What Is the Mishneh Torah? On Codification and Ambivalence
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In the Introduction to his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides describes one of the accomplishments of his work as having made halakhah (Jewish law) into a transparent, accessible system. Talmudic legal literature had developed as an uncontrollable organism, laden with disputes and fragmented give-and-take recorded in Aramaic, a language no longer used in daily life; as a result, the halakhic material had become unapproachable. Even one who had labored to attain a degree of mastery over the literature could not be assured of the ability to extract practical legal rulings from the talmudic morass. He would always remain justifiably concerned that he had failed to understand the complex debate, that he had chosen wrongly among the wealth of opinions cited in the discussion, or, most of all, that he had missed a reference to his subject elsewhere in the Talmud, in some remote, unrelated context—a distinct possibility, given the Talmud's free-wheeling structure—and that the overlooked reference might have fundamentally changed the picture. These difficulties flow from the talmudic literature itself; to them, Maimonides added his gloomy historical account of the decline of Torah centers in his day, centers that, in the past, had produced halakhists qualified to extract sound, straightforward halakhah from the tangled talmudic literature. By omitting the disputes and debates from his presentation of the halakhah in the Mishneh Torah, by organizing the halakhah in a treatise structured around an orderly and focused arrangement of subjects encompassing all areas of halakhah, whether or not applicable in practice, and by writing the treatise in clear, simple language, Maimonides made the halakhah in its entirety transparent and accessible. As he puts it in the Introduction: “so that all the rules shall be accessible to young and old, whether these appertain to the pentateuchal precepts or to the institutions established by the sages and prophets.” As noted, the emphasis is on “accessible”: what had previously been concealed and convoluted was made bright and lucid, even to novices unfamiliar with the complex literature underlying these rulings. The adjective “accessible” is preceded by the no less important term “all the rules,” which characterizes the treatise as exhaustive as well as accessible. But Maimonides does not stop with this characterization of his treatise as a grand attempt at clarity and comprehensiveness; in the immediately following sentence, he adds the most daring and presumptuous statement ever written by a halakhist about himself: “…so that no other work should be needed for ascertaining any of the laws of Israel…a person who first reads the Written Law and then this compilation will know from it the whole of the Oral Law, without having occasion to consult any other book between them.” Whatever the precise import of this passage-a matter to be considered below—one can readily understand the harsh reactions it elicited along with the powerful hopes to which it gave rise. Beneath this transparency, however, lies an intense ambiguity bearing on the nature of Mishneh Torah itself as a tract and on the concept of authority that underlies it. Every line of the work is, indeed, a spectacular model of clarity, but the work overall is affected, from the outset, by a profound ambivalence that allows for strikingly varied understandings of its nature. The marvelous transparency of the tract's content compels the premise that any lack of clarity regarding its character is no happenstance, no mere failure of expressive skill or analytical clarity. On the contrary, the author himself has drawn a curtain of smoke, leaving his work's character an open question. As I shall try to show, this thick cloud is the intended result of Maimonides' ambiguous formulations in the Introduction to the Mishneh Torah and his contradictory statements in various letters in which he comments on the nature of the tract. At first glance, the question “What is the Mishneh Torah?” has a clear and simple answer: it is an effort to create a comprehensive halakhic code. But the term “code” is itself vague, allowing for a wide range of meanings. The purpose of this article is to uncover and clarify the various possible ways of understanding the Mishneh Torah's character as a text, by examining how Maimonides himself formulated the complex alternatives. As far as I know, this fundamental question has not been considered in any study of the Mishneh Torah. In addition, repeated examination of Maimonides' self-perception has left that question unresolved. The key to the various meanings of the work and to the reasons for that meaning's ambiguity is to be found in a close reading of Maimonides' Introduction. A close reading of the Introduction will produce two radically different understandings of the Mishneh Torah. The first option, the moderate one, perceives the Mishneh Torah as the representation of halakhah, and the second option, the more radical one, perceives the Mishneh Torah as the halakhah. The clarification of these two options and their far-reaching implications will be dealt with in this article. But before raising these options it is important to deal with a prior question—the role of the history of halakhah as Maimonides described it in his Introduction in supplying a precedent and a proper context of the Mishneh Torah. The explication of the history of halakhah in the way Maimonides outlines it will be the focus of the first sections of the article and it will provide the background for the presentation of the alternatives in understanding Maimonides' own conception of the Mishneh Torah.
Source Publication
Maimonides After 800 Years: Essays on Maimonides and His Influence
Source Editors/Authors
Jay M. Harris
Publication Date
2007
Recommended Citation
Halbertal, Moshe, "What Is the Mishneh Torah? On Codification and Ambivalence" (2007). Faculty Chapters. 756.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/756
