A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED

A Reader’s Companion to Maimonides’ Masterwork

LENN E. GOODMAN

Interiority And Law

Bahya ibn Paquda and the Concept of Inner Commandments

OMER MICHAELIS

In this volume, noted philosopher Lenn E. Goodman shares the insights gained over a lifetime of pondering the meaning and purpose of Maimonides’ celebrated Guide to the Perplexed

Written in the late twelfth century, Maimonides’ Guide aims to help religiously committed readers who are alive to the challenges posed by reason and the natural sciences to biblical and rabbinic tradition. Keyed to the new translation and commentary by Lenn E. Goodman and Phillip I. Lieberman, this volume follows Maimonides’ life and learning and delves into the text of the Guide, clearly explaining just what Maimonides means by identifying the Talmudic Ma‘aseh Bereshit and Ma‘aseh Merkavah with physics and metaphysics (to Maimonides, biblical cosmology and theology). Exploring Maimonides’ treatments of revelation, religious practice and experience, law and ritual, the problem of evil, and the rational purposes of the commandments, this guide to the Guide explains the tactics Maimonides deployed to ensure that readers not get in over their heads when venturing into philosophical deep waters.

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Bahya ibn Paquda’s Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha

Overturning perceptions of Bahya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of “inner commandments” developed by Bahya. Interiority and Law reveals that Bahya’s main effort revolved around establishing a new legal formation—namely, the “duties of the hearts”—which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Bahya’s radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Bahya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam.

Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Bahya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law.

FEBRUARY 2024 264 pages | 6 x 9

Paper $25.00 (£21.99) SDT 9781503637474

Cloth $85.00 (£73.00) SDT 9781503629530 eBook 9781503637481

Jewish Studies

STANFORD STUDIES IN JEWISH MYSTICISM

NOVEMBER 2023 232 pages | 6 x 9

Cloth $75.00 (£65.00) SDT 9781503636613 eBook 9781503637467

Jewish Studies