A few days ago, while we were in Tiberias, on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, Tracy Hall Jr. and I decided to walk over to see the tomb of the Rambam (Rabbeinu Moshe ben Maimon, aka Musa b. Maymun and Moses Maimonides), which is located there.
I’ve wanted to do that for years, during each of my last several stays in Tiberias, but I’ve never pulled it off.
(Click to enlarge. Click again to enlarge further.)
And this trip was no exception. The tomb area was closed, and wouldn’t open again until after we had left the following morning. And the same thing is likely to happen every time unless I insist that the tour bus itself drive by the site, because we’re always on the road very early in the morning and only return after the site closes in the evening.
This is unfortunate, because Maimonides (as he’s most commonly known to English speakers) is yet another of those vehicles through whom, judging from Christopher Hitchens’s dictum that “religion poisons everything,” religion has made this world a worse place for us pointless and coincidental carbon-based organic units to inhabit. He is, by common consent, the foremost intellectual figure in medieval Judaism; as the old saying goes, “From Moses to Moses, there was nobody like Moses.”
I’ve devoted two or three semester-long classes to teaching and discussing his famous philosophical work Guide of the Perplexed, and I think it’s brilliant. But, of course, I’m wrong, as is everybody who agrees with me on this matter: Humanity would, in fact, be far better off if it and his many other poisonous books and essays (such as the Mishneh Torah and his medical treatises, which are being published by BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative) had never been written.
Religion, don’t forget, poisons everything.
Posted from Victor, New York
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