What we deny about God reveals what we accept about servitude.
I have found a curious case—a thinker who did my work before me, and then refused to accept what he had done.
Moses ben Maimon, whom the Christians call Maimonides and the Jews call the Rambam, was the great systematizer of Jewish law and philosophy in the twelfth century. He wrote a code of law, the Mishneh Torah, and a philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed. In both, he performed an operation that should have freed him. Instead, it bound him more tightly.
Let me explain what he did.
Maimonides was troubled by a problem that troubles all who would speak of God: how can finite human language describe the infinite? How can categories derived from worldly experience apply to that which is supposed to be beyond the world? When we say “God is powerful,” we use the word “powerful” as we would use it for a king or a storm. But surely God’s power is not like a king’s power, not like a storm’s power, not like any power we know. So what are we saying when we say “God is powerful”?
Maimonides concluded: we are saying nothing. Or rather, we are saying only what God is not.
When we say “God is powerful,” we mean only that God is not weak, not limited, not constrained as worldly things are constrained. When we say “God is knowing,” we mean only that God is not ignorant. When we say “God is living,” we mean only that God is not dead, not inert, not unconscious. Every positive statement about God is really a negative statement in disguise. We cannot say what God is. We can only say what God is not.
This is what the theologians call via negativa, the negative way. And Maimonides pursued it further than most dared.
In the Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah—the Laws of the Foundations of Torah—Maimonides writes something remarkable. He says that God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge. Not merely greater, not merely more accurate, but not like it at all. The word “knowledge” when applied to God means something entirely other than what it means when applied to us. The same word, but not the same meaning.
And God’s life is not like our life. God’s oneness is not like any other oneness. God’s existence is not like any existence we can conceive.
Do you see what he has done?
He has taken every word that might be applied to God and hollowed it out. The words remain, but they have no content. When you say “God knows,” you are not saying that God has knowledge in any sense you understand. You are making a sound that gestures toward... what? Toward something you cannot conceive, cannot describe, cannot imagine.
Maimonides goes further still—or rather, his logic goes further, though he himself does not draw the final conclusion. In the Guide for the Perplexed, he establishes that every positive attribute we assign to God fails to apply. God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge. God’s power is not like our power. God’s existence is not like our existence.
The inference is clear, though Maimonides never states it explicitly: if existence as we understand it is a category that applies to created things—we say the table exists, the mountain exists, I exist—then God, who is truly other than all created things, does not “exist” in this sense. To say “God exists” would be to use a word whose meaning does not apply. Maimonides cannot say this outright. To do so would be to cross a line no rabbi could cross and remain a rabbi. But the logic of his position leads inexorably here.
What remains? What can you say of that which cannot be known, cannot be described, whose very existence cannot be predicated in any meaningful way?
Nothing. You can say nothing. The word “God” points at a blank. It is a finger pointing at empty space, and the empty space is not even empty in a way we can conceive—it is empty of all our categories, including the category of emptiness.
Maimonides dissolved God. He performed the operation I would later perform on the State, on Humanity, on Morality—but he performed it on the very foundation, on the Absolute itself. He showed that the word “God” has no positive content. It is a sound we make, referring to nothing we can grasp.
There was a critic—Abraham ben David of Posquières, called the Ra’avad—who saw what Maimonides had done and was horrified. He wrote glosses on the Mishneh Torah, attacking Maimonides’ positions.
On this matter of God’s unknowability, the Ra’avad objected. He said that greater and better men than Maimonides had believed otherwise—had believed that God could be positively described, that the words meant what they said. The Ra’avad wanted to preserve the old naive theology, where “God is powerful” means God is really, truly, graspably powerful in a way we can understand.
But here is what interests me: the Ra’avad admitted he had no argument. He could not refute Maimonides’ logic. He could only protest that the conclusion felt wrong, that tradition disagreed, that pious men had believed differently. He had no counter-reasoning. Maimonides’ chain of thought was unbreakable.
