Maimonides, Leo Baeck, and Abraham Joshua Heschel
on Judaism and the Role of the Jewish People
David Marshak | Marshak Associates West
The Jews have always been a minority. But a minority is compelled to think; that is the blessing of its fate. It must always persist in a mental struggle for that consciousness of truth which success and power comfortingly assure to rulers and their supporting multitudes.
— Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism
The setting: an imagined gathering of minds, summoned by the urgency of the present moment. The question before them: What is Judaism for? What is the Jewish people’s role in history? And what is required of Jews now?
I. Reason, Ethics, and Wonder: Three Entrances to the Same House
MAIMONIDES: I will begin where reason demands we begin — with the nature of God and the nature of the commandment. The Torah was given not to satisfy sentiment or to console the afflicted. It was given to perfect the human being — first the body through just social order, then the soul through true intellect. The highest purpose of the Jewish people is to demonstrate that a society can be organized around the knowledge of God. Not the God of the imagination, who answers prayers and parts seas on demand, but the God whom reason approaches through negation — the One of whom we can say with confidence only what He is not. Our task is to model a civilization of rational piety.
BAECK: I hear you, Moses ben Maimon, and I honor the greatness of what you built. But reason alone will not hold the people together, and it did not. The ghetto was not populated by philosophers. It was populated by mothers and merchants and scholars of modest gifts who survived not because they had mastered the Guide for the Perplexed but because they were held by something you named only partially — the commanding force of the commandment itself, the deed that precedes and produces the understanding. Judaism is, at its root, not a theology but an ethics. The Jews survived because they were compelled to think, yes — but compelled by what? By the demand. By the insistence that justice is prior to power. That is Sinai’s gift, and it does not reduce to intellectual achievement.
HESCHEL: Brothers, you are both right, and you are both not yet at the center. Moses, you gave us the architecture of the mind reaching toward God. Leo, you gave us the ethics as the spine of Jewish survival. But what I want to name is what stands before both of these — the moment of wonder, the radical amazement that anything exists at all, that the world is not nothing, that there is a demand addressed to us from beyond ourselves. Before the commandment, before the rational demonstration, there is the shock of being addressed. God is not an inference. God is a presence that ambushes the human being who has not yet armored themselves against surprise.
Heschel paused before continuing:
HESCHEL: The Jews are the people who have been ambushed most thoroughly and most repeatedly. Not as a privilege — I want to be careful here. The suffering has been real and must not be romanticized. But the prophets were not philosophers who reasoned their way to justice. They were people seized by an intolerable awareness that the world as it was fell catastrophically short of the world as it was meant to be. That awareness — that gap between what is and what ought to be — is the Jewish vocation. It does not belong to us exclusively. But we have been its most burdened carriers.
II. Law, Form, and Spirit
MAIMONIDES: Heschel, you move me — I say this not easily, as wonder is not the primary category of my Guide. But I want to press the practical question. You speak of the prophets seized by awareness. In my own time, I watched communities shattered by forced conversion, by the sword of the Almohads, by the endless choice between apostasy and death. What sustained those communities was not wonder — it was halakha. The structure of the law. The daily practice that made a Jew a Jew regardless of what the rulers decreed. The commandments are not merely ethics, Leo. They are the form within which the Jewish people exist across time. Without that form, the content — your ethics, Abraham’s wonder — dissipates.
BAECK: I do not disagree about the function of law. I am a rabbi; I know what halakha gave the people. But I insist on the distinction between the commandment as form and the commandment as inner act. The danger I watched — and I watched it in Germany, among the most assimilated Jews in history — was the reduction of Judaism to form without spirit, observance without demand. And then, on the other side, the reduction of German-Jewish identity to cultural achievement without covenant. Both failures left us unprepared for what came. The Sinaitic claim — that every human being bears the divine image, that power does not justify itself — that claim was not loud enough in either the Orthodox or the liberal communities when the test came.
