120 CHAPTER FOUR
whether those raised from the dead require ablutions, and says: “Since
our Master Moses will also be present among those resurrected, we are
dispensed with wrecking our brains on these issues.”^154 Such a humorous
response allows for a rebuttal of excessively literal thinking, albeit with-
out outright mockery. Maimonides is obviously familiar with these dis-
cussions, as well as with Saadya’s Amanat. When he mentions the same
kind of questions, he also avoids a direct mockery of those who ask them,
and instead points to the marginality of these questions in comparison to
the truly important issue: the World to Come.^155
Maimonides’ basic methodological principle is that a text making a
claim for truth can never contradict reason. In the case of the Scriptures,
therefore, a problematic verse must be interpreted in a way that will
make it acceptable, and present it “in a form that reason will abide,” as
Onkqelos has done in his Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible.^156 If,
however, the diffi cult text is a Talmudic saying, such an interpretative
effort is not obligatory, and the saying may simply be ignored: “It is not
proper to abandon matters of reason that have already been verifi ed by
proofs,... and depend on the words of a single one of the Sages from
whom possibly the matter was hidden.... A man should never cast his
reason behind him, for the eyes are set in front, not in back.”^157 In this
rationalizing effort, Maimonides repeatedly distinguishes the content
from the wrappings. Many accept without question anything that was
committed to writing in books, or pronounced by the Sages, but Maimo-
nides encourages his readers to question both. He constantly struggles to
strip the written books from the halo that they have acquired. Speaking
against astrology, he dismisses some oft- quoted Talmudic sayings that
seem to support it, and says:
The “great sickness and the grievous evil” [Eccles. 5:12, 15] consist
of this: that all the things that man fi nds written in books, he pre-
sumes to be true, particularly if the books are old. And since many
individuals have busied themselves with those books and have en-
gaged in discussions concerning them, the rash fellow’s mind at once
leaps to the conclusion that these are words of wisdom.^158Maimonides had already stressed the same point some twenty two years
earlier, also in the context of refuting astrology, in the Epistle to Yemen:
“A liar who tells lies with his mouth will not be hindered from telling lies
(^154) SeeKitab al- amanat wal-itiqadat, 231; and cf. BT, Nidda 70b.
(^155) See “Essay on Resurrection,” Epistles, 321 [Hebrew 343].
(^156) “Epistle on Astrology,” Epistles, 488 (Lerner, 235)
(^157) Ibid.
(^158) Ibid., 480 (Lerner, 229).