Introduction
In the writing of Kitāb al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb (Eng.: The Guide to the Duties of the Hearts; Heb.: Ḥovot ha-Levavot; written circa 1080), the author, Baḥya ibn Paqūda, sought to rearrange Jewish life on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” (farāʾiḍ al-jawāriḥ) and the “duties of the hearts” (farāʾiḍ al-qulūb).Footnote 1 By using this distinction, Baḥya attempted to bring about a turn that would yield an internalization of Jewish religious life and a shifting of its focus from the religious community to the individual.Footnote 2 In this revaluation of values, the core of religious life moves away from the worship of the divine through actions that are visible to all, i.e., “duties of the members,” and in its place Baḥya puts the “duties of the hearts,” a realm of inner activity that is executed in the confines of one’s mental space and which Baḥya fashions as a site of intimacy between the human and the divine.Footnote 3 He sought to bring about this shift not only by shaping an ideational framework and a new set of distinctions—albeit ones that are based on currents and trends from Islamic thought—that he aimed to integrate into Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its modes of transmission, its past, and its predicaments in his times.Footnote 4 As will be explicated throughout the article, in order to realize the above-mentioned transformation, Baḥya utilized one of the fundamental distinctions that run through Duties of the Hearts, namely, the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”). This distinction is used chiefly in the context of the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space;Footnote 5 but, as I argue, Baḥya applies it also to the realm of “tradition”—what is disclosed in it and what is undisclosed, what is communicated and what is left untold, what is remembered and what is neglected.Footnote 6
Thus far, scholarship on Baḥya’s Duties of the Hearts has centered on three focal points (with some studies addressing two or all three of them at once). One focal point involves tracing Baḥya’s sources and highlighting the proximity between his work and some elements from the works of earlier Muslim authors;Footnote 7 the second deals with the question of the radicality and the novelty of Baḥya’s proposed religiosity in relation or comparison to his Jewish sources, as well as with the influence his work exerted on future works written by Jewish authors;Footnote 8 and the third addresses primarily the coherency of Baḥya’s system (or aspects of it), with no reference to intra- and intercultural genealogies.Footnote 9 Absent from this scholarly picture is a topic that lies at the center of the present article, namely, the strategy through which Baḥya sought to implement his novel approach within the “medium” of the Jewish tradition, and to cast it not only on his present times but also backward as being part and parcel of Judaism’s own “inner history.”Footnote 10
As part of his attempt to implement his new religious emphases, Baḥya put much discursive effort into articulating the relation between the “duties of the hearts” and the tradition at the core of which he sought to place them. The essence of Baḥya’s line of argumentation is the claim that apart from a declaration of their centrality, the “duties of the hearts,” which he also calls “inner knowledge” (ʿilm al-bāṭin),Footnote 11 were neither enumerated nor sufficiently clarified in the canonical sources of Judaism. In the words of Baḥya:
The Scriptures are concise in their explanation of this matter [the inner knowledge]. Only hints and indications are used …, for the Scriptures rely on the intelligence of the wise to be inspired to search and inquire about the matter as much as possible, until it is grasped and understood.Footnote 12
This argument of Baḥya, which resurfaces repeatedly from the work’s introduction onward, has been scantly remarked upon in scholarship and has yet to receive any focused discussion.Footnote 13 Additionally, sub-arguments expanding on this argument that appear in other sections of the work have thus far not been identified as such, let alone discussed.
I shall begin, therefore, by addressing the question of how to reconcile the medium of tradition—in which, until the writing of the work, Baḥya’s novel religious approach and much of his technical vocabulary had not yet been introduced, or at least had not been crystalized—with the “new” that was introduced in his work not only as an integral part of Jewish religious life but also as a way of rearranging and refashioning this way of life. In the first part of the article, I examine Baḥya’s argument, which provides an answer to the question of how to integrate the doctrine—indeed the very category—of the “duties of the hearts” into a tradition that did not formerly recognize it as a constitutive category. According to Baḥya, the canonical sources did not elaborate on the “duties of the hearts” for several reasons, which I explore below: the first reason concerns the sociology of the knowledge of these duties; the second concerns an epistemological principle that is fundamental to the structure of the “duties of the hearts”; and the third concerns a hermeneutical issue that stems from the very framework of distinctions that Baḥya develops in his book. The need to downplay the discussion of the “duties of the hearts” is the reason, according to Baḥya, that up until his day they did not receive the systematic study they deserve. The writing of his book, he contends, changed this reality. However, the question arises as to whether Baḥya himself does not act improperly in shedding too much light on that which was not meant to be disclosed fully. In the second part of the article, I discuss how Baḥya contends with this problem through a set of arguments that clarify the new balance that he seeks to establish in his book between partial disclosure and partial concealment.