III. The Present Emergency
HESCHEL: This is where I want to speak directly about our present situation, because I believe we are in a moment of prophetic emergency. The Holocaust was the most complete expression in human history of what happens when the Sinaitic claim is not merely violated in practice but repudiated in principle. But here is what terrifies me about this moment: the State of Israel, which exists as the embodied continuation of the Jewish project, is now in danger of becoming precisely what the prophets warned against. Not because Israel’s existence is wrong — I was a Zionist, I understood the necessity — but because a state can commit the foundational violation of Sinai just as empires can. When the image of God in the Palestinian child is not seen, when power justifies itself, when the prophetic demand is replaced by the security calculus — something essential is being lost.
MAIMONIDES: You are speaking dangerously, Abraham. The State of Israel faces enemies who would destroy it utterly. The duty of self-preservation is rooted in the Torah itself — pikuach nefesh, the preservation of life, overrides nearly every other commandment. I will not have the prophetic tradition weaponized against a people defending its existence.
HESCHEL: And I will not have pikuach nefesh — the sanctity of life — used to justify the systematic degradation of other lives. The prophets did not exempt Israel from the demand when Israel was threatened. They applied it most stringently to Israel precisely because Israel carried the covenant. Amos did not say: the nations around you are worse, therefore you are excused. He said: you only have I known among all the families of the earth, therefore I will punish you for your iniquities. The covenant does not protect; it obligates.
BAECK: This is exactly the self-conflict I wrote about — the freely accepted challenge, the struggle for individuality of spirit. What I observed across the centuries is that Judaism’s greatest achievements came precisely at the moments of greatest external pressure, when the temptation to dissolve into the surrounding civilization was strongest. Judaism remained most true to itself when it had to struggle most fiercely to do so. The question now is whether the Jewish people, including the State of Israel, can maintain that same struggle — not against external civilizations that would absorb them, but against the internal temptation to become, in possession of power, exactly what power always becomes when the Sinaitic claim is not genuinely internalized.
IV. The Paradox of Sovereignty
MAIMONIDES: I will grant you this. What I built in Córdoba, in Fez, in Cairo — the synthesis of Greek reason and prophetic revelation, the demonstration that the God of Torah and the God of Aristotle are not in contradiction — that was only possible because I lived at the intersection of civilizations and was compelled by that position to think more rigorously than any single tradition could demand on its own. The minority that must justify its conviction through constant searching: yes, I know this. I was always in that position. And my greatest work emerged from it. Perhaps the question for Israel now is whether sovereignty has robbed it of the pressure that produced its greatest thinking.
HESCHEL: That is the most important thing you have said, Moses. And here is where I want to speak about the role of the bridge people, the schools of the future. Because I spent the last decade of my life not only writing theology but marching in Alabama, testifying before Congress about Vietnam, insisting that the prophetic tradition was not merely a Jewish possession but the moral grammar of any civilization that wished to survive. The Sinaitic claim is universal even if its origin is particular. And the Jews are uniquely positioned — by history, by vocation, by the very persecution that Baeck analyzes — to carry that claim across every civilizational boundary.
He leaned forward with characteristic urgency:
HESCHEL: But — and I say this as a man who never stopped being a traditional Jew, who prayed three times a day, who believed in the living God — the carrying cannot be done by a people that has forgotten the wonder. The bridge people the schools of the future will produce will not emerge from curriculum alone. They will not be produced by interfaith dialogue that papers over real differences. They will be produced by a genuine encounter with the reality that every other human being is a world, that to destroy one person is to destroy a world, that the stranger’s face is a summons.
