Letter 129: Reflections of a Renegade Jew

“First, the disciples were in a unique position to know whether the Resurrection happened, and they went to their deaths proclaiming it was true. Nobody knowingly and willingly dies for a lie…there’s no good reason why skeptics like [Saints] Paul and James would have been converted and would have died [painfully] for their faith.”

-- Lee Strobel, 1998.

“In the first place, philosophy did not develop in an unbiased way from an open and unprejudiced origin. It had its task cut out for it from the start. It had a mission to perform, and it was sworn in advance to that mission. It had to extract the essential moral kernel out of the threatened traditional beliefs of the past.”

-- John Dewey, 1920.

“This work…seeks to explain certain obscure figures which occur in the Prophets [and their messages transcribed in the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible]…Even well informed persons are bewildered if they understand these passages in their literal signification, but they are entirely relieved of their perplexity when we…merely suggest that the terms [of the Prophets and of the narrative of the Tanakh] are figurative. For this reason I have called this book Guide for the Perplexed.”

-- Moses Maimonides, 1190.

NOTE; Thanksgiving Day 2016. 

You are in luck! Here is the blessed text for free: 

http://www.teachittome.com/seforim2/seforim/the_guide_for_the_perplexed.pdf. 

I myself had to have the paper copy so I could leave my teeth-marks in it and study it as I study any bucket-list non-fiction book…ANALytically.

BLUF (Bottom-line, up front): The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel provides a convincing argument in favor of the authenticity and accuracy of the New Testament. In a few sentences, Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides refutes that notion devastatingly.

Introduction. The dilemma? In one book, one has to choose Christianity or overtly turn away from it; lazy agnosticism is no longer an option. Using less refined argumentation than C.S. Lewis, Strobel strengthens his argument through its accessibility. The other book explains why Christianity simply does not work and why it was condemned as a heresy of Judaism from the beginning. 

Certain books can change the world. Certain statements in certain books can change one’s life. The underlying religious texts are full of nuggets for people in all times:

1. "Praise be to G-d, Lord of the Universe, the compassionate, the Merciful, Sovereign of the Day of Judgment! You alone we worship, and to You alone we turn for help."
2. "Simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures."
3. "Blessèd are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."
4. "Now my natural qualities are besieged by weakness and apprehension and my thinking bewildered regarding righteousness."
5. "Solomon answered G-d, 'You have shown great loving-kindness to my father David and now You have made me king in his place. Now, AdonaiELOHIM...give me wisdom and knowledge that I may go out and come in before this people. For who can govern this great people of Yours?'"

Specific books, and passages within them, however, suit a particular individual’s temperament and direction through life. For me, two of those books have been Reconstruction in Philosophy by John Dewey and Guide for the Perplexed by Moses Maimonides. This essay focusses on the irreconcilable super-ordination of Judaism over Christianity executed so elegantly by Maimonides that I have nowhere else to go but home.

Collision of the Wraiths of Faith. For many years, I have come to believe that Saint Paul – half Jew and a Roman citizen – was the first international marketing M.B.A. He saw the vacuity of Roman decadence, the twilight of the Graeco-Roman pantheon in favor of the orientalist man-god in the flesh of the Emperor. While he saw that black hole of the Roman soul, Saint Paul was also a pragmatist.

Saint Paul knew, from his physician friend, Saint Luke, that adult men would never consent to circumcision with mortality rates likely to run 25% or more. So believers – fellow Romans starved for meaning and inward renewal – need only believe in the man-god of J.C.; merely circumcise their hearts; and, simply write the law unto their hearts rather than have all those rules upend their lives.

My blithe conception of Christianity being Judaism-over-easy no longer holds. Barely mentioning Jesus or Catholicism, Maimonides consigns Christianity to being a Jewish heresy. Christians take the words of the New Testament – and the parts of Tanakh (the Jewish Bible, or the Old Testament) used to justify the Gospels – at their face value.

Maimonides discusses at length why the scriptures were never intended to be taken literally. They were analogies and metaphors useful in guiding believers toward (inward) virtue being its own reward. Virtue being its own reward sounds a lot like Grace. Except that the Jewish conception of Grace is a more active notion than a simple and largely passive ‘conversion’; it requires living a certain way to elevate mind and body together toward an accessibility to G-d's guidance.

The relief from perplexity, as prescribed by Maimonides, is aligning metaphysics with behavior, a commitment which entails something other than understanding the why-behind-the-why intellectually. One must apprehend it through attempting, and often falling short of, an obedience to the commandments and to the concrete message behind the mystery of the prophecies. People grow toward Grace, not simply let it in via conversion. 

In The Case for Christ, ex-crime investigative reporter, Lee Strobel, nobly argues a case for the ‘fact’ that Jesus Christ not only existed, but that his biography is accurately narrated and substantially corroborated in the Gospels. He adduces convincing evidence. While not proven completely -- as no historical chronicle ever is -- if Strobel were writing about another, less-laden topic, his pain-staking argument would persuade me as being highly probable in its veracity.

