic freedom fighters, where unhappy bookbinders invented formulas for universal salvation, where dentists whispered confidentially to all their neighbors about their protracted personal correspondence with Stalin, where piano teachers, kindergarten teachers, and housewives tossed and turned tearfully at night from stifled yearning for an emotion-laden artistic life, where compulsive writers wrote endless disgruntled letters to the editor of Davar, where elderly bakers saw Maimonides and the Baal Shem Tov in their dreams, where nervy, self-righteous trade-union hacks kept an apparatchik's eye on the rest of the local residents, where cashiers at the cinema or the cooperative shop composed poems and pamphlets at night.

Maimonides likewise recommended immediate vomiting after consuming suspect food and praised rooster dung as one of the most effective means to bring this about. “It is said that excrements of roosters have a specific property to eliminate every poison by vomiting,” he proclaimed.

Whoever rebukes his fellow man, whether concerning matters between the two of them or between him [the fellow man] and God, needs to rebuke him in private. He shall speak to him calmly and gently, and make known to him that he talks to him only for his own good, to bring him to the life of the world-to-come. If he accepts it from him, good; if not, he shall rebuke him a second and a third time. Thus he is always obliged to rebuke him until the sinner strikes him and says to him, "I will not listen." If he does not prevent everything he can possibly prevent, he is ensnared in the sin of all those he could have prevented from sinning.

God has no attributes.

Be not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding; whose mouth must be held with bit and bridle” (Psalms 32:9).

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best of medicines and the best doctors. I do not mean a restricted diet: I mean total abstinence from food.

According to Maimonides, the moral faculty would, in fact, not have been required, if man had remained a purely rational being. It is only through the senses that “the knowledge of good and evil” has become indispensable. The narrative of Adam’s fall is, according to Maimonides, an allegory representing the relation which exists between sensation, moral faculty, and intellect.

I didn’t know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

I didn't know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

Maimonides agreed that anthropomorphic descriptions of God in the Bible must not be interpreted literally, and tried to find rational reasons for some of the more irrational biblical laws. But he knew that religious experience transcended reason. The intuitive knowledge of the prophets, which was accompanied by tremulous awe, was of a higher order than the knowledge we acquire by our rational powers.

the best sources in the Western tradition have argued that morality is much more than, indeed qualitatively different from, the sum of the values that an essentially autonomous self chooses for itself. Classical, Jewish, and Christian sources, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, or Augustine, John Chrysostom, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and John Calvin, insist that morality is neither plural nor subjective.

According to his opinion, man should only believe what he can grasp with his intellectual faculties, or perceive by his senses, or what he can accept on trustworthy authority. Beyond this nothing should be believed.

אל תחשוב שהסודות הגדולים האלה ידועים עד תכליתם וסופם לאחד מאתנו. לא! אלא שפעמים האמת מבהיקה לנו עד שאנו חושבים אותה לאור יום. אחרי-כן החומרים וההרגלים חוזרים ומסתירים אותה עד שאנו חוזרים להיות בלילה אפל, קרוב למה שהיינו בתחילה.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had no part in the culture of Christian countries, and were too severely persecuted to be able to make contributions to civilization, beyond supplying capital for the building of cathedrals and such enterprises. It was only among the Mohammedans, at that period, that Jews were treated humanely, and were able to pursue philosophy and enlightened speculation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Mohammedans were more civilized and more humane than the Christians. Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the Crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Mohammedan countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill treated. Especially in Moorish Spain, they contributed to learning; Maimonides (1135–1204), who was born at Cordova, is regarded by some as the source of much of Spinoza’s philosophy.Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be under-rated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization—education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism—the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth.

Micah Goodman, a popular teacher on the Israeli scene and one of its young public intellectuals, wrote his first three books on Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed, Rabbi Yehudah Halevi’s medieval classic, The Kuzari, and the biblical book of Deuteronomy—hardly subjects one would expect to attract mass attention. Yet all three of Goodman’s books hit the Israeli bestseller list. Israelis were buying, reading, and thinking about books on subjects their grandparents had tried to evict from the Israeli conversation

For the elements have the property of moving back to their place in a straight line, but they have no properties which would cause them to remain where they are, or to move other-wise than in a straight line, These rectilinear motions of these four elements when returning to their original place are are of two kinds, either centrifugal,vziz.>the motion of the air and the fire; or centripedal,viz.> the motion of the earth, and the water; and when the elements have reached their original place, they remain at rest.