V. The Synthesis: What Each Contributes
BAECK: Then let me say what I believe each of us has contributed to the answer, and where we agree. Moses: the structure of the law, the rational ordering of community life, the insistence that Judaism is a civilization of the mind — these are permanent achievements. Without them, the content of the prophetic demand has no vessel. Abraham: the prophetic urgency, the radical amazement, the insistence that the formal acknowledgment of God is worthless without the lived encounter with the divine in the human face — this is permanent. Without it, the vessel has no wine. And from my own contribution: the minority that cannot rest in the weight of possession, that must earn its conviction through constant searching — this is not a defect to be overcome but a vocation to be embraced. Israel’s greatness as a people has always come from the pressure of that position. The danger of sovereignty is not power per se, but the temptation to rest.
MAIMONIDES: And the prophets?
HESCHEL: The prophets never rested. They could not. They were seized by the gap between what is and what ought to be, and they could not close their eyes to it. The current leaders of Israel need prophets to call them back. But let me say what a prophet is, because the word is often misused. A prophet is not primarily a predictor of the future. A prophet is a person in whom the awareness of God’s demand has become so acute that it overrides the comfort of silence. The prophet speaks not because speaking is safe but because silence has become impossible.
He looked at each of them in turn:
HESCHEL: Such people exist in every generation, in every tradition. The Jewish vocation is to keep producing them — to keep the tradition alive enough, demanding enough, searching enough, that in each generation there are people for whom the gap between the world as it is and the world as Sinai demanded it to be is not merely a theological proposition but an intolerable lived reality.
VI. The Schools of the Future
BAECK: And the schools of the future are institutions designed to produce such people deliberately. Not prophets in the narrow sense — the prophets were seized by God, not trained by academies. But people with the prophetic quality: the inability to look away, the refusal to rest in the comfort of power’s validation, the capacity to see the divine image in the face of the enemy and the stranger. This is the Jewish project, universalized.
MAIMONIDES: I will end with what I know: reason and revelation are not in conflict. The God who spoke at Sinai and the God whom Aristotle’s unmoved mover faintly shadows are the same God. The universe is ordered by intelligence, and the demand of justice is written into the structure of that intelligence. The world resists the Sinaitic claim not because the claim is wrong but because it is inconvenient — because it places an absolute limit on the exercise of power, a limit that every empire in history has tried to remove. The Jews have survived because the claim is true, and truth persists even under the most determined assault.
HESCHEL: And I will end with what I know: God is in search of man. Not the other way around. The Sinaitic encounter was not Israel reaching up and grasping something. It was Israel being reached. The whole project — the three thousand years of carrying, the persecution and survival, the prophetic tradition and the Talmudic tradition and the mystical tradition and the modern tradition — is the record of a people that has been reached and has, imperfectly and magnificently, tried to respond.
He paused, looking at nothing in particular:
HESCHEL: The schools of the future are places where that reaching and that response can happen again, in every generation, across every boundary. That is the oldest work. It is the only work that finally matters.
BAECK: Precisely when it had to associate with old and new civilizations, whose dissolvent influences other religions had not been strong enough to resist, did Judaism remain most true to itself. What was true across the centuries is true now. The challenge is the same. The demand is the same. Whether we are strong enough — that is what each generation must discover for itself.
End of conversation
Editor’s Note
The three voices in this dialogue reflect their authentic intellectual commitments: Maimonides toward rational structure and the necessity of law as the vessel of Jewish survival; Baeck toward the ethical demand and the paradoxical vitality of minority status; Heschel toward prophetic urgency and the primacy of encounter. Their tension about Israel’s present situation gives the conversation its heat. Maimonides is the most resistant to prophetic critique of the state, which is historically accurate to his disposition toward political realism. Baeck and Heschel converge on the argument of “The Meaning of Sinai” — that the Sinaitic claim is universal in reach even if particular in origin, and that the Jewish vocation is to carry it across every civilizational boundary in every generation. Maimonides provides the necessary counterweight that makes the dialogue productive rather than a mutual congratulation.
This conversation was composed in dialogue with David Marshak’s essay “The Meaning of Sinai: And the Root of Human Violence” (Medium, May 2026), which provides its animating framework.
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