Interiority and Law: Bahya ibn Paquda and the Concept of Inner Commandments

By Omer Michaelis

Interiority and Law presents a groundbreaking reassessment of a medieval Jewish classic, Baḥya ibn Paquda's Guide to the Duties of the Hearts. Michaelis reads this work anew as a revolutionary intervention in Jewish law, or halakha.

Overturning perceptions of Baḥya as the shaper of an ethical-religious form of life that exceeds halakha, Michaelis offers a pioneering historical and conceptual analysis of the category of "inner commandments" developed by Baḥya. Interiority and Law reveals that Baḥya's main effort revolved around establishing a new legal formation—namely, the "duties of the hearts"—which would deal entirely with human interiority. Michaelis takes up the implications of Baḥya's radical innovation, examining his unique mystical model of proximity to God, which he based on an increasingly growing fulfillment of the inner commandments. With an integrative approach that puts Baḥya in dialogue with other medieval Muslim and Jewish religious thinkers, this work offers a fresh perspective on our understanding of the interconnectedness of the dynamic, neighboring religious traditions of Judaism and Islam.

Contributing to conversations in the history of religion, Jewish studies, and medieval studies on interiority and mysticism, this book reveals Baḥya as a revolutionary and demanding thinker of Jewish law.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503637467

Book preview

INTERIORITY AND LAW

Bahya ibn Paquda and the Concept of Inner Commandments

Omer Michaelis

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Omer Michaelis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Michaelis, Omer, author.

Title: Interiority and law : Bahya ibn Paquda and the concept of inner commandments / Omer Michaelis.

Other titles: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Series: Stanford studies in Jewish mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023006425 (print) | LCCN 2023006426 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503636613 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503637467 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Baḥya ben Joseph ibn Paḳuda, active 11th century. Hidāyah ilá farāʼiḍ al-qulūb. | Commandments (Judaism)—Early works to 1800. | Jewish law—Early works to 1800. | Mysticism—Judaism. | Philosophy, Medieval.

Classification: LCC BJ1287.B23 M53 2023 (print) | LCC BJ1287.B23 (ebook) | DDC 296.3/83—dc23/eng/20230621

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006425

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023006426

Cover design: George Kirkpatrick

Cover art: First folio of the Guide to the Duties of the Hearts, Ms. Paris BnF hebr. 756

Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism

Clémence Boulouque & Ariel Evan Mayse, EDITORS

Each and every one

With God’s candle in his heart

H. N. BIALIK

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Duties and Supererogatory Acts

2. Inner Duties

3. Proximity

4. The World to Come

5. Bāṭin and Tradition

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book was written during my first years as a faculty member at Tel Aviv University, mostly in the room—a bāṭin of sorts—where I sat throughout the days of the pandemic. The withdrawal into oneself suits the study of the Duties of the Hearts, and it afforded me the right kind of mindset for exerting the effort presented in the pages of this book.

The commitment of the Faculty of Humanities, headed by Dean Rachel Gali Cinamon, to providing young faculty members with the time and peace of mind required to pursue their research was a crucial factor in making this book possible. I owe Dean Cinamon, as well as the heads of the School of Jewish Studies and Archeology, Youval Rotman and Yoram Cohen, and the heads of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud, Adam Afterman and Ishay Rosen-Zvi, special thanks for their consistent and scrupulous attention to this matter. The Israel Science Foundation, via grant no. 2201/21, provided the necessary financial backing for this study.

Throughout my work on the book, I was fortunate to have generous and critical partners for conversation and for thinking through questions that emerged from my research. I thank Adam Afterman, Michael Fishbane, Ehud Krinis, Menachem Lorberbaum, Orit Malka, Idan Pinto, Ori Rotlevy, Sabine Schmidtke, Sarah Stroumsa, and Ariel Zinder for their wise comments and helpful advice. Two anonymous readers for Stanford University Press also helped me greatly with their illuminating comments. And my thanks also to Yotam Schremer for his diligent assistance in preparing the manuscript for print and for his insights throughout the process.

I owe a great deal of gratitude to the efforts of Clémence Boulouque and Ariel Evan Mayse, the editors of the series Stanford Studies in Jewish Mysticism. Their guidance significantly contributed to this work. My sincere thanks also go to Caroline McKusick, the SUP Associate Editor, for navigating the complexities of this project and shepherding the process with dedication. Sincere acknowledgment goes to Aviva Arad, who meticulously copyedited the manuscript, offering critical input to the finalization of the manuscript.