Spinoza follows Maimonides in rejecting the ordinary meanings which attach to words, and in asking his readers to attend, not to language, but to the ‘ideas’ which he is attempting to convey by means of it. Common usage is governed by the imagination, which associates words, not with clear and distinct ideas, but with the confused conceptions of experience. In the language of imagination nothing can be truly described, and nothing is more misleadingly rendered by the imagination than the ultimate subject matter of philosophical speculation – God himself

Maimonides was a zealous disciple of Aristotle, although the theory of the Kalām might seem to have been more congenial to Jewish thought and belief. The Kalām upheld the theory of God’s Existence, Incorporeality, and Unity, together with the creatio ex nihilo. Maimonides nevertheless opposed the Kalām, and, anticipating the question, why preference should be given to the system of Aristotle, which included the theory of the Eternity of the Universe, a theory contrary to the fundamental teaching of the Scriptures, he exposed the weakness of the Kalām and its fallacies.

You should recognize that man’s soul, this single entity whose powers and parts we have described, may be compared to matter, and that the power of reasoning is its completed form. As long as the soul lies dormant and does not acquire its form from knowledge, then the nature of the soul is useless and exists in vain.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews had no part in the culture of Christian countries, and were too severely persecuted to be able to make contributions to civilization, beyond supplying capital for the building of cathedrals and such enterprises. It was only among the Mohammedans, at that period, that Jews were treated humanely, and were able to pursue philosophy and enlightened speculation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Mohammedans were more civilized and more humane than the Christians. Christians persecuted Jews, especially at times of religious excitement; the Crusades were associated with appalling pogroms. In Mohammedan countries, on the contrary, Jews at most times were not in any way ill treated. Especially in Moorish Spain, they contributed to learning; Maimonides (1135–1204), who was born at Cordova, is regarded by some as the source of much of Spinoza’s philosophy. (..) Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be under-rated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization—education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism—the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth.

When the Rabbis stated that obedience or disobedience to the commandments depends not on the will of Hashem but on man’s free will, they echoed Jeremiah, who said, “Out of the mouth of the Most High there comes neither the bad nor the good” (Lamentations 3:38). By the bad he meant vice, and by the good he intended virtue, meaning that Hashem does not predetermine any person as bad or good. Since this is so, a person owes it to himself to mourn his sins and transgressions, since he has committed them of his own free will, as Jeremiah says, “For what should a living man mourn? Let every man mourn because of his sins” (Lamentations 3:39). Jeremiah answers his question positively, telling us that the remedy for our disease lies with us. Just as our failings stemmed from our own free will, so do we have the power to repent of our evil deeds.

here departs from his master, and holds that the spheres and the intellects had a beginning, and were brought into existence by the will of the Creator. He does not attempt to give a positive proof of his doctrine; all he contends is that the theory of the creatio ex nihilo is, from a philosophical point of view, not inferior to the doctrine which asserts the eternity of the universe, and that he can refute all objections advanced against his theory (ch. xiii.-xxviii.).

The distinction between political esotericism and substantive esotericism creates two different meanings for biblical language. Sociopolitical esotericism perceives the biblical parable as an allegory, whose hidden content lends itself to direct conceptual expression. In contrast, the essential concept of esotericism sees the biblical parable as a symbol, whose hidden content cannot be formulated directly in conceptual language. According to this understanding, the esoteric mode of writing and speaking in indirect and allusive way is not the product of a strategy that philosophy adopts vis-à-vis society; it is, rather, the essential nature of the philosophical realm.

Hartung tells of a horrifying study by the Israeli psychologist George Tamarin. Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua:   Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction . . . But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’ . . . Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword . . . And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.   Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Here are three typical answers from the total approval (A) group:   In my opinion Joshua and the Sons of Israel acted well, and here are the reasons: God promised them this land, and gave them permission to conquer. If they would not have acted in this manner or killed anyone, then there would be the danger that the Sons of Israel would have assimilated among the Goyim.   In my opinion Joshua was right when he did it, one reason being that God commanded him to exterminate the people so that the tribes of Israel will not be able to assimilate amongst them and learn their bad ways.   Joshua did good because the people who inhabited the land were of a different religion, and when Joshua killed them he wiped their religion from the earth.   The justification for the genocidal massacre by Joshua is religious in every case. Even those in category C, who gave total disapproval, did so, in some cases, for backhanded religious reasons. One girl, for example, disapproved of Joshua’s conquering Jericho because, in order to do so, he had to enter it:   I think it is bad, since the Arabs are impure and if one enters an impure land one will also become impure and share their curse.   Two others who totally disapproved did so because Joshua destroyed everything, including animals and property, instead of keeping some as spoil for the Israelites:   I think Joshua did not act well, as they could have spared the animals for themselves.   I think Joshua did not act well, as he could have left the property of Jericho; if he had not destroyed the property it would have belonged to the Israelites.   Once again the sage Maimonides, often cited for his scholarly wisdom, is in no doubt where he stands on this issue: ‘It is a positive commandment to destroy the seven nations, as it is said: Thou shalt utterly destroy them. If one does not put to death any of them that falls into one’s power, one transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said: Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth!

