ABSTRACT
Maimonides opens his great code of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah, with the following words: "The foundation of all foundations and pillar of all the sciences is to know that there exists a First Existent, that He gives existence to all that exists, and that all existent beings, from the heaven to the earth and what is between them, exist only due to the truth of His existence". Maimonides claims that Hebrew is holy because of one of its characteristics, a characteristic which could, in principle, be shared by other languages. Hebrew is a language like other languages, only more refined. In effect, for David Hartman's Maimonides, holiness is not something which inheres in people, places, or things, but is a consequence of halakhic categories—it is institutional, not ontological. Hartman shows that Maimonides' philosophical religious worldview sought to "translate the Jewish religion and way of life into universal categories of rationality and human psychology".