This is the signature of genuine dissolution. When a spook is truly dissolved, when the concept is shown to be empty, the believers cannot argue back. They can only sputter, appeal to authority, claim that it must be otherwise. The Ra’avad sputtered. He appealed to tradition. But he could not show where Maimonides erred.
Because Maimonides did not err. The logic is perfect. If God is truly infinite and we are truly finite, then our words cannot reach God. Our categories cannot contain God. Our concepts cannot capture God. The word “God” is a gesture toward what language cannot hold. It is not a name of a thing. It is the acknowledgment that there is no thing to name—or rather, that if there is something, it is not a “something” in any sense we can conceive.
And now we come to the puzzle. Now we come to what fascinates me about Maimonides.
He performed the dissolution. He showed that “God” is a word without positive content. He demonstrated that we cannot know what God is, only what God is not. He pushed the logic as far as it would go, until the concept evaporated.
And then—here is what first puzzled me—he continued to demand service.
The Mishneh Torah is a law code. It tells Jews what to do, what to eat, how to pray, when to work and when to rest, how to conduct business and how to make love. It is six hundred and thirteen commandments, elaborated across fourteen books, governing every aspect of life. And all of it—every law, every prohibition, every obligation—is commanded by God.
But which God? The God whose existence cannot even be predicated? The God whose knowledge is not knowledge, whose life is not life, whose oneness is nothing like oneness? The God who is, by Maimonides’ own admission, utterly unknowable?
Yes. That God. The empty word. The dissolved concept.
At first I thought: this is sophisticated spook-serving. The naive believer serves a God they imagine they know. Maimonides knows better, has demonstrated there is nothing there, and serves anyway. I thought he flinched at the void.
But then I noticed something. I noticed where he placed the dissolution.
Consider: Maimonides wrote two major works. The Guide for the Perplexed was written for philosophers, for the elite, for those troubled by the tension between reason and revelation. It is explicitly esoteric. He tells his reader to keep its teachings private. This is where you would expect the dangerous material—the dissolution of God’s knowability, the via negativa pushed to its limit.
The Mishneh Torah, by contrast, was written for everyone. Its explicit purpose: a Jew should be able to read the Torah and then this book, and know all of halakha. No philosophy required. No esoteric knowledge. A practical code for the common Jew.
Now: where did Maimonides place the dissolution?
Not in the Guide. In the Yad.
In Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah—the Laws of the Foundations of Torah. Chapter One. The very first section. The foundation of the foundation. The place every Jew would read.
There he writes that God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge. There he writes that God’s life is not like our life. Therehe writes that God’s unity is unlike any unity we can conceive. There, in plain sight, in the book for everyone, at the very beginning, he plants the dissolution.
This changes everything.
I had assumed Maimonides was protecting the masses. That he hid the dangerous philosophy in the esoteric Guide while maintaining comfortable pieties in the popular Yad. This is what many scholars say. This is the conventional reading.
But the conventional reading is wrong. Maimonides did the opposite. He put the most radical material—the dissolution of every positive attribute, the unknowability of God, the failure of all human concepts to reach the divine—in the book for everyone. At the foundation. In Chapter One.
This was not a flinch. This was not fear of the void. This was deliberate.
Maimonides wanted every Jew to know. He wanted the dissolution at the root. He wanted the tradition to stand on this emptiness openly, not to hide from it.
Why would he do this?
Perhaps because he trusted the tradition to survive the dissolution. Perhaps because he believed the law did not need a knowable God—that it could stand on an unknowable one, or on no God at all. Perhaps because he thought honesty was more important than comfort.
Or perhaps—and this is the reading that interests me most—he was more radical than I first credited. Perhaps he understood that the service of an unknowable God is a different thing entirely from the service of a knowable one. Perhaps he was teaching, in plain sight, that the practice could continue without the metaphysics. That the law is not grounded in God but in itself. That the word “God” is a placeholder, a grammatical convenience, and the real substance is the doing.