After Abraham was weaned, while still an infant, his mind began to reflect. By day and by night he was thinking and wondering: "How is it possible that this [celestial] sphere should continuously be guiding the world and have no one to guide it and cause it to turn round; for it cannot be that it turns round of itself?"...His mind was busily working and reflecting until he had attained the way of truth, apprehended the correct line of thought, and knew that there is one God, that He guides the celestial sphere and created everything, and that among all that exist, there is no god besides Him....He then began to proclaim to the whole world with great power and to instruct the people that the entire universe had but one Creator and that Him it was right to worship....When the people flocked to him and questioned him regarding his assertions, he would instruct each one according to his capacity till he had brought him to the way of truth, and thus thousands and tens of thousands joined him.

Page 25: …Maimonides was also an anti-Black racist. Towards the end of the [Guide to the Perplexed], in a crucial chapter (book III, chapter 51) he discusses how various sections of humanity can attain the supreme religious value, the true worship of God. Among those who are incapable of even approaching this are: "Some of the Turks [i.e., the Mongol race] and the nomads in the North, and the Blacks and the nomads in the South, and those who resemble them in our climates. And their nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does." Now, what does one do with such a passage in a most important and necessary work of Judaism? Face the truth and its consequences? God forbid! Admit (as so many Christian scholars, for example, have done in similar circumstances) that a very important Jewish authority held also rabid anti-Black views, and by this admission make an attempt at self-education in real humanity? Perish the thought. I can almost imagine Jewish scholars in the USA consulting among themselves, ‘What is to be done?’ – for the book had to be translated, due to the decline in the knowledge of Hebrew among American Jews. Whether by consultation or by individual inspiration, a happy ‘solution’ was found: in the popular American translation of the Guide by one Friedlander, first published as far back as 1925 and since then reprinted in many editions, including several in paperback, the Hebrew word Kushim, which means Blacks, was simply transliterated and appears as ‘Kushites’, a word which means nothing to those who have no knowledge of Hebrew, or to whom an obliging rabbi will not give an oral explanation. During all these years, not a word has been said to point out the initial deception or the social facts underlying its continuation – and this throughout the excitement of Martin Luther King’s campaigns, which were supported by so many rabbis, not to mention other Jewish figures, some of whom must have been aware of the anti-Black racist attitude which forms part of their Jewish heritage. Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of ‘Jewish interest’ (wishing to win Black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle – and back – and back again.

glass of prune juice at least a half an hour before breakfast, followed by a citrus fruit works fast to clear the intestinal tract, and detoxifies the body quite well.

The idea that time could be granular, that there could be minimal intervals of time, is not new. It was defended in the seventh century by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologiae, and in the following century by the Venerable Bede in a work suggestively entitled De Divisionibus Temporum (“On the Divisions of Time”). In the thirteenth century, the great philosopher Maimonides writes: “Time is composed of atoms, that is to say of many parts that cannot be further subdivided, on account of their short duration.”53 The idea probably dates back even further: the loss of the original texts of Democritus prevents us from knowing whether it was already present in classical Greek atomism.54 Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision. ​— ​Maimonides

From the first to the mid-fourth century, before various creed were increasingly formalized, many Christian monks were open to exploring other traditions along with their own, just as monastics today often include writings that range from the works of Moses Maimonides to the Buddhist sutras; apparently they were less concerned with what to believe than with the deepening their spiritual practice.

Israel is the only country in the world, according to Kishon, where patients give doctors advice, taxi drivers read Spinoza and Maimonides, and small talk is defined as a loud and angry debate over politics.

Teach thy tongue to say I do not know, and thou shalt progress.