Early versions of two of the chapters of this book were originally published as articles:

The book’s opening chapter was published in Hebrew: "Duties and Supererogatory Acts in Duties of the Hearts," Shenaton ha-mishpat ha-ivri: Jewish Law Annual 31 (2021–2022): 141–78.

The closing chapter was published in English: Fashioning the ‘Inner’ (Bāṭin) in Baḥya ibn Paqūda’s Duties of the Hearts, Harvard Theological Review 116, no. 4 (2023): 552–74.

And as for my duties of the heart, this book is dedicated to Zohar, Avigail, and Amalia, who are forever in mine.

TEL AVIV, 2 023

Introduction

The work of the Jewish Andalusi thinker Baḥya ibn Paquda—who most likely lived in Saragossa, Spain, in the second half of the eleventh century¹—is among the most enigmatic in the long history of Jewish thought.² Yet it is a riddle that does not present itself as such and which needs to be stirred and shaken from its dormant state in order for it to appear before us and demand our inquiry, since on the face of it, nothing is too hidden in Baḥya’s thought. His major, and to the best of our knowledge, only book, The Guide to the Duties of the Hearts (Kitāb al-hidāya ila farāʾiḍ al-qulūb), was printed in many editions.³ Among them are complexly layered editions, in which meticulous commentaries are adjoined to the original contents, as well as pocket editions that allow readers to recite the book’s chapters wherever they go.⁴ Furthermore, the work’s wide circulation is not a late phenomenon. Soon after it was first written, the Duties of the Hearts was translated into Hebrew from the Judeo-Arabic original, and discoveries from the Cairo Geniza attest that it was one of the most broadly copied works of Jewish thought in the Middle Ages, apparently already in the first hundred years after it was set in ink.⁵ It retained an important status in Jewish religious life throughout the Middle Ages and found its way to wider circles of readers in early modern times with the rise of print. The Hebrew editions of the work were printed in the centers of learning and knowledge dissemination in Naples, Istanbul, Hamburg, and Korzec, and it was translated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries into many of the numerous languages of the Jews, from Italian, Portuguese, and Ladino to Judeo-German, Yiddish, and Dutch.⁶

However, over the eras, despite its widespread circulation, and, as we shall see, in a process that began with the initial translation of the work and among its very first readers, the work’s edge became blunted. On the one hand, its revolutionary proposal came to seem self-evident, and was perceived as part and parcel of Judaism from time immemorial, as if the author had offered no innovation. On the other hand, and in a complementary manner, Baḥya’s approach was significantly softened by his readers: it was interpreted as less daring, less demanding, and far less contentious vis-à-vis other versions of Jewish religiosity, both those that prevailed in Baḥya’s own time and those that have predominated since. What did this softening consist of? For generations, Baḥya was considered to have distilled a pious form of life that called not only for a high regard for the fulfillment of commandments but also for the enrichment of religious life through special attention to what was termed the spiritual, inner dimension of worship. This perception was consistent with the two appellations by which Baḥya came to be known: dayan (rabbinical judge), presumably in reference to his occupation, and ḥasid (pious), as he was described by some of the first generations of copiers of his book.⁷ Moreover, Baḥya’s approach was regarded as providing a systematic logic to the principles of religious life that stem from the canonical rabbinic literature—both biblical and talmudic. According to this view, Baḥya essentially echoed a voice that originates in the depths of the Jewish tradition, rather than aimed to break new ground. Indeed, it seems that Baḥya himself contributed immensely to this impression—though for a different reason, as will be discussed—in his decision to integrate hundreds of citations from both biblical and midrashic literature into his work, and to absorb his innovations in the familiar language of the sources.

