Lekh Lekha (Rambam)

Abraham the Iconoclast

This week’s parshah begins the story of Abraham, whose struggle with idolatry and whose discovery of the one true God captured the midrashic imagination and are a central feature of his biography, even though not mentioned as such in the biblical text (see on this also HY III: Lekh Lekha). Rambam devotes a special discussion to this subject in the first chapter of his “Laws of Idolatry,” of which this serves as a kind of introduction.

Before presenting this passage, a few words are in order about the structure of the Yad, and especially its first book. Maimonides’ great codex, Yad ha-Hazakah or Mishneh Torah, is divided into fourteen books. (Incidentally, Rambam seemed very fond of this number: the first word of this great work’s title, Yad [“hand”], is numerically equivalent to fourteen; there are fourteen roots or rules given in the first section of the Sefer ha-Mitzvot for determining which mitzvot are to be counted in the 613; the mitzvot are divided into fourteen categories in his explanation of their reasons in Book III of the Guide. Any reader’s thoughts on this will be appreciated.) Each of the fourteen books presents a major area of Jewish law (e.g., time; women; Divine worship through sacrifices; jurisprudence; property; etc.); each opens with a motto, in the form of a biblical verse, and closes with a festive peroration. The books are in turn subdivided into treatises or halakhot, laws on a specific subject, anywhere between three and ten in number; each treatise is then divided into chapters, which are in turn composed of individual paragraphs or halakhot.

The first book, Sefer ha-Mada (”The Book of Knowledge”) has a special character. It consists of five treatises concerned with various fundamental areas of Judaism, and contains much material that is uniquely Maimonidean. These are the sections in which Rambam is most himself, in the sense that here one finds entire chapters that are not reworking and codification of Talmudic and Geonic material, as are most halakhic codes, but represent entirely his own thought. Its five sections are: Yesodei ha-Torah (“Fundaments of the Torah”): basic theological principles, laws of sanctifying God’s Name, Kiddush Hashem, and prophecy; De’ot (often mistranslated as “opinions,” but which in fact means “character traits”): health and diet, general moral guidance and character training, and basic laws of interpersonal relationships; Talmud Torah (“The Study of Torah”), and the communal institutions that follow from it, such as schools, study houses, etc.; Avodat Kokhavim u-Mazalot(“Worship of Stars and Constellations”); and Teshuvah (Repentance), and such offshoots as the nature of free-will, the World to Come, etc.

Hilkhot Avodat kokhavim u-mazalot ve-ovdeihem (“Laws of Worship of Stars and Constellations and Those that Worship Them”) consists largely of practical halakhah, taken from Talmudic discussions in Avodah Zarah, Sanhedrin, and elsewhere. Chapter 2 begins with basic definitions of idolatry and the principles of rejection of paganism, and the treatise then goes on enumerate detailed, specific laws about eschewing material benefit from objects associated with pagan worship, social distancing from pagans, and various acts prohibited by dint of their association with paganism (tattoos; certain types of tonsure—hence the growth of payot, sidelocks, as a sign of traditional Jewish observance); etc. All this, however, is prefaced by a lengthy introduction, in which Maimonides propounds a theory of idolatry, where it comes from , and the nature of Abraham’s, and by extension the Jews', mission. Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim, Chapter 1 (this translation is based in part upon Yitzhak Twersky’s A Maimonides Reader):

1. In the days of Enosh, human beings fell into grave error, and the counsel of the wise men of the generation became foolish, and Enosh himself was among those who erred. Their error was as follows. They said: since God has created the stars and spheres to guide the world, placing them on high and allotting them honor, and since they are the servants who minister before Him, they ought to be praised and glorified, and rendered honor. And it is the will of God, blessed be He, to exalt and honor those whom He has exalted and honored, just as a king desires that respect be shown to the officials who stand before him, and thereby honor is shown to the king.