Maimonides considered himself a disciple of Aristotle,[129] saw Moses as the chief philosopher, and even referred to [rabbinic] Judaism as a philosophical religion.[

The attainment of this wisdom has itself practical ramifications. In both Saadya’s and Maimonides’ philosophical works, the focus on particular ‘theoretical’ points in semantic theory, epistemology, cosmology, prophetology, legal theory, and so forth tends to obscure the overall non-theoretical telos of their respective works. Consider the Guide. However conventional the literary form of the work is, an epistle to a beloved student, troubled by a deep existential crisis, one must take the topos seriously. Maimonides is not writing for himself, nor is the Guide to be understood as a patchwork of theoretical minitreatises on the aforementioned topics. This is not in the least to deflate or to overlook the brilliance of Maimonides’ contributions to a variety of deep and difficult philosophical and scientific topics, but rather to contextualize those discussions in the appropriate way. Everything in the Guide subserves the end of showing the addressee that, properly understood, his religion—his traditional way of life, one circumscribed by halakhic (legal) norms—is philosophically defensible.

What evidence is there for the hypothesis that the average man is in need of an 'idol'? The evidence is so overwhelming that it is hard to select the data. First of all, the greater part of human history is characterized by the fact that the life of man has been permeated by religions. Most of the gods of these religions have had the function of giving man support and strength, and religious practice has consisted essentially in appeasing and satisfying the idols. (The prophetic and later Christian religions were originally anti-idolatric, in fact, God was conceived as the anti-idol. But in practice the Jewish and Christian God was experienced by most believers as an idol, as the great power whose help and support could be attained through prayer, ritual, and so forth.) Nevertheless, throughout the history of these religions a battle was fought against the idolization of God -philosophically, by the representatives of 'negative theology' (e.g., Maimonides) and, experientially, by some of the great mystics (e.g., Meister Eckhart or Jacob Boehme). But idolatry by no means disappeared or was weakened when religion lost its power. The nation, the class, the race, the state, the economy, became the new idols. Without the need for idols one could not possibly understand the emotional intensity of nationalism, racism, imperialism, or the 'cult of personality' in its various forms. One could not understand, for instance, why millions of people were ecstatically attracted to an ugly demagogue like Hitler; why they were willing to forget the demands of their consciences and to suffer extreme hardship for his sake. People’s eyes shine with religious fervor when they see, or can touch, a man who has risen to fame and who has, or might have, power. But the need for idols exists not only in the public sphere; if one scratches the surface, and often even without doing so, one finds that many people also have their 'private' idols: their families (sometimes, as in Japan, organized as ancestor cults), a teacher, a boss, a film star, a football team, a physician, or any number of such figures. Whether the idol can be seen (even if only rarely) or is a product of fantasy, the one bound to it never feels alone, never feels that help is not near.

Tamarin presented to more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren, aged between eight and fourteen, the account of the battle of Jericho in the book of Joshua: Joshua said to the people, ‘Shout; for the LORD has given you the city. And the city and all that is within it shall be devoted to the LORD for destruction…But all silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are sacred to the LORD; they shall go into the treasury of the LORD.’…Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword…And they burned the city with fire, and all within it; only the silver and gold, and the vessels of bronze and of iron, they put into the treasury of the house of the LORD. Tamarin then asked the children a simple moral question: ‘Do you think Joshua and the Israelites acted rightly or not?’ They had to choose between A (total approval), B (partial approval) and C (total disapproval). The results were polarized: 66 per cent gave total approval and 26 per cent total disapproval, with rather fewer (8 per cent) in the middle with partial approval. Unlike Maimonides, the children in Tamarin’s experiment were young enough to be innocent. Presumably the savage views they expressed were those of their parents, or the cultural group in which they were brought up. It is, I suppose, not unlikely that Palestinian children, brought up in the same wartorn country, would offer equivalent opinions in the opposite direction. These considerations fill me with despair. They seem to show the immense power of religion, and especially the religious upbringing of children, to divide people and foster historic enmities and hereditary vendettas. Tamarin ran a fascinating control group in his experiment. A different group of 168 Israeli children were given the same text from the book of Joshua, but with Joshua’s own name replaced by ‘General Lin’ and ‘Israel’ replaced by ‘a Chinese kingdom 3,000 years ago’. Now the experiment gave opposite results. Only 7 per cent approved of General Lin’s behaviour, and 75 per cent disapproved. In other words, when their loyalty to Judaism was removed from the calculation, the majority of the children agreed with the moral judgements that most modern humans would share.

Maimonides is the most influential Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, and quite possibly of all time.

There is one disease which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape: that every person thinks his mind more clever and more learned than it is. I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person. — Maimonides

The most striking fact concerning the pharmacological manuals is that the majority of them were written in al-Andalus (az-ZahrawI, Ibn Beklaresh, Ibn ‘Abdun), or by writers of Andalusian birth working in the Middle East (Maimonides, Ibn al-Baitar). It is likely that a substantial body of speakers of a variety of Berber akin to Tashelhit lived in al-Andalus, and that al-Andalus is the place where this language was first committed to writing. [29] That there were indeed Berbers in Spain who spoke a Tashelhit-like language is shown by the fact that at the end of the 15th century, as a consequence of the reconquista, a group or groups of berberophones are known to have migrated from Spain to the Sous in southern Morocco, where they became known as the ‘people of the ship’ (ayt uyrrabu). One of them is Sa‘id al-Kurrami (Seid Ak'w'rramu, d. 882/1477-8), who is reputed to be the last surviving Berber scholar who had received his schooling in Granada.[30] The Andalusian Arabic loanwords which are still found in Tashelhit, such as Imri ‘mirror’, Ikiyd ‘paper’, lixrt ‘hereafter’, ssisit ‘bonnet’, etc., also point to a connection between Tashelhit and al-Andalus. 29. On Berbers in al-Andalus in general see de Felipe, 1993 and 1997. (DE Felipe, Helena. 1993. ‘Berbers in the Maghreb and al-Andalus: Settlements and Toponomy.’ The Maghreb Review XVIII, pp. 57-62. ) 30. Cf. Justinard, 1933, pp. 220-224. "MEDIEVAL BERBER ORTHOGRAPHY" - MELANGES OFFERTS A KARL-G. PRASSE (pp. 357-377).

[...] One chief difference between the medieval "scientist" and the scientist of to-day[1948] lies in the nature of the first principles accepted and in the attitude adopted toward them. The modern scientist has seen the breakdown of too many first principles to accept any as eternal truths. He proceeds inductively, building up slowly on the basis of observed facts. His attitude to his own (or at least to his brother's scientist) first principles is one of hesitation, even suspicion. He looks on them as "working hypotheses" to be modified or changed in the light of further experience. The older scientist, although he too realized that his function wa to explain facts, closed the door on fresh evidence too soon. The modern, at least in theory, keeps it always open. But there is a further and perhaps more interesting difference between them. The medieval thinker aimed at comprehensiveness. he seems not to be satisfied with anything short of the whole. The modern thinker is more modest and seeks the key not to the universe but to one group of facts within it. He likes to break problems up and resolve them bit by bit. He is not interested (that is professionally speaking) in the world as a whole, but only in one small corner of it. Herein lies the traditional distinction between "science" and "philosophy." both science and philosophy try to discover principles and interpret detail in their light; but whereas science tries to clear up small areas of the world, philosophy aims at the world as a whole. it stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to the various sciences much as each science stands in relation to its particular subject-matter. It is the science which seeks to reduce to the scientific unity and order the results of the various sciences. [...]

was dismissing the Torah as irrelevant and insisting that, for the approaching Last Judgment, what was needed for salvation was not obedience to the Law but faith. If Jesus had stuck to the provinces no harm would have come to him. By arriving at Jerusalem with a following, and teaching openly, he invited arrest and trial, particularly in view of his attitude to the Temple – and it was on this that his enemies concentrated.90 False teachers were normally banished to a remote district. But Jesus, by his behaviour at his trial, made himself liable to far more serious punishment. Chapter 17 of Deuteronomy, especially verses 8 to 12, appears to state that, in matters of legal and religious controversy, a full inquiry should be conducted and a majority verdict reached, and if any of those involved refuses to accept the decision, he shall be put to death. In a people as argumentative and strong-minded as the Jews, living under the rule of law, this provision, known as the offence of the ‘rebellious elder’, was considered essential to hold society together. Jesus was a learned man; that was why Judas, just before his arrest, called him ‘rabbi’. Hence, when brought before the Sanhedrin – or whatever court it was – he appeared as a rebellious elder; and by refusing to plead, he put himself in contempt of court and so convicted himself of the crime by his silence. No doubt it was the Temple priests and the Shammaite Pharisees, as well as the Sadducees, who felt most menaced by Jesus’ doctrine and wanted him put to death in accordance with scripture. But Jesus could not have been guilty of the crime, at any rate as it was later defined by Maimonides in his Judaic code. In any case it was not clear that the Jews had the right to carry out the death sentence. To dispose of these doubts, Jesus was sent to the Roman procurator Pilate as a state criminal. There was no evidence against him at all on this charge, other than the supposition that men claiming to be the Messiah sooner or later rose in rebellion – Messiah-claimants were usually packed off to the Roman authorities if they became troublesome enough. So Pilate was reluctant to convict but did so for political reasons. Hence Jesus was not stoned to death under Jewish law, but crucified by Rome.91 The circumstances attending Jesus’ trial or trials appear to be irregular, as described in the New Testament gospels.92 But then we possess little information about other trials at this time, and all seem irregular.

