Maimonides’ Halakhic Revolution (and Why It Almost Worked)
Back in the Middle Ages, Maimonides set out on an extraordinary mission. His goal? To take all of Jewish law and tradition and condense it into one clear, orderly handbook that would finally get Jews to stop arguing. Spoiler alert: that didn’t quite happen.
That iconic portrait? It was found in an 18th-century book—several hundred years after Maimonides passed away—and is almost certainly fictional.
And the book beside it? The Guide for the Perplexed may be his most famous philosophical work, but his true life’s work—is something far more radical.
Imagine this: you’re sitting in your cozy apartment, sipping coffee by the window, when suddenly a construction worker pops into view. Your neighbor is converting her tiny window into a full-blown balcony—with a direct line of sight into your living room. And your bedroom. And yes, even your bathroom.
No curtain is going to save you now.
So—what do you do?
Now imagine you’re a Jew in Spain a thousand years ago. (Nice segue, right?) You’d have to open the Talmud, search through thousands of pages, hope to land on the right section—and maybe, just maybe, you’d find an answer. Probably not a definitive one.
The balcony example above is perhaps a bit quirky, but Jews struggled with this kind of inaccessibility of information for generations. Daily questions required massive amounts of legal knowledge, the kind you’d spend years—or decades—acquiring. And who had time for that?
That’s exactly what Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon—better known as Maimonides, or the Rambam—was thinking. And he had a bold, wildly ambitious solution.
At age ten, young Moshe watched as a new and terrifying power swept into Spain: the Almohads, a radical Islamic dynasty from North Africa. They persecuted Jews, forced conversions, and executed those who resisted.
He saw entire communities flee—his own family included—and watched Jewish life teeter on the edge. He feared that if things continued, Judaism would be reduced to a hollow shell—or disappear entirely.
Years passed, and Moshe was no longer just Moshe. He became Maimonides, the Rambam, The Great Eagle, the Egyptian court physician, and the halakhic authority everyone turned to with questions big and small. Now he realized the time had come.
Each night, after long days treating patients and advising the royal court, he sat down to work on his great project.
Maimonides understood that the endless arguments of the Gemara were no longer helpful. What people needed were clear answers. Straightforward rulings. A simple, structured guide anyone could use.
What they needed was the Mishneh Torah.
Mishneh Torah is the encyclopedia of Halakha – Jewish law.
It’s tidy. Logical. Comprehensive. Fourteen major sections. Exactly 1,000 chapters. Organized from the general to the specific.
To extract something like that from the dense jungle of the Gemara? It’s like turning the Amazon rainforest into the gardens of Versailles.
And he didn’t just organize—he issued rulings. Where the Gemara left questions open, he gave definitive answers. He wrote in crisp, clear Hebrew. He cut out all the names of the Talmudic sages. No footnotes. No citations. No aggadah (narrative or homiletic material). Just the distilled, practical law.
Pure clarity. Or as close as one could get.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate just how radical a shift Maimonides made—using our beloved balcony example.
Before the Rambam, if you wanted to know what to do in a case like this, you’d have to locate the relevant discussion in Tractate Bava Batra (how? No index), sift through pages of (sometimes contradictory) opinions, and then… figure it out on your own.
But if you were lucky enough to have a copy of the Mishneh Torah on hand, all you had to do was open the index, find the right section, and—boom—there’s your ruling.
If the entrance to a courtyard from the home of one of the partners was small, he may not enlarge it, for another partner may protest: “When your entrance is small, I could hide from you when making use of the courtyard. I cannot hide from you when your entrance is large.”
Mishneh Torah | Neighbors | Chapter 5
(Translation by Eliyahu Touger, Moznaim Publishing, via Sefaria)
Sure, the troubles of his era may have sparked the writing of the book, but in the Rambam’s eyes, the Mishneh Torah was meant to be timeless. How timeless?
Unlike most halakhic works, Mishneh Torah devotes real attention to laws that only apply when the Messiah arrives. Maimonides writes, in all seriousness, about regulations that would only come into play when the Temple is rebuilt, or when Jewish society is running its own fully independent political system—institutions and all.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the scope—and sheer audacity—of the project.
In his introduction, Maimonides states his goal outright: that people should study the Torah and then move directly to his book. “They will not need to read any other work in between.”
Naturally, that didn’t exactly go as planned.
To be clear: the book is brilliant. But no one actually gave up the Gemara. And even though Maimonides worked hard to tighten and streamline everything, the moment the book was published—it started expanding again.
And here we get a glimpse of a pattern that’s run through Jewish scholarship for centuries.
When Mishneh Torah was released, it ruffled more than a few rabbinic feathers. Leading scholars of the time added their objections right into the margins. Some tried to reverse-engineer where Maimonides got each ruling and scribbled those sources beside the text. Later commentators debated his decisions in light of other views, and others focused solely on trying to unpack what he meant. All of this commentary is still printed alongside the Mishneh Torah today.
The Hasagot HaRaavad, Kessef Mishneh, Maggid Mishneh, Lechem Mishneh, Migdal Oz, Hagahot Maimoniyot—just to name a few.
This whole story—knowledge expanding, someone condensing it, and then expansion all over again—is a familiar cycle. One that repeats itself again and again throughout the history of Jewish law.
Roughly two thousand years ago, when the Oral Torah had grown too vast to hold in memory, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi distilled it into the Mishnah. Several centuries after Maimonides, when halakhic literature had again become too unwieldy, Rabbi Yosef Karo condensed it into the Shulchan Aruch.
The cycle never ends. And in an age of information overload, we totally get it. When there’s too much knowledge, someone has to narrow it down. But then you realize, “Wait, this part’s missing. That part’s missing.” And so—back out it all comes. So the next time you see that famous portrait of an imaginary Maimonides, you can remember his very real, very revolutionary book.
3 comments:
There were reasons for the pushback against the Rambam.
Some were dogmatic - you can't have a simple system of psak. Every question requires a thorough read-through of the Gemara and the exisiting commentaries at the time to give you an answer. The idea that a regular jew could flip open a book, look at the right chapter and get the answer on his own? Outrageous.
There was also the idea of nuance though. The Rambam's psak on a particular case might not take into account a nuance not considered at the time and lead to a different outcome. Simple reliance on the Mishneh Torah wouldn't help then. Add on that with the passing of time and development of society, new situations not anticipated by the Mishneh Torah might arise and then what?
The Rambam himself also didn't help his case by announcing that with the publication of the book you could throw away your Talmuds because now all you needed was the Tanach and the Mishneh Torah. Also not including footnotes would definitely cause a problem in acceptability.
He saw the Kollel problem down the road :-).
On a serious note, there is no definitive source to my knowledge who he was a student of. In addition being an Aristotelian, created the furor against his seforim, in particular, the Moreh Nevuchim. (Which were burnt by many)
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