Once this idea arose in their hearts, they began to build temples to the stars, to offer them sacrifices, to praise and glorify them in speech, and to prostrate themselves before them—in order to obtain the Creator’s favor, according to their perverse notions. And this was the root of idolatry and what the idolaters who knew its fundaments said. But they did not state that there is no god except for this particular star. Thus Jeremiah said, “Who would not fear You, O King of nations? For such is Thy due; for among all the wise men of the nations and in all their kingdom there is none like You. But in one thing they are brutish and foolish, that the vanities by which they are instructed are mere wood” (Jer 10:7-8). That is, that all know that You alone are God; but their error and folly lies in imagining that this vain worship is Your will.

The salient point here is that idolatry began as an intellectual error, a matter almost of “etiquette”—that one should show respect to those heavenly bodies that are, so to speak, the most intimate ministers to the Almighty. On the one hand, this mitigates its severity—after all, it’s not Promethean rebellion against the Holy One blessed be He, such as that of the builders of the Tower of Babylon! On the other hand, it brings paganism much closer to ordinary experience, in that it is seen to be based on error an in theological matters. To misrepresent God, or to worship God with some kind of doctrinal or theological error, is already the beginning of the slippery slope that culminates in paganism. Hence, Maimonides’ constant emphasis on the importance of clear understanding of the nature of God’s unity, on uprooting errors relating to anthropomorphic conceptions of God, and his staunch opposition to ideas and practices from superstition and magic that creep into folk Judaism. Though I have no historical evidence for this, I would not be surprised to find that this whole chapter bears a certain covert polemical message for his own time.

2. And after many years passed, there arose among men false prophets who claimed that God had commanded them and told them to worship a particular star, or all the stars, to offer it such-and-such sacrifices or pour out libations, to erect a temple to it, and to make its image so that all the people—women, children, and the other ignorant folk—might bow down to it. And the false prophet showed them images which he had invented out of his own mind and asserted that this was the image of the particular star which he had been shown in his vision. And in this manner they began to make images in temples and under the trees and on the mountain-tops and hills, and they would assemble together and bow down to the images, and tell all the people that this image conveyed benefit or harm, and that it is proper to worship and to fear it. Their priests would tell them that through this worship they would increase and prosper, and that they should do this and not do that.

And other imposters sprang up, who said that the star itself, or the celestial sphere or angel, had communed with them and said to them, My worship shall be in thus-and-such a fashion, and informed them of a definite ritual, and said to them: Do this and do not do that. And so this practice spread throughout the world, of worshiping images with various modes of worship different from one another, and to offer sacrifices to them and bow down to them.

And as time passed, the honored and revered Name of God was forgotten by all of mankind, from their lips and from their minds, and they no longer knew it. Thus all the common people and the women and children knew only the image of wood or stone, and the edifice of stone before which they had been trained from childhood to prostrate themselves, to worship the image and swear by its name. And even their wise men, such as their priests and the like, imagined that there was no other god but the stars and spheres, because of whom and in whose likeness these figures had been made; but there was no man who acknowledged or knew the Rock of the Universe, save a few solitary individuals, such as Enosh, Methuselah, Noah, Shem, and Eber. And the world continued in this fashion until the pillar of the world, the patriarch Abraham, was born.

The second stage of error involved a further transition: from shituf, that is, the idea that there are other cosmic powers deserving of homage and reverence alongside the true God—a kind of pantheon headed by the true God, if you will—to another kevel: outright paganism, belief in false gods alone, animism or fetishism. Or, as Rambam, puts it, disappearance of the true knowledge of God.

