Reasons for the Mitzvotpart iii · the rationality of the commandments

There is a group of human beings who consider it a grievous thing that causes should be given for any law; what would please them most is that the intellect would not find a meaning for the commandments... I myself consider the contrary opinion: every commandment has a cause; that is, every commandment has a useful object in view. Guide III:26

Few positions in the Guide have travelled less well than this one. Maimonides insists, against pious instinct, that the commandments have reasons — historical, political, moral, hygienic — and that the philosopher's task is to give them. The contrary view, that we obey because God said so and no further reason is necessary, he treats as a failure of love for the Law. To say a commandment has no reason is, for him, to insult its author.

The categories of reason

Maimonides organises the commandments into fourteen classes (III:35–49) and gives each class its rationale. Some are obvious: laws of theft, laws of testimony, laws of inheritance. Others — laws of forbidden foods, laws of skin diseases, the laws of the sotah, the laws of impurity — require more work, and Maimonides does the work.

The most provocative claim is reserved for the laws of sacrifice (III:32, III:46). Why does the Torah command an elaborate sacrificial cult — a cult that, in Maimonides' century as in ours, is conducted only in memory? The answer he gives is shocking in its historical concreteness:

It was not possible, according to the nature of man, that he should suddenly abandon all to which he had been accustomed... For this reason God allowed these kinds of service to continue; He transferred to His service that which had formerly served as a worship of created beings... By this Divine plan it was effected that the traces of idolatry were blotted out. Guide III:32

The sacrifices are, on this account, a concession. Israel emerged from a world in which all worship was sacrificial; to demand that they begin instantly with the purer worship of prayer and contemplation would have been to demand more than human nature allows. God therefore redirected the existing practice — same bulls, same altar, same fire — toward Himself, and waited.

The implication, half-suppressed

The argument is half-suppressed because it carries an obvious corollary: if the sacrificial cult is a concession to historical conditions, then later worship — prayer, study, contemplation — is closer to the ideal worship. Maimonides does not write this conclusion out plainly. The attentive reader writes it for him.

Nachmanides, a century later, would attack the position with great force: God does not command historical accidents; the sacrifices have their own intrinsic meaning. The dispute is alive in Jewish thought to this day. What is rarely disputed is that Maimonides' framing — the Torah as the work of a wise legislator addressing real conditions — is among the most consequential moves in the medieval philosophy of law.

Why give reasons at all

Maimonides' deeper claim is that the commandments are educative. Each one, properly understood, trains the intellect or the disposition; each one moves the practitioner closer to the perfection that, in the thread on Job, draws individual providence. To say the commandment has no reason is to say that obedience is sufficient without understanding. Maimonides will not concede this. Understanding is the work; obedience is its discipline.