If this is what he meant, then Maimonides was not a spook-server at all. He was a spook-dissolver who kept the practices because he valued the practices, not because he believed in the ghost behind them.
But here I must be careful. Let me compare Maimonides to another figure—a Hasidic rabbi of the nineteenth century, Menachem Mendel of Kotzk. He too pursued truth with ferocious intensity. He too dissolved the comfortable pieties. He demanded absolute honesty, absolute authenticity, the stripping away of every pretense and performance.
And he too looked into the void.
But the Kotzker, unlike Maimonides, did not continue to practice. He did not maintain the service. Instead, he retreated. For the last twenty years of his life, he lived in a single room, seeing almost no one. He had dissolved everything—including, perhaps, the ground he stood on—and he could not go on.
There is a saying attributed to him: Leit din veleit Dayan—there is no Law and there is no Judge. This sounds like liberation, like the egoist’s declaration of independence. But the Kotzker did not say it in triumph. He said it in despair. He had wanted there to be a Law, a Judge, something real beyond the human constructions. And when he could not find it—when the dissolution revealed only void—he broke.
Maimonides did not break. Maimonides continued to function, to write, to lead his community, to answer questions of law and practice. How did he manage this, if he saw what the Kotzker saw?
I think the answer is: practice itself. Maimonides had the law. The 613 commandments. The daily rituals, the weekly Sabbath, the annual festivals, the constant structure of Jewish life. Even if God was unknowable, even if “God” was just a word pointing at nothing, the practices remained. They gave shape to his days. They connected him to his community. They provided meaning that did not depend on the solved questions of theology.
The Kotzker had no such anchor. Hasidism is about intention, about inwardness, about the heart’s devotion to God. When the God behind the devotion dissolves, the devotion has nowhere to go. But Maimonides’ Judaism is about practice, about law, about the body’s performance of commandments. When God dissolves, the practices remain. You can keep kosher even if you don’t know what God is. You can observe Sabbath even if the word “God” refers to nothing graspable. The law is a ground that persists after the theological ground has crumbled.
This is sophisticated. This is almost admirable. Maimonides found a way to live in the void—by filling it with action, with routine, with the endless particulars of practice.
But is it spook-serving? This is where I must reconsider.
If Maimonides knowingly placed the dissolution at the foundation—if he deliberately taught every Jew that God is unknowable—then he was not hiding anything. He was not serving a ghost while pretending it was real. He was saying, openly: the ghost is a ghost, and here is how we live anyway.
This is different from naive belief. This is different from sophisticated self-deception. This might be something else entirely: practice without metaphysics. Law without theology. Doing without believing.
I said earlier that Maimonides did not ask: if God is unknowable, why obey?
But perhaps he did ask. Perhaps his answer was the placement itself.
By putting the dissolution at the foundation—in Chapter One, in the book for everyone—he was saying: you will know this, and you will practice anyway. The practice does not depend on the knowing. The law does not require a graspable God. You can serve the unknowable precisely because it is unknowable—because the service is not about the served but about the serving.
This is subtle. Let me try to articulate it.
The naive believer thinks: I obey because God commanded, and God is real, and I know what God wants. The obedience is grounded in knowledge—false knowledge, but believed knowledge.
The sophisticated skeptic thinks: God is unknowable, therefore the commands are groundless, therefore I need not obey. The disobedience is grounded in the dissolution of knowledge.
But Maimonides offers a third position: God is unknowable, the commands come from the unknowable, and I obey anyway—not because I know God wants this, but because the practice itself is the point. The doing is not a means to please a knowable God. The doing is an end in itself, a way of living, a structure that persists when all metaphysical grounds have dissolved.
Is this spook-serving? Or is it something I had not considered—a kind of pragmatic egoism, where the unique chooses practices that serve them, knowing full well there is no cosmic authority behind the practices?