“Neglected, Not Contained in any Book”: The Status of the “Duties of the Hearts” in the Jewish Tradition
In the introduction to his work, Baḥya writes:
As the religious commandments are divided in two—they have an exterior (ẓāhir) part and an interior (bāṭin) part—I studied the books of our predecessors who composed many books on the religious commandments after the time of the Talmudic sages, so that I might learn from them the inner knowledge (ʿilm al-bāṭin)…. Having studied these books, I could not find among them even one dealing exclusively with the inner knowledge. When I found that this knowledge, the knowledge of the duties of the heart (ʿilm farāʾiḍ al-qulūb), was neglected, not contained in any book comprising its origins, forsaken, with none of its chapters collected in one work, I was deeply astonished.Footnote 14
In these words, Baḥya draws a link between the “duties of the hearts” and the “inner” (bāṭin), a term of crucial importance in his work—as well as in his Islamic sources—that encompasses hermeneutical, theological, eschatological, and anthropological aspects.Footnote 15 It is also notable that in more than one branch of Baḥya’s sources, the bāṭin (both “inner” and “hidden”) is considered superior to the ẓāhir (the “external” and the “manifest”),Footnote 16 a principle that Baḥya not only adopted but indeed was one of the first Jewish (Rabbanite or Karaite) authors to introduce as a fundamental distinction and to articulate in a systematic manner. Moreover, this quote attests that in Baḥya’s view, the “duties of the hearts” are not only a set of duties that demand acknowledgment and execution, they also form anʿilm, that is, they call for study and clarification and also, as Baḥya explicates throughout his work, for certain mental dispositions and a series of exercises in order to be initiated into them.Footnote 17 According to Baḥya, until his day, and especially in everything that was written in post-Talmudic times, no systematic or comprehensive study of this ʿilm was conducted. Moreover, the science (or wisdom or knowledge) of the “duties of the hearts”—which is the most fundamental aspect of religious life as portrayed by Baḥya, the key to a proper relationship with the divine and the portal to the “world to come”—is “neglected,” with no one attending to it seriously.Footnote 18 This issue, continues Baḥya in his rhetorical gesture, is bewildering to the point that:
I said to myself, It may be that this kind of duty is not obligatory upon us, but is commanded rather by way of morality (adab), in order to show us the right way and the straight path. Perhaps it is to be considered a supererogatory duty, for whose neglect we are neither questioned nor punished. This may be the reason why the ancients have left it unnoted.Footnote 19
The major concern here is with the status of the activity derived from the “inner knowledge,” and with the question of whether the lack of attention to the “duties of the hearts” signifies its inferior status vis-à-vis the commandments that were subject to enumeration and clarification. In other words, the question raised by Baḥya, in a mode of circulus in probando—that is, by presupposing the existence of a distinct realm of the “duties of the hearts”—is whether these duties are superior in terms of religious validity to the rest of the commandments, as he assumes, or inferior to them, as may be assumed by the lack of any systematic treatment of them until his times. The attempt to resolve this question by way of “the reasoned (maʿqūl), the written (al-maqtūb) and the transmitted (al-manqūl),”Footnote 20 that is, by rational argumentation, by the written Torah, and by the oral Torah, led Baḥya to the following conclusion: “I found them to be the basis of all duties. Were they not, all the duties of the members would be of no avail.”Footnote 21 According to Baḥya, therefore, the “duties of the hearts” are not only superior to the “duties of the members” from a religious perspective but also condition the very realization of the “duties of the members,” or at least determine their validity.Footnote 22
However, what is the meaning of the claim that a study of the written and the oral Torah will expose the “duties of the hearts” that were neglected in post-Talmudic Judaism, that is, by the Geonim as well as in Baḥya’s own Andalusi cultural milieu? Here lies the beginning of a discursive strategic move that Baḥya will put to use throughout the book, namely, the retrojection of his religious approach to the canonical sources of (Rabbanite) Judaism in order to instill the “duties of the hearts” as part of the traditional medium. This aspect demands a separate study of hermeneutical aspects in Baḥya’s work, but for our purposes it will suffice to indicate the two dimensions of Baḥya’s argument. Baḥya claims, on the one hand, that a study of the canonical sources will reveal that the “duties of the hearts” already appear in them, but on the other hand, that they appear in such a manner that they can easily be neglected or forgotten and vanish without leaving their proper mark