The basic argument of this study is that careful attention to Baḥya’s own arguments and rhetorical gestures in his work, beginning with its very title, reveals that his outlook on Jewish religious life proposed to transform it radically. God, in this outlook, is to be worshipped not entirely or even primarily on the basis of the 613 commandments enumerated in the various lists of commandments that were available in Baḥya’s time and were based on the tradition of Rabbanite Halakhah, but rather through an extensive—indeed infinitely broad, as Baḥya argues—set of activities that take place in one’s inner life. Baḥya could have constructed this inner religious activity in different ways, and he chose the most audacious and strict of these possibilities. He could have conceptualized this realm of inner activities as a step beyond the prevailing religious norms, by using the category of middat ḥasidut (attribute of piety) that was developed in earlier talmudic literature and appeared in the writings of some of the Geonim, or alternatively, employed a category that was in ubiquitous use in his time, namely, supererogatory deeds, or miṣvot nedavah. Moreover, Baḥya could have opted to identify this activity with the category of kavvanah (intention) in the performance of the miṣvah, that is, as reflecting an inner dimension of the external deed. Instead, in his work he decided to explicitly reject the identification of the duties of the heart with supererogatory deeds and to marginalize the concept of kavvanah. He declares that the deeds that are to be performed in one’s inner recesses are indeed full-blown commandments. The duties of the heart are in fact superior to the performance of the duties of the members, as they reflect an obedience to God—and indeed, no word appears more frequently in the book than the Arabic term ṭāʿā, meaning obedience—in what Baḥya views as the superior realm of human life, namely, the inner dimension. Not at the enrichment of religious life nor at the enhancement or deepening of the attribute of ḥasidut did Baḥya aim, but at a reconceptualization of the concept of miṣvah in Judaism. Now, he argues in the book, it must include not only what one is obligated to perform in one’s body, but also the entire realm of one’s mental activity. This entails not only statements about the required mental or rational attitude toward God, put in the form of principles of faith or an abstract call for the love and awe of God. It consists mostly of the formulation of a new grammar of internal activity, which Baḥya put forward in ten gates, or a few hundred smaller sections, that lay down a broad and rich foundation for the different patterns of these inner actions. Baḥya regarded these internal acts as religious obligations that surpass any of the better-known commandments; fulfilling them gains one both proximity to God and the reward of the World to Come and failing to fulfill them is severely punished.

Baḥya’s mode of intervention in the system of Jewish commandments differs significantly from two more common approaches to the commandments in the realm of Jewish thought. The first, characteristic predominantly in the field known as Jewish philosophy, entails adherence to the already-familiar halakhic edicts along with a reconceptualization of the system of Halakhah according to principles that were not formerly part of it, thereby effectively changing the meaning of these commandments—without changing the commandments themselves. In the second approach, prevalent in works written in Kabbalist circles, authors whose works are not specifically halakhic in nature nevertheless intervened in matters of disputed halakhic rulings, and ruled not only with regard to past disagreements but also in relation to contemporaneous quarrels. In his work, Baḥya departs from both of these more familiar patterns and establishes a novel system of commandments that was hitherto unknown in the realm of Halakhah.

Thus, unlike the previous scholarly treatments of the Duties of the Hearts as a work of musar, as a spiritual guide, or as a systematic ethico-psychological treatise, I will analyze Baḥya’s work in light of the discourse with which the author himself identifies his work—the discourse on commandments. Investigating this discourse will yield a remarkably paradoxical portrait. On the one hand, it will show Baḥya to be among the strictest and most demanding thinkers in his halakhic orientation. On the other hand, he will emerge as a revolutionary thinker in terms of his conception of Halakhah. This kind of study of Baḥya’s halakhic orientation, which has thus far been only preliminary and has not noted its centrality, is the first task of my study. I will address this task through three interrelated methods: a systematic analytic study—the first of its kind as far as I am aware—of Baḥya’s halakhic system, based on everything he states explicitly in this regard throughout his work; a contextualization of this discourse in light of other Jewish and Muslim sources, some of them previously unattended to in relation to Baḥya; and an examination of the broad hermeneutic strategies and specific exegetical choices through which Baḥya adapts his sources to his own proclivities and to the effort of fashioning a new halakhic discourse aimed at transforming the character of Jewish religiosity.

One of the most basic insights that emerges from exploring Baḥya’s discourse on commandments is that his outlook is founded on the distinction between outer and inner—respectively, commandments that are termed duties of the members, which are imposed on the body, and commandments termed duties of the heart, imposed on one’s interiority. But this distinction between inner and outer, which serves as an organizing principle for Baḥya’s notion of the commandments, is not exhausted within the confines of this particular discourse: it is fundamental to his overall system as well as to his more general outlook. According to Baḥya, the whole of Being is to be interpreted on the basis of a pair of concepts that are connected through relations of association and tension, namely, in the Arabic terminology of the book: bāṭin and ẓāhir. What do these words signify? First, a translation: bāṭin in English is the inner, internal, or hidden, while ẓāhir is the outer, external, or manifest, which can be superficially recognized.

