Science in the Bet Midrash

What is the secret that Maimonides hides? He himself tells us: the
rabbis of the Talmud used the expression ma'aseh bereshit ("Account
of Creation") for what the Greeks called physics and used
the expression ma'aseh merkavah ("Account of the Chariot") or
what the Greeks called metaphysics. So why is this important? The
consequences of these equations are momentous. Maimonides
imports what we today would call science into the heart of Torah.
This is allied to his universalism and to his conception of the commandments
of the Torah as tools (which could in principle have
been different), whose importance lies in the end they serve, and
not in themselves. That being the case, true reward and punishment
are not connected to behavior, no matter how saintly or how
vile, but to proper conceptions of God, crystallized in the 'Thirteen
Principles'.
Maimonides hid these secrets from his fellow Jews, not out of
fear of reprisal (protected as he was by his good friend, al-Qadi
al-Fadl, he had no reason to fear them), but out of noblesse oblige.
Exposing simple Jews (and their philosophically no less simple
rabbis) to these truths could only lead to perplexity (in the best of
circumstances) or to falling away from observance (in the worst of
circumstances), neither of which Maimonides had any interest in
promoting.
One God wrote two books, as it were: Torah and Cosmos. The truly
devout Jew realizes that he or she must study both books, or only
have access to half of God's oeuvre.

Born and educated in the United States, Menachem Kellner (Ph.D., Washington University in St. Louis, 1973) has lived in Israel for the last 30 years. Author, editor, or translator of 16 books and over 100 scholarly articles,
Kellner's most recent book is 'Maimonides' Confrontation with Mysticism' (2006).