on the Jewish tradition, as indeed occurred, he argues, in his times. According to Baḥya, the reason for this is that the realm of the “duties of the hearts”—and the science involved in their clarification—is not unpacked in the canonical sources but only attested to by way of indicating its existence and the obligation to follow it. Baḥya sets out to prove this point already in his introduction by presenting a set of verses from the Torah, specifically from Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. This set of sources grounds the very existence of the “duties of the hearts” in Scripture’s most fundamental layer, though according to Baḥya, this layer does not exhaust the biblical references, for the rest of the “books of the prophets” “abound in this.”Footnote 23 Moreover, Baḥya argues that the study of Talmudic literature, too, will attest that in the times of the early sages, the “duties of the hearts” were not forgotten and still formed a constituent part of their religiosity, one that left a mark on their way of life as it is recounted in their literature.Footnote 24 We can therefore detect a tension between, on the one hand, an element that according to the author is fundamental to Jewish life and that is present in its canonical sources, and, on the other, the fact that its very mode of presentation in these sources enabled the forgetting and marginalization of this element from the core of religious life in the times of Baḥya, which he argues had begun already in Geonic times.Footnote 25 This tension stems from the fact that while the existence of the “duties of the hearts” was indeed indicated, the details of the duties themselves were not explicated and their consequences were not spelled out in the corpora of traditional literature. The reason—or, as will be clarified below, reasons—for this mixture of presence and absence is not fully disclosed by Baḥya in his introduction but unfolds throughout his book. In these recurring discussions, Baḥya reiterates the principle that the lack of analysis of the “duties of the hearts” in traditional sources is due not to their inferiority relative to other commandments (namely, the “duties of the members”) but in fact to their lofty status and preeminence.
The first reason for the absence of the necessary elucidation of the “duties of the hearts” is related to an epistemological principle that is integral to Baḥya’s work. According to this principle, the very structure of the “duties of the hearts” is such that they require the “calling to attention of the mind” (tanbīh al-ʿaqlī),Footnote 26 that is to say, the comprehension of these duties in an internal process. Therefore, any external transmission fundamentally fails to capture the “duties of the hearts,” and can serve only to urge, by way of intimation, an understanding that can only be reached by the force of one’s own reason.Footnote 27 This principle is mentioned in Baḥya’s discussion of the question of whether the “duties of the hearts” are referred to in Scripture—and if so, in what manner—or whether they are too obvious to mention. As part of this discussion, Baḥya considers the example of the duty to “unify” (tawḥīd) God.Footnote 28 In order to fulfil this obligation, one has to know how to truly unify the divine, and one cannot be satisfied with solely reciting the verse that attests to God’s unity. What else, then, did Scripture provide besides the verse that attests to God’s unity? Alongside this explicit but insufficient verse, the Torah also declared an ethos, which Baḥya calls an “induction” (Ar. root ḥ.ṯ.ṯ), that calls for clarifying in a reasoned manner the heart’s duty to unify God.Footnote 29 This was done, according to Baḥya, in a verse from Deuteronomy (4:39): “Know therefore this day and keep in your heart that God [alone] is God.” With this example, Baḥya sought to present a general principle: although the “duties of the hearts” were referred to in Scripture, they were not clarified, because their mode of conduct as “duties of the hearts” cannot be realized merely by adhering to Scripture. In the words of Baḥya:
The same is true for the rest of the duties of the hearts (farāʾiḍ al-qulūb)…. The believer’s faith will not be pure unless he studies and executes them. This is the inner knowledge (ʿilm al-bāṭin), the light of the hearts and souls. This is meant by the friend (walī) when he says [Ps. 51: 8]: “Indeed You desire truth about that which is hidden; teach me wisdom about secret things.”Footnote 30
Two points deserve to be emphasized in the general principle that Baḥya formulates. The first is that the “duties of the hearts” are not exhausted by intellection and are not a theoretical field of knowledge. Their realization necessitates an act that follows comprehension, even if this act does not transcend one’s “interiority.”Footnote 31 Second, and more importantly for the issue at hand, is Baḥya’s claim that the comprehension of the “duties of the hearts” requires an intellectual effort that exceeds passive reception. All that Scripture can offer, therefore, is a hint, an indication.