As I will argue in this study, the pair bāṭin-ẓāhir serves as a kind of backbone or axis that supports the structure of Baḥya’s work. It is this axis that grants the different dimensions of the work the coherency of a system of thought, and that continuously feeds the work’s halakhic center of gravity.

Very briefly, as befits an introduction, I will note that this pair of terms is presented in a multiplicity of ways throughout the work. Among the most significant of these is the anthropological outlook advanced by Baḥya, according to which being human is defined by two spheres: the bodily and the inner. The body is a network of interrelated organs that functions as a system and whose actions are visible and readily available to behold. By contrast, the inner realm of each human being, consisting of a complex of one’s intellect, heart, and soul, is an internal system. Though the activities of this internal system can produce outer actions performed by the external organs, most of its existence is characterized by a life lived in another realm: an undisclosed inner space that is not observed by anyone but the person whose interiority it is, and by the divine gaze. Baḥya does not merely define and delimit these two dimensions, but adds a judgment regarding their relative value. The external, in his view, reflects a derivative and secondary aspect of human life, whereas the internal is the primary, superior locus of human existence. These two dimensions are not entirely disjointed from each other—they are interrelated as well as struggle with each other. Thus, every action performed by the body is the outcome of one’s inner life. This action can echo one’s refined interiority, it can reflect one’s vileness, or most severely, in Baḥya’s view, it can be an expression of hypocrisy and deception, a corrupt interiority masquerading as external piety. Conversely, the body impacts the soul in its own ways, above all in the ongoing effort to incite it to yield to the desires of the inclination, manifested in the human senses that incessantly seek gratification. The human eyes have an insatiable desire to take pleasure in the beauty of the world, the human mouth seeks nourishment, and the whole of one’s body expresses unbridled desire. This can harness the soul in such a way that one’s own interiority, too, becomes a realm of constant engagement with such passions and the possibilities of their realization; or, alternatively, the passions aroused by the world can be restrained by the soul.

This anthropological outlook is not Baḥya’s own invention. It is based to a large extent on ascetic discourses that were prevalent in the Muslim world, both Eastern and Western, and had begun to shape Jewish discourse in different ways, as well as on a Neoplatonic trend that was partially adopted by Baḥya. However, what distinguishes Baḥya from contemporaneous or preceding Neoplatonically or ascetically inclined thinkers is that, in his case, the emphasis on the distinction between body (jism; jasad; badan) and soul (nafs) is designed to establish and strengthen his fundamental assertion that just as it is halakhically mandated to worship God with one’s body, so it is imperative—and indeed even more important—to do so also with the soul, within.

The basic distinction between body and soul does not exhaust the gamut of Baḥya’s distinction between the inner and the outer. A second mode in which this distinction is expressed is Baḥya’s theory of contemplation or careful consideration (iʿtibār), which serves as the phenomenological interpretative key to the Duties of the Hearts and which considers the human gaze on each and every phenomenon to be a religious challenge of crucial importance. According to Baḥya’s idea of contemplation, all phenomena—those that we consider to be positive, those that we see as ominous, those that indicate a well-ordered world, and those that show a disruption of the familiar order—contain, beyond their immediate appearance, traces (āthār, sing. athar), or are in themselves traces, that when deciphered, indicate, in ways that differ from case to case, the divine source of the phenomenon and its partaking in the overall abundance of creation. These traces also indicate—and here lies a serious hermeneutical challenge—how each phenomenon expresses a divine grace that is entailed by the very fact of its being. The traces or signs are not necessarily hidden, or better put, are not hidden in a simple sense, and a proper mode of contemplation may expose them even in the most visible dimension of the phenomenon. But in order for them to be revealed, the observer must know how to seek them, that is, to search even in the manifest dimension of reality after expressions that point at a reality not limited by the phenomenon itself, nor by the interconnections between different phenomena, but that in some way connect the phenomenon to the Creator and express divine grace. How does the theory of contemplation contribute to the idea of the duties imposed upon the heart? As we will see, consciousness of divine grace, according to Baḥya, is closely related to consciousness of debt. The more one recognizes the continuous and endless graces of creation, the more one understands the unfathomable depth of one’s duty, making it possible to break through the normative framework that confines the commandments to a finite, fixed, and predetermined number.

