Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily. Today, I want to talk about someone that you may know as Maimonides, otherwise sometimes called the Rambam. My father actually, he was an oncologist at Maimonides Hospital. It was a little bit later in life that I realized that Maimonides is the same person that we refer, traditional circles, as the Rambam, an acronym for Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon.
Now, why is Rambam, Maimonides, so famous and so important, specifically in the world of the Talmud? So first, a little bit about his life. The Rambam was born, I believe, in 1138 and died in 1204. Now, the Rambam was born in Cordoba, Spain, traveled a lot, [and] eventually died in Egypt, where he served as like the official medical doctor for the government. He had a very important job.
We have a lot of information about the life of the Rambam. We actually have a letter where the Rambam describes his daily schedule, literally waking up early, seeing patients, getting to study a little bit, eating a little bit. His entire day was completely full, and then he would travel back on Shabbos and be like the rabbi of the community.
We also have a very emotional letter from the Rambam. The Rambam is normally associated with kind of rationalism, of being a philosopher, which he very much was. He was the author of the work The Guide to the Perplexed, known as Moreh Nevuchim. But the Rambam has a very emotional side, where after the Rambam’s brother, whose name was Dovid, died—his boat sank, he drowned to death. And the Rambam has a letter where he talks about the pain, the difficulty of getting over the loss of his brother. His brother was actually the person who supported him and supported his Torah learning during his lifetime.
Now, none of that is why the Rambam really stands out and is so famous as a figure in Jewish history. What exactly did the Rambam contribute? And I want to highlight one aspect of the Rambam’s scholarship. What I think made him so incredibly enduring and famous as a figure in Jewish thought and Jewish law. And that is the Rambam—I like to call him the categorizer-in-chief.
Before the Rambam, when people would try to study the Talmud and figure out, “Okay, like what do I actually do? I have all of these debates and concepts and ideas. How do I actually bring Judaism to life?” So the most famous work before the Rambam that really decided Jewish law was a work by Rav Yitzchak Alfasi, who died less than 50 years before the Rambam was born. [He]was a major figure. If you open up a traditional Talmud and you go all the way the end of the tractate, go past all the commentators, you’re going to come to a section. It almost looks exactly—it’s laid out—looks exactly like a page of Talmud. But this is actually the commentary of Rav Yitzchak Alfasi, or as he’s known, as the Rif, the acronym the Rif. And in the back of every traditional Talmud is the commentary of the Rif.
Now, the Rif basically is a running distillation of the Talmud. So you have to go through the entire tractate, and the Rif essentially gives you the entire tractate, but cuts out the parts that are not relevant for practical daily life. Now, this was fantastic, because we know, you know, who do we decide like, who does the Jewish community operate like in terms of their daily life, whether it’s making a blessing or the laws of Sabbath or whatever it is. It gives you the bottom line: we decided like this, like this opinion or like that opinion. But it’s a very clunky way to figure out how do I actually live my life.
Enter the Rambam. The Rambam is the categorizer-in-chief. He did something very different. Instead of giving you the bottom line and only quoting the relevant passages of Talmud, he took the entire corpus of the Talmud and reorganized it. Reorganize it based on first principles, and this is the work of the Rambam known as Mishneh Torah. Mishneh Torah literally means like the repeat of the Torah. It’s the reconfiguration of the Torah.
Imagine a Torah where it literally starts on first principles: the existence of God, the importance of not serving idols, and repentance, and love of God, and then slowly works up and goes through the holidays, and slowly works past that. It’s like very, very organized. What the Rambam did was reorganize the entire corpus of the Talmud, and that is the work known as the Mishneh Torah. Sometimes when it is quoted, we won’t even quote the Mishneh Torah, we’ll just say the Rambam says, and you will instinctively know in a yeshiva, when they’re studying, you’ll know they’re quoting from the Mishneh Torah.
Now, the Mishneh Torah is a work of, basically takes the entirety of the Talmud and organizes them into 14 sections or 14 topics. I’m not going to go through each one, but you should know that 14 is an important number, because sometimes this work of the Rambam, which he titled Mishneh Torah, is referred to as the Yad HaChazakah, the [Book of] the Strong Hand. Why is it called the Strong Hand? Because the numerical value of the word yad, yud–dalet, is 14, and the Rambam took the entirety of the entire Talmud and recategorize it into 14 major topics. And it begins with belief in God, and it literally ends with the messianic age. It takes you through conceptually and sequentially the entire thing.
Now, the Rambam was very controversial for this, because he basically skips over all of the actual debates and the back-and-forth, and just gives you the bottom line. Most famously, someone known as the Ravad, Rav Avraham ben David—it’s an acronym. A lot of acronyms in this period of time. So, nobody was named the Ravad, nobody was named the Rambam. Rambam is an acronym for Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon, and the Ravad is an acronym for Rabbeinu Avraham ben David.
But the Ravad, as is called in traditional circles, he took great exception to what the Rambam did. “What did you just do?” The Rambam says, “I want to make it easy and accessible. You don’t have to go through the whole Talmud. You can just read my work.” Ravad says, “That’s not the way we do things! You have to quote sources!” The Rambam doesn’t source anything. Just goes through the entire Talmud and distills it into the bottom line. The Ravad says, “Where’d you get this from? Maybe we disagree on your conclusions. Maybe we have a different reading of this passage.” So, throughout the Rambam, you will see the Ravad has glosses to the writings of the Rambam where he will take issue.
