Alan Brill writes: The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) teaches the universal doctrine that God began humanity by creating an individual human being, Adam, “to teach that if anyone destroy a single soul from humankind, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed a whole world, and whoever saves a single soul from humankind, Scripture credits him as though he had saved a whole world.” However, at a later date, the text of this Mishnah was revised to be particularistic, so that many editions currently read that Adam was created alone “to teach that if anyone destroy a single soul from Israel… and whoever saves a single soul from Israel…” A universal teaching has thus been transformed to a particularist view valuing Jewish life, rather than the value of all human life.
Menachem Kellner has devoted the last decades to writing a series of books defending the universal voice in Judaism. Kellner currently teaches Jewish philosophy at Shalem College, integrating Western and Jewish texts, after having spent thirty years teaching at the University of Haifa, where he held the Sir Isaac and Lady Edith Wolfson Chair of Jewish Religious Thought. For more information, I interviewed him in the past on his views of belief and his friend Prof. James Diamond wrote a detailed laudatory intellectual biography of Kellner.
Kellner has authored nineteen books most of them devoted to his project of advocating that Maimonides’ rationalist universalism should serve as the ideal for contemporary modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionist life.
Recently, he has written They Too are Called Human: Gentiles in the Eyes of Maimonides [In Hebrew] arguing that Maimonides was convinced that Jewish doctrine teaches that there is no essential difference between Israel and the other nations of the world. For Kellner, the distortion of Maimonides by later Rabbis is a tragic distortion, the differences between the nations and Israel, are solely at the level of laws, of history, of destiny. The work is a presentation of the universalism on Maimonides showing the reader the proof texts for such a thesis and answering those who read the texts in different way focusing on three texts in the Mishnah Torah, Foundation of the Torah 1:1-6, Sabbatical Year 13:12-13; Kings 12:5. Much of this discussion has already appeared in his articles and has been debated in the field. See Table of Contents in English here. The work was published by Bar Ilan Press as part of very good series on Jewish thought.
Orthodox Jewish universalism is not new. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch and his son Dr. Mendel Hirsch advocated a Romantic brotherhood of mankind, (see the volume Humanism and Judaism by Mendel Hirsch), but the Hirschian approach is not followed anymore. Moshe Unna (1902–1989) brought a universal position to the Mizrachi Worker’s party and the Mafdal, arguing for liberal democracy as a pillar of Jewish humanism, but that too has been eclipsed (see the fine article by Moshe Hellinger and this book).
Orthodox Maimonidean scholars such as Isadore Twersky already pointed out how Maimonides was always careful to distinguish the universal elements in philosophy and religion from the particular legal aspect. Hence, there is an Aristotelian ethic of the wise available to all to follow the ethical mean and the particular Jewish ethic for select Jews of the saint to go to an extreme against anger or pride. Or that the Mishnah Torah distinguishes between the universal knowledge of a first cause divinity and the specifics of accepting the prophecy of Moses. Yet, Maimonides wrote in his letter to R. Samuel ibn Tibbon, that Aristotle had reached the highest level of perfection available to human beings short of prophecy, placing the philosopher above almost all Jews.
Even the Yemenite rationalist scholar Rabbi Yosef Qafiḥ (Kapach) (1917 –2000) made these distinctions in his fine editions of the medieval Jewish rational classics. But a serious reading of these essential works in their philosophic context has been obscured by contemporary Rabbis in their misquotations of Maimonides.
This latter point motivated Kellner, who is upset by the turn among religious Jews towards particularism with its concurrent preaching of irrationality, essentialism, and dogmatism. Hence, as expressed in his preface, his works are an explicit polemic against these positions and the rabbis who hold them, in that, he considers these particularistic thoughts, to capture his rather colloquial style, fakrimt, farfallen, farblonjet, farfoilt, farshlugginner, as well as dangerous.
In prior works, Kellner directly condemned the rabbis who are anti-science and in favor of superstition by showing that Maimonides advocated science and condemned superstition. When rabbis speak of the essentialist metaphysical nature of ritual, land, Torah, and Jews, Kellner responds by showing that Maimonides treated all these as instrumental, sociological, and based their value toward human perfection.
To emphasize his point for the contemporary reader, Kellner even creates an ahistoric dichotomy of mystic irrational essentialists and anti-mystical universal rationalists. Out of bounds of the discussion would be the Universalism of mystic essentialism of Rav Kook who wrote, “The love for Israel entails a love for all humankind” since he would fall into the wrong side of the dichotomy.