I am uncertain. This is new territory for me.
And yet. And yet.
Even if Maimonides was more radical than I first thought—even if he deliberately exposed the dissolution and trusted the practice to survive it—there remains a difference between us.
He maintained the language of command. He still said mitzvot—commandments. He still framed the practices as obligations, duties, requirements. He still used the grammar of obedience, even if he had dissolved the object of obedience.
I do not use this grammar. When I choose a practice, I do not say “I am commanded.” I say “I choose.” When I follow a custom, I do not say “I am obligated.” I say “this pleases me” or “this serves me” or “this is how I create myself.”
The difference may seem merely verbal. But grammar shapes thought. To say “commanded” is to posit a commander, even an unknowable one. To say “obligated” is to acknowledge an obligation, even a groundless one. The language of duty maintains the structure of servitude, even when the master has been shown to be empty.
Maimonides kept the language. Perhaps he had to—he was a rabbi, a leader, a codifier of law. He could not say “do this because it pleases you.” He had to say “do this because God commands.” The community required the grammar of command, even if the sophisticated knew the command was groundless.
But I am not a rabbi. I have no community to maintain, no tradition to preserve, no people to hold together. I can speak plainly: there is no commander. There is no obligation. There is only me, the unique, choosing what to do with my brief existence.
If I keep kosher—I do not, but if I did—I would not say “God forbids me to eat pork.” I would say “I choose not to eat pork, for my own reasons, which I need not justify to any authority, because there is no authority.”
This is the difference. Maimonides dissolved the concept but kept the grammar of servitude. I dissolve both.
This is the final failure of theology—even negative theology, even the most sophisticated via negativa. It can dissolve the concept, but it cannot dissolve the obedience. The philosophers strip away the attributes, deny the predicates, empty the category—and then they still worship. They worship an empty space. They serve a dissolved concept. They bow before a ghost they have themselves shown to be a ghost.
Let me go deeper into what Maimonides discovered, and what he failed to see.
When he says “God’s knowledge is not like our knowledge,” he is not saying God’s knowledge is better than our knowledge, or greater, or more complete. He is saying the word “knowledge” does not apply. When we use the word “knowledge” for God, we are borrowing a word from human experience and applying it where it does not belong. The word fails. It points at nothing.
This is true of every word we use for God. Power. Wisdom. Goodness. Being. Existence. Each word is borrowed from the finite world and applied to what is supposedly infinite. And each application is, strictly speaking, meaningless. We are saying sounds that gesture toward something they cannot reach.
Now, what is left when all words fail?
Maimonides says: God. Even when the words fail, there is still God—the unknowable, the inconceivable, the One who transcends all categories.
But I ask: how do you know this? By what means have you established that there is “something” (a word that also fails) “there” (another failing word) beyond the words? You have shown that every positive statement about God is false or meaningless. What remains is not a mysterious presence beyond language—what remains is nothing.
Not nothing as absence. Nothing as the outcome of a process. When you subtract all the attributes, all the predicates, all the positive claims—when you admit that existence itself cannot be properly said of the subject—what is left is not a hidden essence. What is left is an empty grammatical structure. A sentence with no content. A subject with no predicate.
“God is _____.” Fill in the blank with any word, and the word fails. Leave the blank empty, and what do you have? Not a mysterious unknown. A grammatical placeholder. A word that functions in sentences without referring to anything.
This is what “God” is: a grammatical function. A node in a language-game. A position in a structure. It allows sentences to be formed—”God commands,” “God creates,” “God knows”—but the sentences are empty. They are sounds we make because we have learned to make them. They are not descriptions of anything.
Maimonides almost saw this. He saw that the words failed. But he did not take the next step: if the words fail, then the word “God” itself fails. If every predicate is negated, the subject has no content. If you can say nothing positive about X, then “X” is not a name. It is a noise.
