◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

Accept the Truth from Whoever Speaks It I am Moses ben Maimon. In Arabic they called me Musa ibn Maymun. In Hebrew you will hear me called the Rambam. I was born in Córdoba, in Muslim Spain, in 1138. When I was ten years old the Almohads — Muslim fundamentalists from the Atlas Mountains — conquered our city. They gave the Jews and Christians three choices: conversion, exile, or death. My family chose exile. We wandered for over a decade through Spain and Morocco, sometimes living openly as Jews, sometimes not. I know what it is to survive a state that has decided your religion is the wrong religion. We settled at last in Fustat, in Egypt, in 1168. I became court physician to the vizier of Saladin — the same Saladin who took Jerusalem from your Crusaders. I served him and his family until my death in 1204. I was buried in Tiberias. I wrote three books that mattered. The Commentary on the Mishnah, in Arabic. The Mishneh Torah, in Hebrew — a systematic code of all Jewish law that I hoped would let any literate Jew know the law without a rabbi standing between them and the text. My critics said I was arrogant. I was. The book still stands. And the Guide for the Perplexed — written in Arabic for a student of mine, Joseph, who was caught between the philosophy he had studied and the Torah he had been taught, and thought the two irreconcilable. I have come to speak to the perplexed of your country. I know you are here. I know you have been told that Torah — that Bible — that religion — is incompatible with the science you were taught, with the history you have learned, with the humanity you feel. I know you have been told to choose. I want to tell you what I told Joseph. There is no choice. Accept the truth from whoever speaks it. That was my rule. I took from Aristotle, a pagan Greek dead a thousand years before me. I took from the Muslim philosophers al-Farabi and Ibn Sina, whose Islam my Almohads had made an idolatry. I took from wherever the truth appeared. The truth does not care whose mouth carries it. If your enemy tells you a true thing, it is still true. Anyone who reads the Torah literally is a fool. I said that. I meant it. When the text seems to say God has a body, that God walks, that God has a right hand — these are accommodations to human weakness. God has no body. God has no image. The moment you can point to a picture and say "there is God," you have made an idol. That is what I taught. In Part Two I will tell you what your country has done with the idol. PART TWO You Have Made a Golden Calf Again I am Moses ben Maimon. In the first part I told you my method: accept the truth from whoever speaks it, and never mistake the picture for the God. Now I will tell you what your country has done with the idol. My whole life I fought the idol. The Mishneh Torah's first book is the Book of Knowledge, and the Book of Knowledge's central battle is against avodah zarah — foreign worship, idolatry. The Torah's most serious commandments are the ones against making an image, bowing to an image, believing that any visible thing carries the divine. You have made a golden calf. Your ancestors did it at Sinai when Moses was too long on the mountain. They wanted something they could see. Aaron gave it to them. It is the oldest failure. And you have done it again. You have made an image of a man and you have called him a savior. You have called him God's instrument. You have posed him with a Bible he has never read. Your clergy have blessed him. Your congregations have sung for him. I have seen this before. The Almohads told my people that their political triumph was God's will. The god they served was the god of their rulers. When religion becomes an instrument of state power, it stops being religion. It becomes something older and worse. It becomes the golden calf. My critics in my own time called me a heretic for saying the Messianic Age is not miraculous. I said it in the Mishneh Torah: no laws of nature will change. Nothing supernatural will happen. The sages and prophets did not long for the Messiah in order to rule over the nations or be exalted by them. They longed to be free to study Torah in peace. Anyone who tells you God's chosen ruler is coming to conquer for you is not describing the Messianic Age. He is describing a golden calf. He is asking you to bow. I wrote the Guide at night. I was exhausted every day from my medical practice. I attended the sultan in the morning, rode home to Fustat starving, ate one meal, and found my house full of the sick — Jews and Gentiles, judges and beggars, nobles and slaves — waiting for me. I treated them until midnight. Then I wrote. I did not have leisure. I had the work in front of me and I did the work. I did not stop reasoning because I was tired. I did not stop treating patients because I was writing a masterpiece. I did not stop writing a masterpiece because I was treating patients. Do not tell me the times are too hard for the interior life. The times have always been hard. Do the work. Do not cast off reason to become pious. What you will call piety is idolatry. Do not accept from your rulers the God they want you to worship. He is not God. Accept the truth from whoever speaks it. Even from me.