The second reason Baḥya presents for the absence of the necessary elucidation of the “duties of the hearts” is political in nature, and he addresses it in a discussion on the question of divine retribution. According to Baḥya:
Good deeds are divided into two parts, one hidden and known to God alone, like the duties of the heart, and the other apparent (ẓāhir) in the members, not concealed to anyone, which are the commandments, whose performance is apparent in the members. The Creator requites the deeds apparent in the members with a reward apparent in this world; the inner (bāṭin), hidden (khafī) deeds He requites with a hidden reward, the reward in the world to come.Footnote 32
Here, Baḥya presents a twofold analogy: on the one hand, between acts done in an unconcealed manner, i.e., “duties of the members,” which are rewarded by an unconcealed reward, i.e., a reward given already in this world; and, on the other hand, between the acts done in one’s mental space—invisible to any spectator—and a different kind of retribution economy that involves a reward in the world to come, that is, a reward that is non-apparent in this world.Footnote 33 The world to come, according to Baḥya, is hidden, in the sense that it is a reward bestowed for acts done in a mental space that is in principle hidden from any other being. As such, a spectator cannot foresee in advance who will be rewarded with it. But the world to come is hidden not only because it is a non-apparent reward for non-apparent acts but also because of its “distance,” that is, for being a reward that will be bestowed in a non-immediate future, and thus one that demands patience and endurance. The problem, argues Baḥya, is that such endurance does not characterize the general public (or, in medieval terminology, the multitude; Ar. jumhūr), which seeks immediate reward for every action.Footnote 34 This was already true in the time of the revelation of the Torah, when the people were in a state of “ignorance and little understanding,” in a condition analogous to that of a youth who requires, in order to be motivated, either the promise of “immediate pleasures, like wonderful food and drink, clothing and a carriage, and the like,” or the threat of “immediate discomforts, like hunger, nakedness, whippings, and the like.”Footnote 35 Given this state of affairs, there was no point in conveying to the public the duties whose reward is mostly deferred to the world to come and which are characterized by their transcendence of the immediate. This infantile mental condition necessitated tilting most of the discussion toward commandments that yield a reward in this world and downplaying the discussion of duties rewarded in the world to come.Footnote 36 Moreover, according to Baḥya, this state of affairs not only characterizes the nation in a primeval state that has since been overcome, but is continuous, as is reflected in his statement—which does not seem to be limited to his present time—that “the multitude of the nation (jumhūr al-ʾāmma) has only the apparent deeds, not the hidden ones,” and therefore “Scripture treats only briefly the matter of reward in the world to come.”Footnote 37
The third reason for the absence of a clarification and discussion of the “duties of the hearts” in the sources that make up the tradition is a more profound one and relates to the very framework of distinctions that is operative in Baḥya’s work, primarily the overarching distinction between the “manifest” (ẓāhir) and the “inner” (bāṭin) and the predilection for the latter. In Baḥya’s outlook, because the “inner” dimension is superior to the “manifest,” it is unfeasible that the Torah, “Kitāb Allāh,” should include only the “manifest.”Footnote 38 The Torah must include an “inner” dimension that requires transcending what is clearly manifest in the surface of the text. In other words, Baḥya’s basic episteme, which gives precedence to the “inner,” immediately renders problematic any contentment with or adherence to the “manifest” or “external” dimension only. Inner knowledge, ʿilm al-bāṭin, is therefore also an interpretation of Scripture that exposes within it a realm of religious activity that is not apparent and not sufficiently clear in Scripture’s explicit statements.Footnote 39 In this sense, the reward of the world to come is not only a “hidden” (i.e., non-apparent in this world) reward for an act done “inwardly” (i.e., in one’s mental space in a mode invisible to the eyes of a spectator) but is also a reward for an act that is “hidden” (in the sense of being insufficiently spelled out) beneath the surface of Scripture. The existence of the “duties of the hearts” as part of what ought to be inferred from Scripture is hinted at already in the introduction to the work, in Baḥya’s insistence that a systematic interpretation such as his own did not previously exist. Following his claim quoted above that there exist both “inner” and “external” commandments, Baḥya adds:
As the religious commandments are divided in two—they have an exterior (ẓāhir) part and an interior (bāṭin) part—I studied the books of our predecessors who composed many books on the religious commandments after the time of the Talmudic sages…. I found that all their explanations and commentaries fall under one of the three following headings: (1) Interpreting the verses in the book of God and the works of the prophets … in one of these two modes: interpreting the words and their meaning … [or] interpreting grammatically the phrases, their metaphors, their declensions and conjugations and corrections…. (2) Summarizing the principle commandments … (3) Instilling the matters of religion in our hearts by way of rational demonstration and refutation of those who disagreed with us.Footnote 40
This paragraph can be approached in two modes, which differ in the degree of disputation they contain. The first way of reading it is as a schematic survey of the extant post-Talmudic literature written in Jewish (Rabbanite) circles, possibly with reference to the prominence of the writings. This type of survey does not necessarily indicate any opposing position vis-à-vis the mentioned literature but can be interpreted as expressing a milder stance that only alludes to an absence: despite everything that the tradition has produced thus far, no book like The Guide to the Duties of the Hearts has been written. The second mode perceives in each of the three categories enumerated in the quoted passage a major flaw and a sign of treading on an erroneous religious path. While I cannot elaborate here on the three categories, for present purposes it will suffice to note how the second mode of reading applies to the first category, which addresses the exegetical literature that focuses on lexical or grammatical aspects of Scripture.Footnote 41 In light of this second and more critical mode of reading, the exegetical literature since the times of the Geonim was characterized by hypersensitivity to a register that is secondary in its importance, without noticing that the very exegetical act, when carried out in such a way, hides more than it reveals. It may bring some accomplishments in its own limited exegetical field, but it occludes a hermeneutical horizon that is vital to proper religious life, namely, the “inner knowledge.”
