When the great rabbinic scholar, philosopher, and physician Moses Maimonides died in 1204, he was succeeded by his son Abraham as head of the Egyptian Jewish community. Abraham also continued his father’s legacy by authoring numerous works on theology, biblical exegesis, halakhah, and medicine in both Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. David Fried reviews a recent book about these two towering figures:

Anyone familiar with the writings of Abraham Maimonides knows that he frequently presents himself as the faithful heir to his father’s teachings. Scholars, though, have seldom taken this self-perception seriously. Conventional wisdom is that Moses Maimonides is the Aristotelian philosopher and his son the Sufi mystic. Only in the last several decades has the Maimonidean scholarship really begun to seriously look at the phenomenology of Moses Maimonides’ religious encounter, and perhaps even mystical inclinations, and not merely his philosophical content.

Diana Lobel is one of the scholars who takes this work seriously, and her new book, Moses and Abraham Maimonides: Encountering the Divine, offers us a far more nuanced comparison of Abraham and Moses Maimonides than we have previously seen. Lobel presents a valuable portrait of the interplay between [the elder] Maimonides’ philosophy and his inner religious life and spiritual practices. . . . Lobel is able to point out very real differences between [father and son] in both the spiritual and philosophical realms without resorting to facile tropes of saying that one is a philosopher and the other a mystic.

Perhaps the most significant distinction between father and son that Lobel points out relates not to philosophical doctrine but to the spiritual role of philosophy itself. For Moses Maimonides, the study of physics and metaphysics is a spiritual exercise. Meditating upon natural science is the path to love and fear God and an important rung on the ladder (if not the ultimate one) towards God’s inner court. Abraham more or less agrees with the content of his father’s science and philosophy, but does not see its study as a primary path to Divine encounter.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.