The Aryan identity got broken off and forked historically in ancient Egypt where we witness the Osirian identity being passed down to the Jew while the Atenian one being inherited by their Christian successors. The Jew for example keeps his sidelocks (i.e. Payot) as his Egyptian plagiarized heritage states in Leviticus 19:27. This is the very same hair style worn by Horus The Child (Harpocrates/Heru-P-Khart) while sitting protected between the Aker lions; he also had seven manifstations just as Yahweh has seven authentic names (which are not to be classified as, attributes, according to Maimonides' magnum opus 'Mishneh Torah' as we read in Sefer Madda - Yesodei haTorah). The significance of this form of Horus is that it became the type of new birth starting from the New Kingdom onwards when the triads of gods got renewed and rejuvenated as Budge informs us. Horus, hence, became the Lion of Judah who was called by the ancient Egyptians as the 'Great Protector' and was also depicted as a lion with a head of a hawk.

The philosopher Karl Popper convincingly showed how utopian systems (such as fascism and communism) that consider themselves to be perfect tend to become violent dictatorships.17 The inner logic of utopian societies tends to make them hate difference. If you believe that the system is perfect, then dissent is by definition destructive and must be suppressed.

The Talmud distinguishes between huqqim (laws) and mishpatim (statutes). While the reasons for the mishpatim, such as “Do not murder,” are perfectly clear, the reasons behind huqqim—for example, not mixing wool and linen, or sending out the scapegoat on Yom Kippur—are opaque. The Talmud says about them, “I, God, decreed it and you do not have permission to question them” (BT Yoma, 67b).

The educational power of ritual is the Torah’s weapon of choice for defeating paganism.

Maimonides, by contrast, does not try to make reason and Torah compatible. For him, there is no need to harmonize revelation and reason, because revelation reveals reason. One does not have to reconcile the two intermediaries between us and truth, because they are really one. According to Saadia Gaon, Torah exists in harmony with reason; according to Maimonides, Torah is the revelation of reason.

The urge to consume the world causes suffering; the desire to understand the world brings happiness.

People become infatuated with their own thoughts and lock themselves into a limited and limiting framework of ideas.

The Guide is a struggle against tyrannies of the mind, not only those imposed by extreme religious movements, but also those formed out of our own hasty preconceptions.

Remember that it is not right to take a passage out of its context and to draw inferences from it. It is imperative to take into consideration the preceding and following statements in order to fathom the writer’s meaning and purpose before making any deductions.

Going back to Moses Maimonides, he considers Jesus that prophet who was authorized by God to prepare the heathen world (as Messiah for the heathens) for the salvation expected by Israel. I judge this attitude of a Jew very positively because he uses the same category of thought as Christian theology. This says that the Hebrew Bible is a preparation for the Gospel, and Lapide says that Christianity is a preparation of the heathen world for the Jewish Messiah.

Bernard Lewis, a lifelong student of Jews and Islam and himself a Jew, reflected on the fourteen centuries of Jewish life under Islamic rule, eight centuries after Maimonides’ damning verdict. Lewis wrote: ‘The Jews were never free from discrimination, but only rarely subject to persecution.’ He noted that the situation of Jews living under Islamic rulers was ‘never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best.’ Lewis observed that ‘there is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust.’ But he also commented that, on the other hand, there was nothing in the history of Jews under Islam ‘to compare with the progressive emancipation and acceptance accorded to Jews in the democratic West during the last three centuries.’11

Elly Kleinman Siyum Hashas Elly Kleinman (born 1952) is an American business executive and philanthropist best known as the founder and CEO of The Americare Companies.[1] He is the Co-Chairman of OHEL Board of Directors, Chairman of Camp Kylie Board of Trustees and Former Trustee of the Maimonides Medical Center. In 2012 he was the Chairman of 12th Elly Kleinman Siyum HaShas

The Nagid expressed the idea in verse: Man’s wisdom is in what he writes, good sense at the end of his pen; and using his pen he can climb to the height of the scepter in the hand of his king.14

There are evils . . . that men inflict upon one another, such as tyrannical domination of some of them over others. —THE GUIDE OF THE PERPLEXED, III, 2