The idea of a layered hermeneutical approach is explicitly articulated in the “Gate of the Obligation of Obedience” in Baḥya’s account of the ten ranks of the “study of the Torah” (ʿilm al-kitāb). This list is multivalent and contains a mixture of a number of different threads, including the relation between the written Torah and the oral Torah and the importance of learning from the reliable Rabbanite tradition.Footnote 42 One of the axes of this list that is of special relevance to our present concern is the analysis of the different modes by which the verses gather their meaning. The lowest-rank mode, which Baḥya likens metaphorically to the Qurʾānic image of an “ass carrying books,” is that of reciting the text in a way that does not relate to it any meaning at all.Footnote 43 The succeeding ranks include a progression in the degree of acquaintance with the text, beginning with a mastery of its grammatical forms, which is followed by an understanding of its palpable senses, including some degree of comprehension of the metaphorical language employed in it. This art of understanding forms the fifth rank and is termed “the science of the matters of Torah” (ʿilm maʿānī kitāb Allāh).Footnote 44 Only in the ninth rank—the highest rank from the perspective of hermeneutic excellence, which differs from the tenth rank only in the sources on which the exegesis relies—does the exegete reach the level of proper understanding of the “duties of the hearts.” This rank is achieved by those who have “made the effort to study the duties of the hearts and of the members,” including that which distinguishes between these two categories and that which impairs each one of them. The people of this rank are presented also as those who have “comprehended the manifest and inner meanings of the Torah.”Footnote 45 Notably, Baḥya draws an analogy here between knowing the “duties of the hearts” and comprehending the inner sense of the Torah. He typifies as “inner” (bāṭin) not only those acts done in a person’s interiority, but also the knowledge that exists in a hidden layer from a hermeneutical perspective. This idea is reiterated in the “Gate of Self-Accounting (muḥāsaba),” in Baḥya’s presentation of a passage of initiation that one must undergo in the course of one’s studies as a reader of Scripture and as a subject of tradition. Readers of Scripture must not be satisfied with what they gather from the knowledge of the Torah and the books of prophets in the first stages of their learning. Moreover, it is better that readers forget the contents of their former stage of understanding and that, as they develop their intellectual capacity (ʿaql) and faculty of discernment (tamyīz), they address Scripture anew, “as if [they] had never read a letter of it.” Only in this manner, claims Baḥya, may one know the verses according to different modalities, including the distinctions between verses whose sense is clearly established (muḥkam) and those that are ambiguous (mutashābih); those that can be understood by way of analogy and those that cannot be subject to the use of analogy; and, most important to the issue at hand, those whose sense is manifest (ẓāhir) and those that have an inner (bāṭin) sense.Footnote 46
We can see, therefore, that the central distinction between the inner (bāṭin) and the manifest (ẓāhir) utilized by Baḥya throughout his book has a significant hermeneutical dimension in his system. Two factors work in tandem here: (a) the elevation of the “inner” above the “manifest” as a firm position that plays the role of an organizing principle in Baḥya’s discourse; and (b) the presupposition regarding the ultimate value of Scripture. The combination of these two leads Baḥya to argue that Scripture is characterized by having an “inner” dimension and a “manifest” one, and that its “manifest” dimension—i.e., the surface of the text and the plain sense that can be gathered at this level—suffers from the fundamental problem of the “manifest,” namely, its inferiority vis-à-vis the “inner.” The exegete must abide by this hermeneutical principle, avoid being content with understanding only what can be gleaned from the manifest dimension of the book, and seek to achieve the “inner” knowledge that is kept hidden in it.
Various exegetical trends in medieval Judaism up until the time of Baḥya introduced the demand to interpret Scripture in a way that exceeds its plain sense, a need that arose out of various changing reasons related to the exegetes’ guiding principles. This might be done because of overt contradictions between different verses, an incongruity between knowledge that was validated by reason and various explicit statements made in a verse, a mismatch between Scripture and other canonized texts of tradition, and other reasons.Footnote 47 Common to all of these is the assumption that an interpretation that exceeds the plain sense is limited to specific locations in Scripture and is not a principle to be applied to the text as a whole. By contrast, the present study of Baḥya’s Duties of the Hearts exposes an overarching distinction that grants superiority to the “inner” over the “manifest” and leads to a general hermeneutic position—which is clearly pronounced, if not fully realized, by Baḥya as a commentarial enterprise—according to which the “inner” knowledge of Scripture is to be sought not only in cases of a local exegetical challenge but in principle, i.e., as a general rule that applies to Scripture as a whole.