That would suffice for me to accept Jesus Christ as a historical figure; to hand my life over to his guidance; and, to get on with my life of Grace. Except that Moses Maimonides under-cuts the legitimacy of Strobel’s argument by clearly, simply and incontrovertibly pointing out the source of Christianity being a heresy: the literal interpretation of the prophecies and other scriptures.

Being literalists, the early Christians aligned the facts, as recorded, of Christ’s life with the prophecies of Isaiah et al. in proclaiming an eventual Messiah. That reversal of Christian logic by Maimonides does not mean that I think Christians are somehow fraudulent in their often extraordinary loving-kindness. What it does mean is that Christianity, for all her splendor and wisdom, is not a simple emulation of G-d begotten as man but of G-d as spoken through the Prophets. 

No, my old notion of Christianity being Judaism-over-easy – reflecting a life-long habit of splitting the difference to appease everyone and, therefore, to please no one – is not a separate package of belief and doctrine. It is Judaism, pure and heretically simple. Many other confounding questions (some new and some old) fall into place after a life-time of cognitive dissonance thanks to this brilliant and modest man from so long ago:

• why there is a close resemblance of the structures of Catholicism and Judaism (i.e., tabernacles for the body of wisdom, the Torah, and the body of Christ as well as five layers of hierarchy between man and G-d, per the counsel of Jethro, history's first ever management consultant);
• why so many Christian sects exist, many being cults of (often dangerous) personalities;
• why Islam and Judaism resemble one another far more than either resembles Christianity;
• why so many Christians – Orthodox and Western – have been so profoundly Anti-Semitic for so long;
• how a repeated mix of Christianity and politics keeps yielding distinctly un-Christlike behavior and rhetoric in our own day through conflation of literalism with political ideology or voting preference;
• why everyone is truly created as a finite image of an infinite G-d;
• how fighting over shelf-space has instigated repeated pogroms, even genocide, against the believers of a vulnerable religion, often with the tacit complicity of host-nation Christian churches;
• why the Trinity, according to Maimonides (ironically, without mentioning it), really makes no sense, except in a context of error in which figurative language is interpreted literally;
• how to revere and emulate Jesus since he is more than a rabbi and less than a prophet; as well as,
• why Maimonides’s exerts a pervasively persuasive influence on many great Christian theologians and philosophers, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to William of Ockham to Blaise Pascal to Bishop George Berkeley to Søren Kierkegaard to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and even to (the Jewish) Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The medieval rabbi came to my attention during my time interning with the U.S. Senate a long time ago. Two years before, a fellow W.&L. Zeeb and a W.&L. professor, neither of whom ever avoided dinging me, instructed me to pursue the-why-behind-the-why through their example of curiosity, notwithstanding grades. 

Thank G-d, because high marks were not exactly in my repertoire back then! Among many books beyond my limited intellectual reach that I read was A Guide for the Perplexed by E.F. Schumacher, in 1982. Having recently been enchanted, permanently, by his earlier masterpiece, Small Is Beautiful, I was disappointed by Schumacher's stab at metaphysics due to its difficulty. 

Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, read the previous year, I sorely lacked the patience to slow down enough really to read that book. In his 'Guide', Schumacher kept referring to Guide for the Perplexed by Maimonides. What I managed to extract from Schumacher and his invisible mentor has shaped my basic beliefs to this day. 

Consequently and inevitably, Maimonides's work became a bucket-list book, not to be read for another thirty-four years (i.e., true to my slack form, if more sacral substance). But what a rich, if deferred, lode of gold this eight-hundred, twenty-five year old book has proven to be! Reading it is like eating fresh Sushi: only then do I realize how famished I have been for real nourishment.

Conclusion: why the above-cited quotes above mean so much.  Early in their respective books, Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish theologian and metaphysics philosopher, as well as Dewey, the great twentieth century pragmatic philosopher, made simple and transparent declarations that instantly changed the way I looked at things then; their imprint will remain indelible until the day I depart.

John Dewey’s plain-spoken argument, which I read thirty-five years ago, shattered my nascent romance with metaphysics by explaining that Aristotle and Plato fancifully supported the status quo of their time. Metaphysics was not venal nor was it other-worldly. Like it or not, one had to play his hand as dealt. Only doing that with arretê (instrumental excellence) would increase virtue, provided one did not shed his humility along with his ignorance. 

Likewise, Moses Maimonides’s equally plain-spoken clarification argued that Jewish scripture – with the exception of the commandments dictated to Moses by God – was designed less to build knowledge than to excite the imagination, or the will (i.e., soul) toward virtue. That fact of the Tanakh basically relegated Christianity to a Judaic heresy since the early fathers had degraded the figurative scripture into the literal or, philosophically put, the metaphysical into the ephemeral. 

Grace is virtue; wisdom, its currency; and, rapture, its reward.