Maimonides on Netanyahu

On August 5, 2025, Israel’s prime minister, Ben Netanyahu and his cabinet were considering conquering all of Gaza as cease-fire talks came to naught. According to the Associated Press, he “hinted at wider military action in devastated Gaza . . . even as former Israeli army and intelligence chiefs called for an end of to the nearly 22-month war.”[1] Roughly thirty years earlier, Netanyahu had admitted in an interview that Israel destroys countries (or peoples) it doesn’t like very slowly. The slow process of starvation amid Israeli troops and American mercenaries enjoying shooting Gazans at designated food-distribution sites through at least the summer of 2025 instantiates Netanyahu’s perhaps careless admission of cruelty befitting a man out for vengeance. Never mind the scriptural passage, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord; Netanyahu and his cabinet, and even the president of Israel felt entitled to take that task upon themselves, such that even just death would be too good for Palestinians, rather than having faith in their deity, whose vengeance would presumably be narrowly and properly directed to the Hamas attackers and kidnappers rather than to innocent people, including small children who could not possibly be considered to have been culpable two months shy of two years earlier in 2023. The religious depth of the betrayal of Yahweh by Netanyahu and his cabinet can be gleamed by recalling passages from Maimonides.

In The Eight Chapters, the medieval Jewish scholar writes, “If you consider most of the commandments in this way, you will find that all of them discipline the powers of the soul.”[2] Such disciplining is necessary for a person to keep the mean (i.e., feelings and actions that are fitting and proper, rather than too little or too much) and thus be virtuous in Aristotle’s sense of virtue. “For example,” Maimonides continues, “they [i.e., most of the commandments] eliminate revenge and vengeance by His saying: You shall not take revenge nor bear a grudge, You shall surely release it, and You shall surely help to lift them up, etc.; these aim at weakening the power of rage and irascibility.”[3] A person who ignores or dismisses these divine commands and violates them “does not know that he goes all the way to one extreme, completely leaving the mean,”[4] by which Maimonides means Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean as pertains to the moral virtues.

Given that the ongoing, gradual decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure and of the residents themselves by the Israeli government for more than a year and a half by the late summer of 2025, it is evident that the vice (i.e., extreme) of hateful vengeance had become a habituated pattern for those officials in charge of the Israeli government, and especially in the military. Allowing oneself to continue in a bad (i.e., not virtuous) habit is antipodal to Maimonides’ advice: “the perfect man needs to inspect his moral habits continually, weigh his actions, and reflect upon the state of his soul every single day. Whenever he sees his soul inclining toward one of the extremes, he should rush to cure it and not let the evil state become established by the repetition of a bad action.”[5] A person having intentionally or unwittingly developed such a sordid habit “should attend to the defective moral habit in himself and continually seek to cure it, for a [human being] inevitably has defects.”[6] Even though “Solomon said absolutely: There is no man who is just upon the earth, who does only good and does not sin,”[7] by no means does this justify going to the other extreme and remaining there, such that a habit of vice can establish deep groves in the road such that turning around becomes virtually impossible, given the human penchant for stubbornness and intractability.  For I submit that by the summer of 2025, Netanyahu and his cabinet officials had reached such a point that only external force could be capable of pushing those men back from the extreme in the sense of Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean.

Moreover, it is so easy for humans to will to stay the course in what is an immoral extreme that Yahweh issues divine commands concerning particular actions, such as to forbid daytime sex so to keep lust in moderation rather than going to an extreme. Maimonides views such laws as being oriented to Aristotle’s philosophy on virtue, and thus risks reducing theology to ethics. This risk may be worth it, given the stubborn presumptuousness of Netanyahu in the presumably righteous determination to exterminate a subjugated people in Israel’s Gaza territory in a habituated extreme case of vengeance. Nietzsche points out that positing Yahweh as both omnibenevolent and vengeful is self-contradictory and thus discredits that concept of God. Even given Netanyahu’s extreme vengeance as routinized as a genocide and even holocaust, the divine command not to be vengeful does not need the additional scriptural text, Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. To leave a vacuum without a credible concept of a deity puts too much weight on human subjectivity to fill the gap—hence Sartre claimed that human choices are so weighty and Husserl treated subjectivity as the only possible basis for a philosophy. In other words, that the Nazi Holocaust and the Gaza Holocaust have both followed the Age of Reason and Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead leaves us with the vital question of what is left upon which a moral and, moreover, existential philosophy can be built. In short, even without positing vengeance as pertaining to Yahweh, Maimonides’ reading of the Torah and the Talmud in line with Aristotle’s moral philosophy (without conflating the two or reducing one to the other) is enough to base the claim that Netanyahu and his cabinet members have become extremists both in terms of their religion and an established theory of virtue. It is upon this basis that the Gaza Holocaust rests.

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1. Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa, “Netanyahu Hints at Expanded War in Gaza but Former Israeli Military and Spy Chiefs Object,” The Associated Press, August 5, 2025.

2. Maimonides. Ethical Writings of Maimonides, ed. Raymond L. Weiss and Charles E. Butterworth (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1975), p. 72.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 73.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

On the Theology of the Eucharist: Beyond Historical Divisions

According to a survey led by a sociologist at Catholic University and published in The National Catholic Reporter, forty percent of 1,442 American Catholic adults said "you can be a good Catholic without believing that in Mass, the bread and wine really become the body and blood of Christ—a core doctrine of Catholicism.” A reporter opines that this “could reflect the decline in Mass attendance. The survey finds it’s fallen from 44% attending at least once a week in 1987 to 31% in 2011, while those who attend less than monthly rose from 26% to 47%. When asked why they don’t go to Mass more often, 40% say they are simply not very religious.”[1] What does it mean to say that someone is or is not religious? Looking back at the history of religion, a neutral party might half-joke that the adjective refers to the proclivity to spar over puerile theological distinctions as if Creation itself hung in the balance. In this essay, I illustrate how such a distinction bearing on the Eucharist (i.e., Holy Communion) can be diffused of its alleged historical significance as warranting Christian division under the taskmaster of (cognitive) uniformity as a placeholder for unity.

