Solving a Difficult Rambam: Shabat HaGadol 5769

This may be difficult for many of you out there, but I am about to describe a terrible time in our people’s history. It was a dark time, a time of great sadness, some would even say a time of great madness. I am of course referring to the stunning historical reality that there was a time when rabbis would only speak to their congregations twice a year! I know, I know. Settle down. Don’t get too emotional, but this was actually the case! That’s right rabbis only spoke in shul on two shabbatot, on Shabbat Shuvah, in between Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, and on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat immediately preceding Pesach. You see back then the rabbi was the posek, the legal decider for a community, and public preaching did not often sit high on the priority list. Well, I don’t know how we survived for so long as a people through those lean years, but somehow we managed to make it through the doldrums and make our way towards a more enlightened time.
So what did those great rabbis of a time gone by choose to speak about? I mean it had to be a really good one right? It had to be worthy of almost seven months of thought and contemplation. If you didn’t hit a home run, your congregation was likely to ask themselves, “just what does he do with all that time?”, and so these rabbis must have turned many a hair gray while they wrote their words of Torah.
But the fact is that for the most part, they all spoke about the same thing: they all chose to solve what is known as a “difficult rambam.” Rambam, of course, is Maimonides, the world-famous Jewish philosopher and legal expert whose influence can still be felt in the world of Halacha. So what, you might ask, is a difficult Rambam? Well you see, one the Rambam’s most famous works is called the Mishneh Torah. The Mishneh Torah, literally means ‘the second teaching of the Torah,’ which should tell you that the Rambam was not one to underestimate his own reach of influence. Throughout fourteen volumes he organized, codified and decided between legal voices scattered throughout the Mishnah and Talmud. Because the Mishneh Torah is comprised of fourteen volumes, it also acquired the nickname “The Yad HaHazaka” The strong hand, since the Hebrew letters that make up the word Yad is the equivalent of the number fourteen in gematria. But I digress. A difficult rambam you see is the rare case where you find, among the thousands of laws that he codified . . . a mistake. That’s right; at first glance it appears that even the greatest genius in our Jewish history sometimes made mistakes. But it is not always easy for us to admit the faults of our great heroes. And so it was the job of the great rabbi of the days of yore, through creative reasoning and by means of extensive Talmudic knowledge to unwrap the riddle of a mysterious Rambam.
Let me tell you a famous story that illustrates what I am talking about. There once was a famous rabbi in Lithuania who was renowned the world over for his skill and solving the most difficult of rambams. Each year on Shabbat Shuvah and Shabbat HaGadol, his congregants would gather with joy and anticipation to hear their great rabbi flex his mighty intellectual skills. He never disappointed. Through a clever reading of this text, or that Mishnah; or through a creative explanation of what the Rambam ‘really’ meant when he said this or that, their rabbi would always succeed in his quest to redeem the Rambam from a potential blot on his rabbinic resume. Finally after a lifetime of doing this, the great rabbi passed away. As soon as he made his way to Olam HaBa, he immediately sought out his hero. It did not take long for him to find the illustrious Rambam, and of course he wanted to try out one of his cleverest solutions on the genius himself. So he started to explain to him: if you read this sugya in the gemara in this way, and if you read this mishnah that way, and if you understand that you, the Rambam were actually saying this when you said that: well then, there is no conflict in your words at all! The Rambam looked puzzled. He smiled as he explained to his new friend, “Very clever, very clever indeed, so I hate to tell you this: but you must have a bad version of my Mishneh Torah. I never said that, it must be a scribal error.” The Rabbi from Lithuania frowned with great disappointment as he looked at his hero and said, “Rambam, that is not how you solve a difficult Rambam.”
And so this morning, it is with great humility that I will attempt to follow in the footsteps my rabbinic ancestors and try and solve a difficult rambam. The difficult rambam in question can be found in the second chapter of Hilchot Hametz and Matzah, a section concerning the Laws of cleaning for Passover. The Rambam first explains that it is a positive commandment from the Torah, a Mitzvat A’say M’D’oraita to remove all Hametz from your house, as it says in Exodus 12 verse 15: “On the very first day you shall remove all leaven from your houses.” But the Torah is reticent with regard to the preferred method of hametz removal. The rabbis of the Mishnah and the Talmud of course understood the concept of ‘removal’ to be synonymous with three acts: the searching for, the burning and the cancelling of all leaven in our possessions. In other words, first we clean our homes; looking for any last morsel of bread left behind. Then we are to literally burn those scraps which we do find during our Passover cleaning. And finally, we say a verbal formula which renders any hametz that is unknowingly left over in our possession null and void. This is the order, of things, open and shut case, good night.
