On One Foot
MAIMONIDES, LAWS OF FOREIGN WORSHIP 11:17-18 These practices are all false and deceptive and were means employed by the ancient idolaters to de- ceive the peoples of various countries and induce them to become their followers. It is not proper for Israelites who are highly intelligent to be drawn by such inanities or imagine that there is any benefit in them, as it is said “For there is no enchantment with Jacob, neither is there any divination with Israel” (Numbers 23:23); and further “For these nations that you are to dispossess hearken to the soothsayers and diviners; but as for you, The Lord your God has not suffered you so to do” (Deut. 18:14). Whoever believes in these and similar things and, in his heart holds them to be true and scientific and only forbidden by the Torah, is nothing but a fool, deficient in understanding, who belongs to the same class with women and children whose intellects are immature. Sensible people, however, who possess sound mental faculties, know by clear proofs that all these practices which the Torah prohib- ited have no scientific basis but are chimerical and inane; and that only those deficient in knowledge are attracted by those follies and, for their sake, leave the ways of the truth. The Torah, therefore, in for- bidding all these follies, exhorts us, “You shall be wholehearted with the Lord your God (Ibid 18:13).” 3
3 IN A SHARP DISSENT, MAIMONIDES, the prime example of Jewish rationalism in the Middle Ages, rejects any possibility that the stars impact the human condition. This is a classic example of the Maimonidean principle that, when Torah and reason collide, we alter our understand- ing of the Torah to fit with reason. In this case, he sees the many examples of astrological influ- ence in the Bible as metaphorical. The Rambam elaborated on this anti-astrology stance in a let- ter he wrote to the Jewish community in Yemen, which was dealing with a charismatic individual claiming to be the Messiah, leading many in the community astray. Local leaders wondered if the community was suffering this misfortune because it was under the influence of bad astro- logical signs. “Dismiss such notions from your mind,” Maimonides wrote. “Cleanse your mind of them as one cleanses dirty clothes. Accomplished gentile and certainly Jewish scholars refuse to be- lieve in the truth of this science. Its postulates can be refuted by real proofs on rational grounds.”
2 THIS IS AN EXCERPT from an extend- ed passage in the Talmud that begins by describing the various ways that the stars in- fluence human behaviour and actions — writ- ing, for example, that a person born under the influence of Mars will have blood in their life, which may manifest in fates ranging from becoming a murderer to working as a slaugh- terer. It then declares that the constellations do not affect the Jewish people. Constellations —in Hebrew mazel (the origin of the phrase mazel tov) are clearly believed by the Talmud to have a real effect on people, but this must be reconciled with moments when this effect is overcome, either by divine intervention or our own will. The Talmud explains that, while the effect of the stars is real, Jews are unique- ly positioned to alter their destinies with good deeds and prayer.
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