Debate over the Principles and Jewish belief

Overview

Recall questions on incorporeality and the eighth principle, the response of Maimonides' contemporaries, Hasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo on the number of principles, Orthodox and Reform views of their authority, the Principles in worship, and whether Judaism is defined by practice rather than belief.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Why is the incorporeality of G-d a principle of faith for Maimonides, and what problem does the biblical text create for it?

   Model answer

   Maimonides holds that G-d has no body, no shape, no location and nothing comparable to him, and he treats belief in a corporeal G-d as a serious error rather than a naive one. The problem is that the Torah repeatedly speaks of G-d's hand, arm, face, voice and throne, of G-d walking, smelling and regretting. His answer is that scripture is written in language people can grasp, and that such expressions are figurative; a large part of his philosophical work is spent explaining biblical anthropomorphisms away. He argues that positive descriptions of G-d are misleading and that we speak more truthfully by saying what G-d is not, or by describing G-d's actions rather than G-d's nature. Not everyone accepted the severity of his ruling: one prominent contemporary critic objected that better Jews than Maimonides had pictured G-d in bodily terms and should not be called heretics for it.

2. 2

   What does the eighth principle claim about the origin of the Torah, and how does living Judaism treat it?

   Model answer

   It claims that the entire Torah now in Jewish hands was given to Moses from G-d, and Maimonides extends this to the oral interpretation as well, so that the traditional explanation is also of divine origin. Its biblical root is the Sinai narrative and the repeated formula that G-d spoke to Moses. Orthodox Judaism holds the principle in its full form and treats Torah from heaven as the boundary of acceptable belief. Progressive Judaism does not: it regards the text as a human record of encounter with the divine, shaped by its authors and their times, and locates its authority in its continuing power rather than in its dictation. This is arguably the single sharpest doctrinal division in modern Judaism.

3. 3

   How did the contemporaries and near-contemporaries of Maimonides respond to the Thirteen Principles?

   Model answer

   Reception was mixed and often hostile. His work triggered a prolonged controversy in which rabbis in Provence, northern France and Spain attacked his rationalism, his philosophical reading of scripture and his treatment of resurrection, and his books were banned and in one notorious episode burnt. On the principles specifically, a prominent critic objected that he had declared as heresy beliefs that pious Jews had long held. Later thinkers accepted that Judaism has dogmas but disputed which: one influential critic argued that the list confuses fundamental principles with beliefs that merely follow from them, and another reduced the essentials to three roots, the existence of G-d, revelation of the Torah and reward and punishment. Others argued that all the commandments are equally fundamental and that no such list can be drawn up at all. The principles nonetheless outlived their critics.

4. 4

   How do Orthodox communities regard the Thirteen Principles today?

   Model answer

   Mainstream Orthodoxy treats them as the standard summary of required Jewish belief, prints them in the prayer book, sings the hymn based on them, and uses several of them, particularly Torah from heaven, as the marker distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable positions. At the same time Orthodox scholars are aware that the principles were disputed in the medieval period and that great authorities held views inconsistent with some of them, and there is a live internal argument about how much weight a list that was never formally adopted can bear. In practice most Orthodox Jews encounter them as liturgy rather than as doctrine to be examined.

5. 5

   Explain what the teachings of Maimonides show concerning what G-d is and whether G-d exists, and how far his conception can be defended.

   Model answer

   Maimonides presents a G-d who exists necessarily, is absolutely one and simple, has no body, is outside time, and is so unlike anything created that positive description fails and we speak most accurately by negation. In defence: this protects monotheism from idolatry and anthropomorphism, it makes the Jewish conception of G-d intellectually defensible against philosophical objection, and it is arguably what the prohibition of images requires once thought through. Against: a G-d beyond all positive description is hard to reconcile with the G-d of the Torah who speaks, chooses, grieves and rescues, and harder still to address in prayer; the doctrine of simplicity strains against the covenantal relationship that the rest of Judaism assumes; and critics from Crescas onwards argued that Maimonides had let Greek philosophy set the terms for a Jewish subject. What turns on it is whether the transcendence Maimonides secures is worth the intimacy it appears to cost.

6. 6

   Why were Maimonides' Thirteen Principles controversial?

   Model answer

   Judaism had no formal creed, and critics argued that reducing belief to a fixed list imposed a dogmatic test the tradition had never required.

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