When Maimonides sat down in the twelfth century to write his thirteen principles of faith—now canonized in the Yigdal prayer—he did something novel in Jewish history.
Judaism before him had managed without a creed. It was covenant before catechism, a faith conducted through observance, storytelling, and spirited debate. Yet Maimonides dared to name the minimal architecture of belief: that God exists and is one; that He is beyond body and time; that God alone is worthy of worship; that prophecy is real and Moses its most perfect vessel; that Torah is divine and eternal; that providence governs reward and punishment; that the Messiah will come, and the dead will rise.
Today, Maimonides’s thirteen principles are taken by some as a sine qua non of Jewish orthodoxy, something a convert must affirm in full, to become a member of the tribe. 1
Yet to read Maimonides’s statements as the equivalent of Church doctrine is to mistake their purpose.
Maimonides was not writing a list for recitation, but a ladder for the mind.
Each principle is a challenge — a provocation to think more deeply about God and the world God authored.
They are not propositions to be believed and filed away, but exercises in understanding — the beginning of philosophy, not its end.
For Maimonides, faith without knowledge is a failure of devotion.
The highest worship is contemplation; the truest piety is study.
To affirm that God exists is meaningless unless one strives to know how and why being itself depends on God. Better to aspire to Maimonides’s thirteen principles and reject or revise them (or better yet, reinterpret them), than to parrot them without conviction, or espouse them despite intellectual embarassment.
To say that Torah is divine is empty unless one labors to understand what divinity means when expressed in human words.
The Thirteen Principles are not there to still the mind, but to awaken it.
They are scaffolding for an infinite ascent — an invitation to reason one’s way toward reverence. They are Maimonides’s attempt to formulate the basic topics of Judaism, an ontology from which all else follows. As I read them, there are really three core topics: What is God? What is Judaism? What is the World?
Rightly approached, Maimonides principles are really questions:
How can the infinite dwell among the finite?
If God is eternal, how does God act in time?
What makes revelation binding?
Can divine knowledge leave room for freedom?
Is justice visible in history, or only beyond it?
Why are we here?
While Maimonides himself doesn’t say this, I believe we can suggest that a Jew, is not someone who recites Maimonides’ principles (or claims to have concluded their veracity), but one who wrestles with their depths, who refuses to let any single answer end the inquiry.
Still, what Maimonides leaves unsaid is as haunting as what he declares. There is no direct article of free will, though divine justice implies it. No word of covenant, though Israel stands at the center of revelation. No explanation of suffering, though the world aches with it. No principle of prayer or love, though the whole enterprise depends on loving what cannot be comprehended.
Why this silence? Because Maimonides is not writing theology for comfort. He begins not from man’s yearning but from God’s nature. The order of knowing must precede the order of feeling. Before one can love, one must unlearn idolatry; before one can pray, one must understand what it means to address the One who has no form. His restraint is reverence. He will not name what the principles already imply. His creed is a negative theology in miniature — an iconoclasm of thought.
Yet history never allows a system to remain pure. The Zohar would soon flood the neat geometry of his faith with light and shadow. The poets and mystics would reinhabit his edifice with breath. The Baal Shem Tov would return to the trembling heart what Maimonides had reserved for the intellect. Together they form the dialectic of Jewish life: the analytic of reason and the music of experience.
The Thirteen Principles are not the conversation itself. They are its grammar — the architecture of truth without which the dialogue of generations would dissolve into noise. But grammar without poetry is mute.
A Jew is not one who affirms all thirteen principles. If that were the case, there would hardly be a minyan. The baseline kavanna, intention, needed to utter the thirteen principles is not the intention to mean the words, but the intention to connect to the place (Ha-Makom) they point to.
In the Bible, Ruth simply converts by telling Naomi, “Wherever you go, I will go, your people will be my people…” Her paradigmatic conversion is bare of any explicit theological reason for wanting to be Jewish. Yet for Maimonides, such a conversion would have been considered wanting. (A point of apologetic reconciliation might be that Ruth’s catalyst for conversion was social, but that only theological understanding completed the process; come for the Kiddush, stay for the d’var Torah). I prefer a more Levinasian approach, namely that metaphysics is implicit in a sense of peoplehood. That Ruth’s relationship to God was embedded in and revealed through her relationship to Naomi.