Another dimension of the distinction between inner and outer is related to Baḥya’s sociological perspective. Here, Baḥya does not entirely adhere to the common medieval distinction between an elite (khāṣṣa) and the masses (ʿāmma). In a sense, Baḥya marginalizes this distinction and instead posits a different basic distinction that colors the social sphere: between the people of the manifest and those of the inner. Interestingly, the category of the people of the manifest as it is portrayed in the Duties of the Hearts is not purely of Baḥya’s own innovation, and is not only a category that Baḥya inherited from earlier sources. In addition, it is possible, as was already noted in scholarship, that this category reflects a specific Jewish elite of Baḥya’s own time.⁸ This elite partook in the cultural life of al-Andalus and shared the values of Muslim Spain’s courtly culture—its gardens with their beds of spices, its banquets and fondness for wine, its admiration of and passion for beautiful bodies.⁹ Contra this culture, Baḥya proposes—and perhaps aims to create—another category, the people of the inner. These people do not gather together to form a community of the inner that establishes a collective life, rather, they mostly remain in their individual inner-solitude, each alienating themselves from the outer sphere in their own way and according to their own capacity, and devote their lives to the bāṭin, the interiority of their souls, the primary locus of sincere divine worship. Here, too, Baḥya’s distinction is not only analytic but also value laden: the inner is superior to the external. It reflects the highest good to which one ought to aspire, and makes possible a greater intimacy with the divine, as opposed to the exile from divine proximity that is imposed by a life lived in the external realm.

A fourth dimension closely related to the distinction between the inner and the external is Baḥya’s theory of divine reward, which we may also describe as the book’s soteriological interpretative key. According to this theory, human deeds that take place in a sphere that is—in principle—visible to others, namely, the duties imposed on the bodies, will be rewarded visibly. This reward is externally manifest, and it is granted already in one’s lifetime. It is also as ephemeral and transient as life in this world is. In contrast with this reward, there is another kind of reward, which is hidden and will be granted—in an unforeseeable future—for acts done in the nonvisible sphere, that is, in one’s interiority, between man and God alone. It will be given only in the undisclosed hour of one’s death; the nature of this reward—what exactly will be granted—is enigmatically not disclosed by Baḥya. Indeed, Baḥya remains reticent regarding the final recompense awaiting one who fulfilled the duties of the heart—in other words, regarding the highest reward, which expresses the superiority of the inner over the manifest—a choice that demands explanation and will be discussed later in this study.

A final dimension in which the distinction between the inner and the manifest is reflected in Baḥya’s Duties is his attitude toward Scripture and its proper mode of interpretation, or in other words, the work’s hermeneutical theory. Just as it is, according to Baḥya, with the manifold other dimensions of Being, so too Scripture, in his view, does not consist solely of the manifest meaning that can be superficially attained. The senses of Scripture include both ẓāhir and bāṭin. Just as Scripture reveals and speaks explicitly, it also conceals signs and speaks clandestinely. This mode of conveying meaning is not intended for the general public, and will not be exposed by the people of the outer sphere or by those who are led by the needs and passions of their bodies. It is a dimension of Scripture open to those who seek the path of the inner, whose intellect is qualified for the task, who know how to reign over their passions, and who estrange themselves from the pleasures of this world in pursuit of complete obedience and worship of God, which will lead them to divine proximity and to the World to Come. What are the contents of the hidden depths of Scripture and of the Jewish tradition, which according to Baḥya, had been neglected to such an extent that by his time were almost completely forgotten? In Baḥya’s view, the inner layer of Scripture consists of none other than the teachings of the proper mode of divine worship and the proper mode of human conduct, namely, the teachings of the duties of the heart that he elaborates in his own work.

Acknowledging the apparatus of fundamental distinctions and essential homology employed by Baḥya also sets the ground for a reassessment and new answer to a question that had been addressed in previous studies of Baḥya, namely: To what extent can mystical elements be found in the Duties of the Hearts? Attempts to properly answer this question have followed one of two problematic tracks, both of which have made a resolution difficult: on the one hand, attempts to derive Baḥya’s mystical model from the various configurations and specific emphases of Neoplatonic mysticism or models of Christian mysticism; and on the other, a rejection of the presence of any mystical element in the Duties of the Hearts because of the disparity between Baḥya’s approach and that of some of the radical mystics associated with early Sufism.¹⁰ As I will argue, the term mysticism may indeed apply to Baḥya’s teachings, but differently from what has thus far been suggested by scholars, and in two distinct senses, which at this stage can only be presented in very preliminary form. One sense in which mysticism is present in Duties of the Hearts has to do with Baḥya’s incessant interest in and