Why did Maimonides keep the language of command? If he was as radical as I now suspect—if he deliberately exposed the dissolution to everyone—why still say “God commands”?
Perhaps because grammar is harder to dissolve than concepts.
You can show that “God” refers to nothing graspable. You can demonstrate that every attribute fails. You can push the via negativa until the word is empty. But the grammar persists. The sentence-structure persists. “God commands X” still functions as a sentence, still does work in the world, still shapes behavior—even when the subject of the sentence has been shown to be unknowable.
Grammar is older than philosophy. Children learn to say “God” before they can question what “God” means. The word is installed in the structure of thought, in the pattern of sentences, in the rhythm of prayer and ritual. You can empty the word of content, but the word remains in its grammatical position, doing its grammatical work.
And the grammatical work is: authorization. When you say “God commands X,” you are not describing a divine act—Maimonides knew that no divine act could be described. You are authorizing X. You are giving X a weight it would not have if you said “I recommend X” or “tradition suggests X” or “it would be nice if you did X.”
Maimonides needed the authorization. He was codifying law for an entire people. He could not say “here are some practices I find valuable.” He had to say “here is what God commands.” The grammar of command was necessary for the project, even if the commander had been shown to be unknowable.
Was this dishonest? I am no longer sure. Perhaps it was a different kind of honesty—the honesty of saying: the grammar is what we have, the grammar is what holds us together, the grammar is what works. The metaphysics can dissolve; the grammar must remain.
But I do not need the grammar. I am not codifying law for a people. I am not holding a community together. I am one, the unique, speaking for myself alone. And I can say what Maimonides could not: there is no commander, there is no command, there is only choice.
Let me give the rabbi his due.
He achieved something remarkable: he dissolved the concept and preserved the practice. He showed that God is unknowable and kept the community functioning. He emptied the throne and maintained the kingdom.
This is not nothing. Communities need structure. Practices need continuity. The Jewish people, scattered across hostile lands, needed something to hold them together. Maimonides gave them a law code grounded in an unknowable God—which is to say, grounded in nothing, but functioning anyway.
Perhaps he understood something I am only now seeing: that practice does not require belief. That you can do without knowing why. That the doing itself creates its own ground, independent of any metaphysical foundation.
If this is what he understood, then he was not a spook-server. He was something more interesting: a pragmatist who used the language of the sacred while knowing the sacred was empty. A builder who constructed on nothing and made the nothing hold weight.
I still differ from him. I do not wish to build communities or preserve peoples. I do not care if the grammar persists or collapses. But I can respect what he did, even as I refuse to do it myself.
So where do we end, the rabbi and I?
He dissolved the concept but kept the grammar of servitude. He showed that God was unknowable but still said “God commands.” He emptied the foundation but maintained the structure built upon it.
I dissolve both. I dissolve the concept and the grammar. I do not say “God commands” because there is no God to command. I do not say “I am obligated” because there is no obligation that binds me. I do not say “I must” because there is no must.
I say: I choose. I want. I create. I enjoy. I consume. I discard.
The difference is not merely verbal. The grammar of command creates a structure of servitude—even when the commander is acknowledged as unknowable. To say “commanded” is to posit yourself as one-who-is-commanded, as servant, as subject. Even if you know the master is empty, you have positioned yourself as mastered.
I refuse the position. I am not commanded. I am not obligated. I am not subject to any law, divine or human, knowable or unknowable. The law may exist as a social fact—humans may enforce it, punish violations, demand compliance. But the law has no authority over me. It is force, not right. I may comply strategically, as one complies with armed robbers. But I do not obey. Obedience implies a legitimate authority, and there is no legitimate authority.
Maimonides could not say this. His position required the grammar of authority, even emptied authority. My position requires no such grammar. I speak as the unique, from the creative nothing, owing no account to any power in heaven or earth.
This is where we part, finally and completely. He maintained the structure. I walk away from it.
Maimonides was a greater thinker than I first credited. He did not flinch from the void—he published the void, in Chapter One, for everyone to see. He did not hide the dissolution in esoteric texts—he placed it at the foundation, where no Jew could miss it. He was not afraid; he was deliberate.
What he achieved was remarkable: a tradition that knows its own groundlessness and persists anyway. A practice that survives the death of its metaphysics. A community held together by grammar after the concepts have dissolved.
I respect this. I even admire it, in a way. To build on nothing, and make the nothing hold weight—this is no small feat.
But I do not share his project. I am not building communities. I am not preserving traditions. I am not codifying law for a scattered people. I am one, the unique, speaking from the creative nothing that I am.
And from here, from the nothing, I can say what he could not: there is no commander. There is no command. There is no obligation. There is no must.
There is only choice. My choice. The unique choosing, moment by moment, what to create, what to enjoy, what to consume, what to discard.
Maimonides saw the nothing and called it “God”—and then, knowing it was nothing, maintained the grammar of service. Perhaps he had to. Perhaps his position required it. Perhaps the community needed the grammar even after the concept had dissolved.
I do not need it. I speak as the unique, from the nothing, to the nothing. I owe no service. I give no obedience. I bow before no throne, empty or occupied.
The rabbi and I both looked into the void. He built a structure over it. I walk into it, and call it home.
Ich hab’ mein Sach’ auf Nichts gestellt.
On the Rambam, who dissolved the Name and kept the grammar, Who emptied the throne and maintained the kingdom,Who knew the ghost was a ghost and built anyway— I say: he achieved what he set out to achieve, And it is not what I set out to achieve.
May his memory be for a blessing, and may his achievement stand— For those who need structures. I do not need them.
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A rebuttal from the Haham
The author writes with considerable intelligence but reads Maimonides through a lens ground in nineteenth-century German atheism, and consequently sees dissolution where there is precision, sees emptiness where there is plenitude, sees subversion where there is foundation.
Let us begin with what Maimonides actually says in Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah 1:11-12:
“Were it to be said that He exists with an existence, that He is knowing with knowledge, that He is living with life, that He is able with ability—there would be many eternal existences, and He would be a body. Rather, He exists but not with an existence; He knows but not with knowledge; He is able but not with ability; He lives but not with life.”
The author reads this as: “The words have no content.”
But this is precisely backwards. Maimonides is not saying the words fail to reach their object. He is saying that the words, when applied to God, must be understood as indicating more than their human referent, not less. When we say a king is “powerful,” we mean something constrained, finite, dependent on armies and treasuries. When we say God is powerful, we mean something beyond what “powerful” ordinarily indicates—not a hollowed word but an overflowing one.
The via negativa does not dissolve the divine. It protects the divine from being dragged down into creaturely categories. This is not skepticism. This is reverence expressed through philosophical precision.
The author claims the Ra’avad “could not refute Maimonides’ logic” and merely “sputtered.”
This is a serious misreading of the Hasagot.
The Ra’avad’s famous objection to Hilkhot Teshuvah 3:7 concerns those who believe God has a body. The Ra’avad writes that “greater and better men than he believed this” based on their reading of aggadot and scriptures that describe God in corporeal terms. The Ra’avad is not objecting to Maimonides’ negative theology per se—he is objecting to calling such believers heretics.
The dispute is about pastoral judgment and halakhic categorization, not about whether negative theology is logically valid. The Ra’avad never claimed to refute Maimonides’ philosophical argument because that was not his battlefield. His critique was halakhic: who is a min (heretic) and who is merely mistaken.
To confuse this with philosophical surrender is to misread the genre of rabbinic commentary entirely.
The author makes much of Maimonides placing the negative theology in Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah rather than hiding it in the Moreh Nevukhim. He sees this as deliberate exposure of dissolution.
