Commandment in Jewish Thought

What is the relationship between friendship and human flourishing? This is a central topic in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and one to which Maimonides also returned throughout his career. Despite the relative neglect of this topic in recent scholarship, I argue that friendship (philia) was an important link between moral and intellectual perfection for Maimonides. He identified Aristotle’s virtue friendship with the love between students and teachers and also interpreted many of the divine commandments as efforts to promote both family and virtue friendship among the Jewish people. Friendship was aligned thematically in Maimonides’ writings with topics like kinship and sexuality, circumcision, and the ethics of speech, all of which point in different ways to the unresolved tension between rational and sensual aspects of our human condition. This article therefore contributes to the investigation of the relationship between Maimonides’ legal and philosophical writing on social themes. While Aristotle clearly influenced his reading of biblical and rabbinic texts for example, I will also argue that Maimonides’ religious and communal commitments helped to push his reading of Aristotle in a broadly inclusive direction— both with respect to the range of different goods that are appropriate to an ideal human life as well as the potential accessibility of those goods to different classes of persons. I offer this article as a corrective to the exaggerated focus on seclusion and solitary contemplation that has characterized academic scholarship on Maimonides.

A meditation on some of the inner symbolic meanings of the Jewish commandment of circumcision ("brit milah"), in light of a growing number of Jews choosing to refrain from observing it. Circumcision is analyzed using three axes of meaning: matrialism vs. spirituality, nationalism vs. universality, freedom vs. coercion.

Elhanan Shilo (born in 1972) is a scholar of modern Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah as well as an original thinker in his own right. He studied at Yeshivat Or Etzion and afterwards studied Jewish Thought, philosophy, and Bible Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in the department of Hebrew Literature at Bar Ilan University on the subject of Kabbalah in the writings of Shai Agnon. The study was adapted into a book and published in 2011. Shilo has taught at Mikhlelet Orot and currently teaches at Mikhlelet Sapir. His second book, Yahadut Qiyumit, was published in 2017. Already at the beginning of Yahadut Qiyumit, Shilo introduces the dialectical tension between reason and revelation, referring to it as a dichotomy between religiosity and secularism. He explains that he wishes to present his own thoughts on the issue, describing a way to eliminate this duality and create a new path. Of all the other thinkers discussed in this book, Shilo is the only one who does not accept each one of the two competing sources of authority as a full truth in its own right, but rather seeks an alternative to rigid halakhic Judaism. In the first chapters of his book, he proposes two approaches. The first is what he terms "practical Judaism." This calls for the creation of less demanding and less rigid religious models, including non-halakhic ones, allowing unification with the secular truth-which is also not self-sufficient, seeking as it does a new form of spirituality as well as closeness to Judaism and its sources. Thus, it is possible to recreate a unified nation with a broad, shared basis of Jewish identity. The second approach is what Shilo calls "existential Judaism." According to this approach secular Jews should also obligate themselves to perform the commandments, not out of a sense of obligation to Halakha, but rather on the basis of existential criteria-identification with the contents of Halakhah and the belief that it has relevance to our lives. Using the first approach it is possible to unite a community around a single idea and set of actions. However, according to the second approach, the collective will be multifarious and pluralistic, a group of individuals, each member choosing the Judaism that best fits him and the commandments he wishes to observe. In Chapter Two of his book, Shilo seeks to undermine the notion that Jewish-religious observance is dependent on the existence of a commanding God-an assumption that has produced a dichotomy between the religious and secular segments of Israeli society. He presents the following possibility: One can choose to fulfill commandments due to a sense of affinity towards their contents, a recognition of their value, or a nationalistic/religious desire to connect oneself to Jewish tradition. This is as opposed to religious observance on the basis of traditional theological beliefs-that one must fulfill the commandments due to a heteronomous fiat, historically connected to the theophany at Sinai. On the one hand, accepting this proposal strengthens the commandments by imbuing them with autonomous status; on the other hand, it leaves leeway for a less demanding observance-one far more lenient than that demanded by intransigent Halakhah. According to this possibility, one can bridge the dialectical tension and close the chasm between atheists and lapsed Orthodox on the one hand and the commandments of the Jewish religion on the other. The religious experience and the sphere of sanctity are not necessarily connected to or dependent upon belief in the existence of a higher being. Up to this point, Shilo seems to be advocating the resolvable dialectical approach. However, he later seems to express a clear preference for the dual truth approach: