Aristotle, Maimonides, and Jewish Ethics
It may surprise you to learn that one of the most influential figures in Jewish thought was not Jewish. He lived, taught, and wrote during what is believed to be a particularly fraught and important time in Jewish history—though it is one that is shrouded in the haze of time and a dearth of documentation.
When Alexander (356-323 BCE) conquered the Holy Land in about 333 BCE, he brought many of the cultural and intellectual elements of Greek society. He introduced Jewish society to the Greek wisdom and philosophy of Alexander’s teacher, Aristotle (384-322 BCE). And so, with the developing Jewish taste for all things Greek, an appetite for the teachings of Aristotle also blossomed in souls of educated Jews. It’s no exaggeration to say that Judaism, as we know it, owes much to this encounter.
Centuries later, Maimonides (1138–1204 CE), one of Judaism’s greatest thinkers, absorbed these teachings through the lens of Muslim Aristotelians. His seminal work, The Guide for the Perplexed, bridged Aristotelian philosophy and Jewish theology. For Maimonides, ethics and reason were central to Jewish practice, a legacy that influenced later Jewish movements.
900 years later, influenced by the ethical teachings of Maimonides, the Jewish Mussar movement evolved. Rabbi Israel Salanter (1809-1883), teaching in Lithuania, incorporated the first sentence of the book of Proverbs into a profound discipline of ethical aspirational practice.
לָדַ֣עַת חׇכְמָ֣ה וּמוּסָ֑ר לְ֝הָבִ֗ין אִמְרֵ֥י בִינָֽה׃
For learning wisdom and discipline (Mussar);
For understanding words of discernment;
What Aristotle, Maimonides, and Salanter have in common is that ethics should be a foundational pursuit of humanity—and for the latter two, the core of Jewish practice. Maimonides and Salanter were somewhat controversial because, while they embraced Jewish rituals and practice, they taught that observance alone does not bring virtue, it must be accompanied by a disciplined life in pursuit of principle.
In the days ahead I’ll take a look at ethics in a Jewish context and offer a challenge for each of us to incorporate more of those principles into our own conduct.
–Rabbi Ron Stern