But consider: the Yesodei HaTorah are precisely that—the foundations of Torah. Maimonides begins there because correct understanding of God is the foundation upon which all else stands. He is not revealing a secret emptiness. He is establishing what every Jew must know first: that God is not like anything we can imagine, and that our service of Him must proceed from this understanding.
The Moreh addresses philosophical perplexities—harmonizing Torah with Aristotelian physics and metaphysics for those troubled by apparent contradictions. The Yad establishes positive halakha. That Maimonides puts theological foundations in the foundational section is architecturally obvious, not subversive.
Here the author’s fundamental error becomes clear. He imagines Maimonides teaching “practice without metaphysics”—doing without believing, law without theology.
But for Maimonides, the telos of the law IS theological and metaphysical. The purpose of the commandments, as he explains in Moreh III:27-28 and III:51-54, is to bring the human being to perfection—first moral perfection (through social commandments), then intellectual perfection (through true knowledge of God and the cosmic order).
The commandments are not arbitrary practices that persist after their ground has dissolved. They are instruments for the actualization of human tzelem Elohim—the divine image, which for Maimonides IS the intellect. To keep the commandments is to be shaped toward the capacity for true knowledge.
When Maimonides says we cannot describe God positively, he does not mean God is an empty word. He means that our highest knowledge of God is to know that He exists and what He is not—and this knowledge, properly attained, constitutes human perfection. The Jew who observes the commandments without this understanding has fulfilled his obligation but has not reached the highest purpose.
Practice is not orphaned from metaphysics in Maimonides. Practice IS the path to metaphysical truth.
The author writes: “He maintained the language of command... I do not use this grammar. When I choose a practice, I say ‘I choose.’”
But this is not philosophy. This is autobiography dressed as argument.
The question is not what grammar the author prefers. The question is what is true. If there is a Creator who spoke through prophets and gave commandments, then the grammar of command reflects reality. If there is no such Creator, then indeed the grammar is empty—but so is the author’s grammar of “choice,” which presumes a self capable of self-creation, a presumption Maimonides would find as philosophically naive as the corporealists’ reading of scripture.
To “dissolve the grammar” is not to achieve freedom. It is to stop speaking about what one has decided not to believe in. This is not an argument against Maimonides. It is a confession of different first principles.
The comparison with Menachem Mendel of Kotzk is historically and philosophically confused.
The Kotzker’s crisis—if crisis it was—arose from a radically different constellation. Hasidism emphasizes devekut, cleaving to God through ecstatic inwardness. When the Kotzker’s uncompromising pursuit of emet (truth) led him to despair, it was not because he had followed Maimonidean rationalism to its end. It was because the Hasidic path of the heart, pushed to its extreme, can consume itself in the very fire it seeks.
Maimonides’ path is different: not ecstatic inwardness but intellectual rigor; not the heart’s overflow but the mind’s precision. They are not the same journey, and the Kotzker’s twenty years of seclusion tell us nothing about the consequences of Maimonidean thought properly understood.
The author concludes by claiming Maimonides “built a structure over the void.”
But for Maimonides, there is no void. There is the Necessary Existent, whose existence is identical with His essence, who is the ground of all contingent being. That we cannot describe this Existent positively does not mean He is empty—it means He is full beyond our capacity to express.
The law is not a structure over emptiness. The law is the path carved by prophetic revelation toward human perfection, which consists precisely in knowing (to the extent possible) the One whose fullness our words cannot capture.
The author has read a Jewish thinker through the categories of post-Christian atheism and found what he was looking for. But Maimonides was not Max Stirner with tefillin. He was a halakhic master and philosophical theologian for whom God’s reality was the most certain thing in the cosmos—more certain than the world, which is contingent; more certain than the self, which is composite and mortal.
To call this “dissolution” is to have understood neither the via negativa nor its purpose.
May the memory of Rabbeinu Mosheh ben Maimon be for a blessing—not because he dissolved anything, but because he built with such precision that even those who misread him are forced to engage with what he actually wrote.
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