The “Duties of the Hearts” between Ẓāhir and Bāṭin
Although Baḥya does not argue—and in all likelihood did not suppose—that a systematic study of the “duties of the hearts” can completely exhaust the “inner” meaning of Scripture, some of his statements analyzed above clearly indicate that, for him, comprehending the “duties of the hearts” forms at the very least a partial realization of the “inner knowledge.”
But does Baḥya himself not act faultily by exposing the “inner” in the very act of writing his book, that is, in making that which is noble (because it is “inner”) become of lesser quality because of its disclosure? Put differently, we may ask whether the “inner knowledge” is not to be kept under at least some sort of concealment. Though Baḥya does not raise this question explicitly with regard to his own work or dedicate a specific discussion to it, it is improbable that he was unaware of it, if only because of the centrality of the distinction between the “inner” and the “manifest” to his work, and his strong condemnation, in other respects, of turning the “inner” into “manifest.”Footnote 48 There are reasons to assume—even if it cannot be unquestionably determined—that Baḥya does acknowledge this problem, or, in a more cautious formulation, that the problem leaves its traces in his discourse even if it is not defined or diagnosed as such. This assumption is strengthened when we identify a line of argumentation that runs through his book and constitutes a kind of resolution of this problem, for the reasons I enumerate below.
The first stage of this argumentative move lies in Baḥya’s claim, in the introduction to his work, that the crisis of his times—which had already begun, as he tacitly puts it, in the days of the sages that “followed the people of the Talmud” (ahl al-Talmud)—demands a change of attitude from that of the “ancient righteous fathers”—an alternative name, most likely, for the ahl al-Talmud—who transmitted the “duties of the hearts” in a “general” manner or through a description of their own annals and modes of conduct.Footnote 49 Admittedly, even in previous generations the issue of the “duties of the hearts” was reserved for a select few and did not concern the general public, but Baḥya still opts to describe this as a crisis of the “people of our own times,” who “neglect even the knowledge and practice of the duties of the members, not to mention the duties of the hearts”;Footnote 50 or, in another formulation, “our contemporaries overlook them [the duties of the hearts] in both theory and practice.”Footnote 51 This dire situation is reflected according to Baḥya in a twofold crisis: a crisis of a communal scope that has to do with the condition of religious life and the worship of the divine; and a crisis of a personal nature, for even if Baḥya were to succeed in comprehending to a certain degree the knowledge of the “duties of the hearts,” the fact that this knowledge is not public and is not disseminated widely enough would lead to an erosion of his knowledge over time and might even lead to its eventual loss. Baḥya’s crisis-narrative enables him to argue that although the category of the “duties of the hearts” (and all knowledge that partakes in it) is not an acknowledged part of the Jewish culture of his times or of the way in which its canonical sources are approached, this does not mean that the category is foreign to Judaism. Instead, the foreignness of the category is a product of an age of negligence and forgetting. Moreover, this narrative allows Baḥya to explain why, despite the fact that no book has been written that posits the “duties of the hearts” at the core of Jewish religious life, such a book is timely and urgent. This argument transforms the absence of the “duties of the hearts” in previous sources from a suspicious sign of the introduction of an external influence that seeks to reshape the tradition in its own image to a sign of the utter necessity to write the book and redeem a dimension of religious life that, according to the author, has been part and parcel of Judaism from its formative stages. Furthermore, and indirectly, the crisis also provides an explanation for Baḥya’s decision to expose the “inner knowledge”—which should in principle be kept hidden, at least to some degree—to the eyes of every future reader.