3. After this [spiritual] giant was weaned, while still a child, his mind began to reflect, thinking and speculating day and night: How is it possible that this [celestial] sphere should continuously be moving and there is no one to guide it and cause it to turn round, for it cannot be that it turns round by itself? But he had no teacher, nor one to instruct him in aught, but he was submerged in Ur of the Chaldees, among foolish idolaters. And his father and mother and the entire population worshiped idols, and he worshiped with them—but his mind was busily working and reflecting until he attained the path of truth, and understood the proper line of thought, and knew that there is one God who guides the celestial sphere and created all, and that in all that exists there is no God but Him. And he realized that the entire world was in error, and that the cause of their error was that they worshiped the stars and the images, so that truth perished from their minds. Abraham was forty years old when he recognized his Creator. Once he attained this knowledge, he began to refute the inhabitants of Ur of the Chaldees, arguing with them and saying to them that they were not following the true path. He broke the images and began to teach the people that it is improper to serve any but the God of the Universe, to whom alone it was proper to bow down, and offer sacrifices and make libations, so that all human creatures might, in the future, know Him. And that it was proper to destroy and to smash all the images, so that the people might not err like these who had thought that there was no god but these images. Once he prevailed over them with his arguments, the king sought to kill him, and he was miraculously saved and emigrated to Haran. And he began to proclaim to the whole world with great force and to instruct the people that there is One God for the entire universe and that it was fitting to worship Him. And he went from city to city and from kingdom to kingdom, calling and gathering together the people, until he came to the land of Canaan, and there too he proclaimed his message, as it is said, “And he called there on the name of the Lord, the Eternal God” (Gen 21:33). And once the people flocked to him and questioned him regarding his assertions, he would instruct each one according to his [mental] capacity until he had brought him to the way of truth, until thousands and myriads joined him. And these are the persons referred to as “the people of the house of Abraham.”

And Abraham implanted in their hearts this great principle, and composed books on it, and taught it to Isaac his son. Isaac settled down, instructing and exhorting people. And Isaac imparted it to Jacob and charged him to teach it, and he settled down, and taught and strengthened all those who joined him. And Father Jacob instructed all his sons, and set apart Levi, whom he appointed head [teacher], and placed him in an academy to teach the way of God and to keep the charge of Abraham. He commanded his sons to appoint one instructor after another from the tribe of Levi in uninterrupted succession, so that the doctrine might never be forgotten. And so the matter was increasingly strengthened among Jacob’s offspring and their adherents, until there came about in the world a nation that knew God. But once the Israelites were a long time in Egypt, they relapsed and learned of the practices of their neighbors, to worship heavenly bodies like them, with the exception of the tribe of Levi, that steadfastly kept the charge of the patriarch, fir the tribe of Levi never practiced idolatry. But the doctrine implanted by Abraham could easily have been uprooted, and Jacob’s descendants would have lapsed into the error and perversities universally prevalent.

But due to God’s love for us, and because He kept the oath made to our ancestor Abraham, He made Moses our Teacher to be the master of all the prophets, and charged him with his mission. After Moses had begun to exercise his prophetic functions and Israel had been chosen by the Almighty as His heritage, He crowned them with mitzvot and showed them the way to worship Him and how to deal with idolatry and with those who go astray after it.

In this third paragraph, Rambam turns from the issue of the nature of idolatry per se to a discussion of Abraham’s mission. Interestingly, the picture drawn here is mostly not based on material found explicitly on the Bible, but upon a deeply-rooted Jewish oral tradition about Abraham’s life trajectory (although some of the ideas found here, e.g., the idea that Abraham write books, are not even found in the Midrash, if we except the Kabbalistic tradition that Abraham authored Sefer Yezirah). Also significant is that, unlike his near contemporary Judah Halevi in the Kuzari, where there is a kind of inborn, innate “Divine element” in the personality of Abraham himself, Rambam portrays his arriving at the truth of monotheism by means of reflection and reasoning alone, in an age of total paganism. Abrahamic monotheism is entirely a normative, exoteric doctrine, available to all by means of clear and logical, if serious and profound, thought. There is no innate, special religious talent or aptitude within the Jewish people in the genetic sense. Hence, as we shall see in Yesodei ha-Torah Ch. 7, prophecy exists among the nations. The main function of Abraham’s family unit is as the framework within which this teaching is passed on, and through its means promulgated to others. More on the figure of Abraham, and his central role in Maimonides’ thought, next week.