Maimonides and Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman: Two Different Torahs?

In this chapter I discuss Maimonides’ and Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman's different understandings of the nature of Torah. I then illustrate this difference by writing a ‘Maimonidean’ commentary on several key passages in Rabbi Wasserman's writings. I try to show that Maimonides and Rabbi Wasserman read the Torah in two different ‘languages’, and that the latter did not understand the ‘language’ of Maimonides’ Torah.

The vast gap between Maimonides’ world and that of Rabbi Wasserman relates to a meaningful truth concealed within the well-known Italian pun, traduttore-traditore (translator-traitor). Translators are well acquainted with the problems of transmitting ideas from one language to another without changing them and often even distorting them, particularly in theological contexts. I shall illustrate this with several significant examples.

In the Septuagint, through which the Torah reached the Christian world, the word ‘Torah’ is generally translated as nomos (law). No wonder, then, that the founders of Christianity related to the Torah mainly as a ‘dry’ book of laws. Many other words in the Septuagint underwent a Christianizing process, so to speak, in the transition from Hebrew to Greek. One prominent example is the pair ‘faith’ (Heb. emunah) and pistis—merely noting that this Greek term is the root of the word ‘epistemology’ will suffice to clarify that whoever reads the Torah with, as it were, Greek undertones, reads a book very different from one who reads it with the original undertones. Another example: the word ‘mercy’ in English clearly denotes a person in a privileged position who, out of kindness, consents to help someone of lesser status. Compare this to the Hebrew equivalent raḥamim and its tie to reḥem (womb), and the fundamental difference in the ‘music’ accompanying these two terms becomes immediately apparent. A third example: the word ‘man’ in German and Yiddish is identical—Mensch—but their meaning is entirely different. A Mensch could be evil in German, but never in Yiddish. One last example, from the very beginning of all Jewish thought: does Genesis 1: 1 say, ‘In the beginning …’ or ‘When God began to create …’?

Anyone living in more than one language will immediately grasp this.