However, this is not the only argument that can be seen as related to this issue. Another argument results from Baḥya’s framing of the “duties of the members” as limited in number, in contrast with the “duties of the hearts” that are infinitely extended; or, in another formulation that is in one respect more cautious and in another respect more daring, a framing that sees the commandments that are grounded in the dictates of human reason and inferred as part of the “inner knowledge” as “almost innumerable.”Footnote 52 Amos Goldreich has indicated that this framing forms part of Baḥya’s careful but audacious construction of an architecture of religious life that is structured upon two asymmetrical systems of commandments: one that includes the “duties of the members” that add up to 613 commandments, and the other that is made up of the “duties of the hearts,” which are infinitely “branched.”Footnote 53 From the perspective of our present concern, it is important to note that the infinite number of the “duties of the hearts”—even if all of them are somehow derived from the ten “roots,” or “principles” (uṣūl), enumerated in the ten “gates” of Baḥya’s work—allows one to see the Guide to the Duties of the Hearts as an act of only partial disclosure, which still leaves much to be discovered and independently pursued by the perceptive reader. Unlike the tree whose roots are hidden from sight but whose branches are visible, Baḥya’s book presents the “direction to the duties of the hearts” as an inverted tree: its roots are exposed but the full gamut of the branches cannot be seen. Baḥya implies this much in his discussion of how the “duties of the hearts” unfold from the principles enumerated in his book and of the divine assistance that is necessary in order to perceive the duties that branch out from these principles. In Baḥya’s words:
You must know that all the duties of the hearts … are included in these ten roots (uṣūl) included in this book, both the positive and the negative ones…. Therefore, adhere to them in your heart, and repeat them constantly in your mind, and then their branches (furūʿ) will be made manifest to you, with the help of God as he perceives from your intention your desire [to fulfill them] and your inclination towards them. As it is said by the friend (walī) [Ps. 25: 12–14]: “Whoever fears God, he shall be shown what path to choose; his soul shall abide in prosperity, and his seed shall inherit the land. The secret (Heb. sod) of God is for those who fear Him, to them He makes known His covenant.”Footnote 54
The sequence of verses with which Baḥya ends his discussion in this paragraph attests to a process of future disclosure of knowledge that is not imparted to every reader simply by the act of reading the book. Moreover, in quoting the three verses, Baḥya ties together the fear of God and the life of the soul devoted to God, treating both elements as a secret that will be revealed by divine assistance to those who adhere to God.Footnote 55 It is also possible that Baḥya integrates in this quotation an allusion to the reward of the world to come that awaits those who fear God, expressed in the phrase “his seed shall inherit the land,” which is associated with a statement in m. Sanh. 10:1: “All of Israel have a share in the world to come, as it is said [Isa. 60:21]: ‘And your people, all of them righteous, shall inherit the land for all time.’ ” Footnote 56
A third argument for regarding the Duties of the Hearts as a book that only partly discloses knowledge and thus retains at least some degree of concealment, concludes the third chapter of the “Gate of Self-Accounting.” According to Baḥya, the Torah is not the only text that has both “inner” and “manifest” dimensions. His own book as well—or at least this particular unit in the “Gate of Self-Accounting,” which in any case Baḥya sees as a concise version of the whole bookFootnote 57—is written in the same manner and features secrets that are not fully disclosed but are only hinted at in the work:
Therefore you should think of them [the modes of self-accounting] constantly and bring them to mind as long as you live. Do not be content with my concise discourse on them and with my short indications here, for each of these matters is laden with far more interpretations and clarifications than I have mentioned to you. I have only urged them on your attention (tanbīhā), and reminded those who are concerned in a few words…. May you keep it in mind, guarding it in your memory and turning your thoughts to it frequently, for when you rehearse it thus you will be exposed to all sorts of hidden secrets and spiritual lessons. Do not assume that if you contemplate and study the manifest sense (ẓāhir) of the words you know their inner (bāṭin) meanings as well. These can be reached only after much thought, constant repetition, and continuous and diligent effort expended over a long period of time.Footnote 58
First, these words further clarify Baḥya’s specific rendering of the term tanbīh, the “calling to attention,” which he frequently employs in the book and which is also featured in the subtitle of the work as it appeared in Ms. Paris BN Ms. héb. 756 (wa-l-tanbīh ʿalī lawāzim al-ḍamāʾir; “and the calling to attention to the requirements of the interiorities”).Footnote 59 Notably, it turns out that the term tanbīh signifies, on the one hand, an address and an utterance that involve some disclosure, but, on the other hand, the structure of this address is nothing but an act of intimation, an indication that it is not exhausted by what it discloses and calls for further exploration. Moreover, in this paragraph Baḥya creates a bold doubling of the structure of Scripture. He does indeed expound on biblical verses, and he reveals some of their secrets by shedding light on them from the perspective of the “inner knowledge” or the “duties of the hearts”; yet, by doing so, he does not ultimately dissolve the mystery but only transports it to his own book. Now, it is his book that requires the careful study that befits the study of Scripture; it is his book that is designed to become subject to memorization, a treasure of subtle secrets that will go unnoticed by inattentive readers and will only be disclosed to those who delve deeply into its inner dimension.
