Developing Your Mind Body and Soul: An Exploration of Maimonides’s “The Eight Chapters” (Winter 2021)

A student of mine was upset because his grade-point average was not perfect. Don’t worry I told him, I’ve never heard someone’s grade-point average mentioned in a eulogy, your GPA is not your character. How does one attain virtue, character, and moral practice? Where in Jewish literature are these ideas worked out? The Eight Chapters of Maimonides. The Eight Chapters presents a pathway to character development, an ethics of virtue that creates a moral person. The Eight Chapters in incredibly accessible and these short chapters, one each week, will be our shared text.

Maimonides (aka HaRambam) wrote a commentary to Pirke Avot, the Sayings of the Ancestors, circled back, and wrote, in eight chapters, an eight-part introduction to his Commentary on Pirke Avot. These short chapters, one each week, emerge as the best introduction to Maimonides’ philosophy, maybe to all medieval Jewish philosophy. He presents a pathway to character development, not in conflict with Jewish practice, but in harmony with it, an ethics of virtue.