Sheltering With Maimonides

I came to Israel to visit my daughter and friends with a project that I hope to implement, a podcast of interviews with rabbis. Part of the fun was to go visit my interview subjects in their homes and record our conversations in person. But fate took a turn, and I have found myself in a country at war with its most intractable enemy. So I visit my daughter every day, and return to my Airbnb, where I conduct those interviews on Zoom, and await the next round of missiles and bombs.

By now I’ve made my way to the shelters six times. The first was a public shelter attached to a parking garage near my daughter Tali’s apartment. It was hot, crowded with people and dogs. (Tel Aviv is very dog friendly.) The other five visits were to the shelter in the building where I’m staying.

When the IDF detects incoming missiles or rockets, the entire country receives a loud, jarring alert on their phones. You get a few minutes to reach a shelter. Tali says the alarm sounds like the beginning of the Mission Impossible theme. The shelter in my building is a decent-sized room, sealed with a very heavy door, though in the times I’ve used it, that door has never been fully closed. On my last visit, someone actually locked it too soon. There were still people trying to enter.

Most visits have been brief. The longest was that first time in the public shelter. The rest have lasted under fifteen minutes.

People talk. They sit around and gab. A few visits ago, I opened the Kindle app on my phone and started reading the new translation of Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. More precisely, I am working through the introductory materials. I mention this because something in that reading struck me. It echoed the moment I was in. Bear with me.

Maimonides was born in 1138 in Córdoba, when Andalusia was still under Muslim rule. Right before his birth, a fundamentalist group known as the Almohads rose to power. It was likely this that compelled Maimonides’ family into a wandering life, Spain to Morocco, then to Palestine, and finally to Egypt. Biographies of Maimonides often note the irony that the family fled Palestine (as it was called in the 12th century) to settle in Egypt.

The Guide, written in Judeo-Arabic, is considered the greatest work of Jewish philosophy. It gathers and reframes centuries of thought—Greek, Arab, and Jewish—through a distinctive lens. It distills these traditions into something new. Later religious philosophy, especially in the Christian world, is unthinkable without this book.

I bring this up because, as I sat there in the shelter reading Maimonides on my phone, I found myself reflecting on how Israel, now under attack from Iran, represents the resolution of two very old Jewish concerns.

First, Maimonides and his family, like so many Jews across two thousand years, had to flee persecution. The fact that they found a congenial home in Fostat, Egypt (or earlier in Spain before the Almohads) was as real as it was precarious. Jewish history teaches: a safe home today does not mean a safe home tomorrow. Zionism, in my view, has never been only, or even mainly, about securing a safe home for Jews. But building a home has always been a necessary part of it.

Second, just as Maimonides gathered ideas from across civilizations and traditions and forged something lasting, so too has Zionism aspired to take the best of Western and Jewish thought and refashion it into new concepts, ideas and institutions that serve both Israeli society and the world.

Hopefully, though I doubt it, I won’t need to return to the shelter again. But if the Mission Impossible theme sounds, I know I’ll have a good companion on my phone to keep me company until the all-clear sounds.