It’s very interesting. The project of the Rambam, in some ways, it almost backfired. The Rambam was looking for one text that you can read and get the entire corpus of the entirety of the Talmud. Instead, you know what the Rambam did? Created another layer of the depth of learning, because if you open up a Rambam now, the same way the Talmud is surrounded by commentaries, every page of the Rambam is surrounded by commentaries. It just accelerated and created more Torah learning. It didn’t distill everything into just one book. It almost created hundreds and hundreds of more books, because now what are the books about? How did the Rambam read this passage of Talmud? Did the Rambam read it correctly? What was his source? No, maybe his source was that. The Rambam became an exceptional ground for really the fruition of conceptual learning, of trying to understand through the Rambam’s eyes, how did he understand this passage of Talmud.
So, the Rambam is very central because he’s the categorizer-in-chief of the entirety of the Talmud, who basically take the entire chaotic world of the Talmud and distill it, on first principles, into 14 categories. That is why the Rambam stands kind of alone in Jewish history. [He]was the first person to recategorize the entire Talmud. And it’s going to be central in the development of Jewish law, of the understanding of the Talmud, how we approach it, and most importantly how we bring it into our everyday life.
One other important categorization of the Rambam that I want to present, that I think is so important, and just a basic foundation of understanding the corpus of the Talmud, is the Rambam says all Jewish obligations and readings come down to five categories of Jewish obligation. There are five categories of anything that we do.
Let me take one step back. The Rambam, aside from his Mishneh Torah, kind of the introduction almost to Mishneh Torah, is a work that the Rambam wrote that is a list of all of the 613 mitzvot. This was a classical form of Jewish work, where essentially there were many people who wrote works that basically just list out, these are the 613 commandments. We have positive commandments and negative commandments.
Now, it’s very interesting to know: we only have as one tradition in one place that we even know there are 613 commandments, so I don’t want you to get lost in that. But the Rambam basically tells you with, once again, 14 principles—I don’t know, the Rambam loved the number 14—14 principles of how to extract and define what a mitzvah is. What is an actual commandment from God? This is almost the introduction to his work Mishneh Torah, where the Mishneh Torah is not just the 613 commandments, but it’s all of the laws and the details of how you bring them out into daily life. And the Rambam will tell you before any section, “In this section, we’re discussing two mitzvot, two different commandments,” but it could be chapters and chapters of the details of how we bring them out into our daily life.”
But when it comes to any Jewish interpretation of any Jewish law, the Rambam divides them into five categories. And here they are. This is very important, and this is in the introduction of the Rambam to his commentary on the Mishnah. The Rambam writes as follows. Says there are five categories.
The first category are received translations of the Torah. Sometimes the Torah will say something that’s ambiguous, and we have a received tradition that has never been argued upon that this is how we translate these words of the Torah. Most of the Talmud has nothing to do with this. The Talmud takes them for granted.
The second category is what the Rambam calls a halachah leMoshe miSinai, a law that was received from Moses at Sinai, which really is received traditions. These are received traditions, laws that we have that are not anchored in the actual text of the Bible, but received traditions about when maybe a certain law may apply or how we are supposed to do a certain law. This is called a halachah leMoshe miSinai. These are mentioned in the Talmud frequently, but not that often. You’ll come across them.
It is the third category that is the bulk of the Talmud. These are laws that are extracted from the very text of the five books of Moses, from the Torah, laws that are extracted through the principles of interpretation, and we’re able to literally generate from the words of the Torah the actual laws. A close reading of the Torah with these essential principles of how to read the Torah then bring that written Torah alive in a way that can actually apply to our daily life. Most of the Talmud is discussing how we apply these principles, these readings of the Written Torah, and how we extract with these principles of interpretation the laws for our daily life. That is the third category, that is the bulk of the Talmud.
The final two categories are rabbinic law. There are things that the rabbis suggested either to do or to abstain from because it’s either a good guardrail, it protects a value of the Torah. When rabbinic law tells you to do something proactively, that is called a takkanah, that is a rabbinic enactment. When the rabbis tell you to abstain from something, that is called a gezerah, that is a rabbinic prohibition.
The same way that we have biblical commandments that some are active, what we call a mitzvas asei, that’s a proactive commandment, and we also have biblical prohibitions, those are a mitzvas lo sa’asei, what you should not be doing. Those prohibitions, the same way those exist on a biblical level, they exist on the rabbinic level. Proactive rabbinic legislation is called a takkanah, and a rabbinic prohibition is called a gezerah.
And those are the five categories, that is the entirety of Jewish law: received translations, received traditions, laws that are derived based on the principles of interpretation, rabbinic enactments of what you need to do, and rabbinic prohibitions.
And that is really why the Rambam stands alone. He took the entirety of the entire Talmud, and he developed, through a conceptual framework, the bottom line, taking you literally from the existence of God till the arrival of the messianic age, and brings you in one cohesive work, 14volumes, the entirety of Talmudic law.
This wasn’t the end of Talmudic learning, it was actually just a new beginning, where more commentators come on and continue to wrestle with the opinion of the Rambam, the ideas of the Rambam. We never have an end to Jewish learning, but every commentator, even after the Rambam, who tries to bring everything in order, is actually a catalyst for only more commentary, more Torah, which is part of the beauty of Torah study itself.
Let’s keep learning, and let’s keep making Torah sweet.