But this is where we find a seemingly difficult rambam. In Halacha Bet of Chapter Two the Rambam writes: “And what is meant by the phrase “remove all leaven from your homes” that is stated in the Torah? The answer is that you must cancel it out in your heart, and it will be thought of as mere dust, and you must make certain in your heart that there is no hametz in your possession at all – and when you do this, when you cancel it out in your hears, all the hametz that is in your possession is though of as mere dust and ashes.”
Hmmm. A couple of interesting and somewhat startling revelations in this halacha of the Rambam’s. First off, the Rambam seems to make clear that the type of hametz removal that matters the most, is a sort of internal oath that we are to make between our hearts and God. Twice he uses the word “B’libo” ‘In his heart’, as opposed to describing the physical removal of hametz, or even the verbal oath we make today. Secondly, let me get this straight. Is the Rambam saying that we are all going a bit crazy with this pre-pesach cleaning ritual? Is he intimating that all we really have to do is close our eyes, concentrate and with full intention in our hearts cancel out all of the hametz that is in our possession? Is it that easy?
Well you can imagine that the great rabbis of old went to town on this. Many of them jumped to explain that the Rambam clearly meant “b’peh” ‘verbally’ when he said “b’libo,” ‘internally,’ because everyone knows that you have to say the famous formula out loud when you declare your hametz to be null and void. Others quickly jumped in to say that the Rambam meant to point out to us that even if we were to simply cancel out all the hametz in our possession, even without physically removing it from our homes, this indeed would be enough to make us immune from the prohibition of possessing hametz on Pesach. Finally, there are the modern scholars who chose to go the route of the Rambam himself in that humorous story I told you a minute ago. They point out that there is no conflict at all with what the Rambam says here because the Rambam never said it. In fact there is a version of the Mishneh Torah from a manuscript in Rome which reads as follows: “First you should physically remove all of the hametz that you are aware of in you home, and that which you are unaware of you may cancel out in your heart and it will be thought of as mere dust etc. etc. etc.” No problem at all, just a scribal error.
But I want to offer another possibility as radical as it may seem: that the Rambam meant exactly what he said: That for him, the priority of Passover cleaning was not the physical removal of hametz from your home, but rather the spiritual, metaphoric representation of this act. After all we know that it is impossible to remove all the hametz from our possession. There are the crumbs that slip between the cracks in the couch and end up pressed against the sofa bed. There are those tiny remnants of dog treats that your dog brought with him into the basement, and deposited behind the exercise bike. There is that one stale granola bar that is hidden in the unused pockets of your golf bag, or hidden behind the warranty in your glove box. We all know that it is futile. To physically remove every piece of leaven from our lives, and given that futility we are left to conclude, like the Rambam, that the most important thing we can do is to make a mental declaration that for these eight days our lives will be noticeably different.
Finally this morning, I wish to conclude with another perush, another explanation of this difficult Rambam. This one I do not pretend is the p’shat, the literal meaning of what the Rambam intended, but nonetheless I think it is worthy of our contemplation before Pesach begins. According to some Hasidic interpretations, the entire concept of hametz is meant to be a spiritual metaphor for the ‘shmutz’ we have in our lives. We are therefore enjoined each year to carefully search out the tiny imperfections in our spiritual selves, to take note of them and to try and eliminate them from our lives each Passover.
A famous Hasidic Rebbe, Rabbi Alan Flam of Providence, RI, (or as I like to call him, the Browner Rebbe) finds this spiritual metaphor for hametz extremely meaningful. He writes:
Cleaning can become a meditation, during which we are able to address the emotional crumbs of our lives. We can ask, “What is my attachment to this crumb? Can I let it go? Am I freer having this or letting it go?” As we search our homes for chametz, we can imagine some aspect of our lives or ourselves that no longer serves us and dispose of it.

Using this metaphor for hametz, we can use our Passover preperations as a spiritual check up for that soul searching we did here in shul some seven months ago on Yom Kippur.
If I am quick to anger or frustration; clean it up. If I take love for granted; clean it up. If I separate myself from my community: clean it up. If I have been avoiding God; clean it up. Armed with the metaphor of a candle and a feather, let us search our lives for those tiny crumbs of imperfection in order to make a cleaner, more holy life in the year to come. And this, this is the way you solve a difficult Rambam.