Maharal Netivot Olam: Introduction

Together with my colleague Itamar Landau, I’ve begun studying Netivot Olam, a book written by Maharal of Prague (Rabbi Judah Loewy), a 16th century rabbi most popularly famous for the legend of the golem. Though the golem stories are a 19th-century invention, the fact that the Maharal was credited with the ability to create an animate man from clay indicates the esteem to which he was held in Jewish folklore. The Maharal was a scholar of the sciences, philosophy, Talmud, and Jewish mysticism, and he was also involved in politics. There’s a cool statue of him at the city hall of Prague which shows him sporting a wicked beard.

Also, fun fact: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb (“behold I am become death, destroyer of worlds) is a direct descendant of the Maharal, so apparently harnessing cosmic forces to protect the Jewish people runs in the family.

Netivot Olam is one of Maharal’s philosophical works, primarily concerned with ethics. Because I’m studying this for the first time, instead of giving an overview of the book, I’m going to try to write notes here on the chapters that we study as we study them. This time, we’re going to do the introduction.

In the introduction, Loewy divides ethics into two categories - “law\obligation” and “charity”. Each of these categories is essential for living a good life, but they differ in a variety of ways. Drawing from verses in the book of Proverbs, Loewy says that law is like a narrow path and charity is like a wide road. What he means by this is that obligation is rigid and well-defined, and if you deviate in the slightest bit from your obligations, you’ve seriously messed up. If you murder, cheat, or steal even once, you’ve already done something that has led you in bad direction. Charity, on the other hand, gives people a wide berth in terms of how and when to fulfill it. You don’t have to give money to every homeless person that you see or volunteer at every soup kitchen. So charitable behavior, while necessary for living a good life, gives people some level of latitude.

Because law/obligation is so rigidly defined, few people manage to live their whole lives while staying true to the path of obligation. Everyone messes up at some point and does something that they’re really not supposed to do. So the narrow path doesn’t hold very many people. Conversely, because the charitable road gives people a lot of leeway, most people don’t completely veer from it. Almost everyone does generous things every so often, so unless you live your life entirely selfishly, you’re probably okay on the charity front.

Maharal then discusses the nature of evil, that all evil has its root in the material (Hebrew: חומר), as the impermanence of physical things and material desire is the source of all privation in the world. He associates the material/impermanent with femininity, which is the reason why temptation to do evil is frequently referred to in the Bible with feminine language (yeah, it’s a bit misogynistic). The temptation to do evil moves people from the path of the good, and when they get older and their temptations weaken, they regret the mistakes of their youth that led them to make bad decisions that have deleterious consequences on their long-term happiness.

Maharal also cites an early rabbinic source (Avot 2) as saying that rewards and punishments for the commandments and prohibitions are not explicitly stated in the Torah, so that people shouldn’t dismiss the “trivial” commandments in favor of the more consequential ones. This is, prima facie, antithetical to the consequentialist/utilitarian view that assigning quanatitative values to outcomes is necessary for a moral calculus. The consequence of the utilitarian view, though, is that people will tend to ignore trivial things because they can be offset by more important things. So, for example, if people know that not flying in an airplane is far more consequential to the environment than recycling, everyone might just decide not to recycle. There is thus a benefit to a more deontological perspective where actions and outcomes aren’t assigned specific values and all moral obligations are treated as equally imperative.

Maharal concludes his introduction with an explanation for the title of his book. Netivot Olam (lit. “paths of the world/eternity*”) is intended to explain the ethical path which leads to the good life. The work is thus a 32-chapter book about ethics (presumably corresponding to the Hebrew word לב - heart/mind, in the Gematria numerology system), but he has one additional chapter about Torah, because in the Marahal’s view ethics stem from the study of Torah.

*There is a bit of ambiguity as to whether עולם in the title means "world" or "eternity", because in Judaism the concepts are linked. Rabbinic Judaism believes in the afterlife where man is rewarded for his good deeds and punished for his sins. In Rabbinic parlance the afterlife is called "the world to come", in distinction to our material reality, known as "this world." A person who merits life in the world to come (by dint of good deeds) effectively attains an immortal, eternal life.