Maimonides Was Born Moses Maimon

Maimonides was born Moses Maimon and has been proclaimed as the man who has had most profound impact on Jewish faith. No one has studied and explained the Jewish religion as comprehensively and completely as Maimonides and thus there is a saying in Jewish circles that states: "From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses." Son of a rabbi, Maimonides grew up with deeper knowledge of the religion that most people his age. His birth in 1135 coincided with the era of persecution of non-Muslims in Spain and thus the family moved to North Africa when Maimonides was in his teens. But he proved to be a precocious theologian for he started studying religion and various possible interpretations of Torah from a very young age.

Moses Maimonides developed the thirteen articles of Jewish Faith that forever felt an indelible mark on the religion and its followers. He termed these thirteen principles as "the fundamental truths of our religion and its very foundations." The articles are grounded in Maimonides' extensive research and various interpretations of Torah and its teachings. Extracted from sacred texts were beliefs that now form the very foundation on which Jewish religion is based. These articles are:

Belief in the existence of the Creator, be He Blessed, who is perfect in every manner of existence and is the Primary Cause of all that exists.

The belief in God's absolute and unparalleled unity

The belief in God's non-corporeality, nor that He will be affected by any physical occurrences, such as movement, or rest, or dwelling.

The belief in God's eternity

The imperative to worship Him exclusively and no foreign false gods

The belief that God communicates with man through prophecy

The belief that the prophecy of Moses our teacher has priority

The belief in the divine origin of the Torah

The belief in the immutability of the Torah

The belief in divine omniscience and providence

The belief in divine reward and retribution

The belief in the arrival of the Messiah and the messianic era

The belief in the resurrection of the dead

Source: Medieval Sourcebook)

Maimonides presented these thirteen articles in his commentary on Mishnah. And there is definitely more than one reason why he chose to codify Jewish beliefs and present thirteen articles as the cornerstone of Jewish religion. Maimonides was educated by Arab scholars and was a thinker who truly wanted to find the truth. He believed that seeking truth was important no matter what its source. In this regard he was as influential and unprejudiced as Thomas Aquinas and did for Jewish religion what Aquinas did for Christianity. Maimonides' primary objective for writing various commentaries was to prove that there existed no conflicts between reason and faith in Holy Scriptures if correctly interpreted. He felt that religion must be scientifically studied to remove any clash that might originate between scientific facts and religious truths.

For a student of philosophy and science, like Maimonides, Jewish religion was quite vague since it was primarily based on teachings of ancient rabbis in Talmud and similar other texts. A single comprehensive source of knowledge for missing and this Maimonides stepped in to provide the link. It was a great challenge to bring all the sacred texts and their teachings together at one point and present a comprehensive yet understandable guide to Jewish people. He found a void in religious writings and felt a need for codification of religion and thus turned to Plato and Aristotle for philosophical explanation of religious teachings.

Being a student of Aristotle, Maimonides subscribed to his assumption of universal teleology i.e. every person comes into this world with a destiny and reached a natural final state after fulfilling that destiny. He felt that people move in a certain pre-ordained direction from the time of birth and continue their journey till they reach the final state of rest. He used teleology to provide the link between reason and faith and to prove that there existed no real conflict between the two. He took it upon himself to justify intellectually and scientifically the various principles and views prorogated by Jewish thinkers and rabbis.

Contrary to popular belief of his time that some commandments could not be explained scientifically, Maimonides asserted that every single commandment had sound intellectual basis or reasons, which are intelligible to human beings. Maimonides dedicated his life for bridging the gap between reason and revelation. He believed that reason unlike revelation was an arduous process that follows a step-by-step procedure to reach the truth and asserted that man was inherently capable of reaching the final truth provided he possesses certain intellectual capacity. Revelation was just a higher form of reason and thus there existed no specific difference between the two.

For Maimonides, the love of God is the intellectual love of God, that is, one begins with the intellectual knowledge of God, but then imbues that intellectual knowledge with drive, passion, and desire -- drive, passion, and desire that are themselves cognitive in nature -- thereby transforming intellectual knowledge of God into intellectual love of God. (Kaplan, 1994)

Due to this link that he had discovered between reason and revelation, Maimonides refused to accept the popular Jewish belief that revelation was restricted to people of Jewish faith only. He felt that revelation was open to all human beings and thus treated Islam and Christianity with respect considering them two authentic faiths and supported their claims of revelation. But being a firm believer in the unity of God, he criticized Christianity for its concept of trinity and felt that this concept clashed with Christianity's claim of monotheism.

Maimonides' interpretation of faith was firmly grounded in reason and intellect. He believed that people who are not trained in philosophy or science might find his arguments intelligible.

Maimonides tends toward an elitist position regarding the role of reason to be exercised in the divine science. Prompted by the perplexity of his student, Rabbi Joseph ben Judah, in reconciling the literal meaning of the Bible with the dictates of reason, Maimonides writes for a select segment of the population. He addresses himself to those of his co-religionists who possess two antecedent qualifications: they must be firmly established in their religious beliefs and practices, and they must have studied the sciences. It is not Maimonides' desire to instruct the multitude of ordinary men in philosophy." (Birnbaum 2001)