Conclusion
In this article I have shown how Baḥya sought to integrate the category and the doctrine of the “duties of the hearts” into Jewish discourse as an essential element. For that purpose, I have analyzed how the distinction between bāṭin and ẓāhir is reflected in Baḥya’s approach to the Jewish tradition whose values he sought to revalue, and I have demonstrated how this distinction also sheds light on Baḥya’s understanding of the book he authored. This investigation exposes a central tension in the work, which is expressed in Baḥya’s attempt to prove, on the one hand, that the “duties of the hearts” are not a new element in the world of Judaism but are instead an essential part of it and, on the other hand, that this element is not plainly visible and is not imparted as part of the “surface” layer of the canonical texts.
My exploration of Baḥya’s book from the perspective of the status of the “duties of the hearts” in the Jewish tradition has revealed, for the first time, that the discussions related to this issue are not exhausted by Baḥya’s programmatic introduction but that they also resurface in various other sections of the work. My analysis of these various discussions has uncovered several reasons that, according to Baḥya, had necessitated the partial concealment of the doctrine of the “duties of the hearts” and the avoidance of any systematic consideration of these duties up until his own resolution to write the book. The first reason is epistemological and concerns Baḥya’s insistence that a proper acquisition of the “duties of the hearts” must involve a process of rational intellection. This kind of understanding may indeed be catalyzed by an explicit biblical utterance, but Scripture can do no more than indicate and prompt this process. The second reason is Baḥya’s overall pessimism regarding the possibility that the general public will be willing to fulfill the “duties of the hearts,” the reward of which is granted only in a distant future and, thus, does nothing to enhance one’s status in the eyes of one’s neighbors. Because no presentation of the “duties of the hearts” will provide a strong enough motivation to entice the multitudes to proper worship of the divine, they are not elaborated upon in the “manifest” dimension of revelation (i.e., the explicit utterances of Scripture), which are intended for the general public. The third reason is more structural and concerns the framework of basic distinctions in Baḥya’s work. Given that the distinction between ẓāhir and bāṭin is one that Baḥya keeps revisiting from various perspectives and, given that, on the basis of this distinction, he shapes the fundamental hierarchical framework that characterizes different dimensions of religious life, the distinction necessarily must also play a role in the structure of revelation—in other words, Scripture itself must include both “inner” and “manifest” dimensions.
Ostensibly, in the very act of writing a systematic work that addresses the principles of the “duties of the hearts,” Baḥya boldly overturns the balance between the “inner” (meaning, in this case, “concealed”) and the “manifest.” Baḥya is not silent on this issue, and in analyzing some of his discussions, I have introduced three modes through which Baḥya shapes his dialectical stance between concealment and manifestation with regard to both the act of writing his book and its contents. One mode involves the alarming narrative of the crisis that befell his generation and that left unattended the knowledge of the “duties of the hearts” and the possibility of abiding by them in the worship of the divine. This predicament, Baḥya argues, requires him to dedicate a book to the systematic treatment of the “inner knowledge.” The second mode has to do with Baḥya’s repeated assertion that the “duties of the hearts” are innumerable and thus that every act of disclosure can only be partial, since by definition it does not exhaust the infinite number of the duties. The third mode consists in Baḥya’s presentation of his book as an act of only partial disclosure, a disclosure that retreats as an integral part of the way in which it unfolds, thereby enticing the reader to its secrets without fully exposing them. His written work thus displays a variation on the tension between concealment and manifestation that characterizes the earlier biblical Jewish discourses as depicted by Baḥya. He does not completely overturn the balance, but only reshapes it by moving its center of gravity to his own work.
The various discussions throughout this article have shown, then, that the distinction between bāṭin and ẓāhir in Baḥya’s work is not limited to the anthropological, ethical, or religious dimensions of the worship of the divine, as it is frequently employed and understood. It also has important bearings on Baḥya’s conception of layered knowledge and his notion of tradition. Only by understanding this dimension can we fully assess the nature of the intervention Baḥya sought to make in the medium of the Jewish tradition and the way in which he sought to implement his approach as an integral part of Judaism.
Moreover, the analysis of Baḥya’s discourse reveals an illuminating chapter that has yet to be told about the rise of bāṭin discourse in medieval (Rabbanite and Karaite) Jewish culture between the tenth and twelfth centuries and which therefore calls for a wider investigation. Although the meaning of the contrasting term (ẓāhir) was the subject of several studies that dealt with its function in Jewish discourses since its first appearances in the sources available to us, no study has thus far been dedicated to exploring how bāṭin functioned in the writings of Jewish authors and specifically not in the writings of authors preceding Maimonides.Footnote 60 Any future analysis of bāṭin discourse would require not only close attention to the different senses given to the term in different sources but also an assessment of: the centrality of this category in the exegetical, theological, and philosophical trends in the works of other Jewish authors; the contribution of this category to transformations of Jewish religiosity in the Middle Ages; and the different cultural contexts in the Islamicate world from which it is possible that bāṭin discourse—or better put, discourses—drew.
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