The Catholic doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist is called transubstantiation. It is the belief that the substance, or essence, of the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ. The term “substance” can be misleading. It does not refer to what we moderns understand as chemical or physical material or matter; rather, the notion of substance here is that of Aristotle, who distinguishes it from accidents, or the qualities/attributes of something. The accidents include something’s physical or chemical material as well as other qualities. The real presence in transubstantiation is the Aristotelian notion of “substance” (or essence) applied theologically rather than metaphysically. The body and blood having a real (theologically!) presence in the Eucharist are of Christ’s post-ascension, resurrected body.

Lest one object that Jesus resurrected asks for a fish and thus has a physical dimension, it is the post-ascension resurrected body and applied theologically. In other words, the real presence is real theologically. We tend to think of “real” metaphysically as in terms of reality, and this in turn in terms of real substance as matter. We have almost lost the ability to think in terms of theological essence. I contend that the theological essence from applying the Aristotelian notion of substance (or essence) theologically to the Eucharist as real presence is virtually the same as the Reformed spiritual presence. The Lutheran consubstantiation—that the Aristotelian substance or essence applied theologically is real presence coheres with the “substance” or essence of bread and wine remaining. My point is that all three views contain a spiritual (or “real” theologically) presence, in contrast to Zwingli’s view of communion as a symbol.

To grasp Aristotle’s notion of substance and how it may apply to theological concepts, consider the following analogy. For a person to say that the house (or apartment) he or she grew up in was his or her home is to say that the “substance” or essence of the house changed to, or included, being home. It makes no sense to say that the presence of home is a material substance even though home is really present as felt. Materially, the house may be made of wood and/or brick, but this is almost beside the point. At some point after a couple moves into a physical house, it becomes home. The “substance” or essence changes (or is added to)—the difference with respect to whether the essence changes or is added to doesn’t really matter if one’s focus is on home. So what it is also still a house? My point is that home has its own sort of real presence, and it doesn’t make any sense to speak of it in terms of other domains, such as materials science. This doesn’t mean that the presence of home is any less real. Anyone who has had one's house or apartment broken into and trashed knows that the "substance/essence" or real presence of home can be wiped out in a day. The difference between the house being one's home and being the house in which one lives is unmistakeable and thus the distinction is taken as real in a certain, non-metaphysical sense. So too, the presence of the body and blood of Christ is taken as real in a spiritual or religious sense.

I suspect that real presence and spiritual presence refer essentially to the same thing, given that Christ is present “bodily” in a distinctly religious or theological sense, rather than in a metaphysical or empirical sense. The bottom line may be that for a disciple of Jesus, home is really (i.e., religious sense) present at the table. In other words, the essence is that of being home, just as Jesus feels at home going alone to pray on a mountain. Being a child of God is to be home where God is felt to be. Religious, or transcendent, experience is really present for such a person. Ultimately, I think the real presence at the Eucharist is precisely such an experience. In it, the Kingdom of God within is experienced as truly present. One is part of the body of Christ. In other words, the body that is ingested is distinctly (and delimited as) theological in nature, and thus spiritually present—and no less real (in a religious rather than metaphysical sense). Ultimately, home is felt as really present as a matter of the heart, rather than being a place or material substance that could be bottled.

If I am on the right track in tracing the distinctly spiritual real presence of the body of Christ to its roots in a distinctly religious experience, then at least some of the arguments or fighting between the Reformed, Catholic and Lutheran sects historically was based on  mere misunderstandings. Take, as another example, the doctrine of justification by faith (solo fides). The Catholic position does not deny this, or interlard works or the efficacy of the sacraments as additional requirements for justification. Rather, taking communion is part of the process of sanctification, which follows justification.

Also, the Catholic position does not maintain that the sacrifice of the Mass substitutes for Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, as one Reformed historical document claims. Indeed, Catholic priests say that their ordination enables them to share in Christ’s sacrifice, rather than substitute for it. After centuries of misunderstanding rolling over the division from generation to generation without any thought or reflection, perhaps we can finally step back and marvel: So much for the vanity that presumes human disagreements to have any real significance!

Perhaps most unfortunate of all, the sheer intransigence of apparent historical differences can block perceptual opportunities. For example, given their doctrine of spiritual presence, which at the very least is a presence in a religious sense, Reformed churches could conceivably have provide the spiritual presence of Christ in chapels to be adored under the specie of consecrated bread. The assumed spiritual presence could serve as an anchor making possible a sustained presence of intense religious or transcendent experience isolated as though a precipitate of ongoing practice. Out of such practice naturally comes a distinctly spiritual sensitivity, which in relation to other people we feel as compassion. In the context of such a religious core, theological disagreement itself is naturally relegated or sidelined as extraneous just as one does not pay so much attention to the materials of one’s house if it is also one’s home.

Who would willingly go from the warmth of a hearth into a cold room unless to pick a fight? And what does it matter anyway what the fight is about to the persons staying near the hearth? I suspect that the Catholics who view themselves as “not very religious” have simply not been shown to the hearth, even in Church; to them, it is a cold room guarded by too many control-freaks (who themselves know not the hearth). Who could blame people for resisting the cold—yet if they are given a taste of warmth would they want it? I think this depends on the person. Perhaps a church is in essence (or ought to be in practice) delimited by experiencing a distinctive warmth.

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1. Cathy L. Grossman, “Survey: U.S. Catholics’ Religious Identity Slips,” USA Today, October 25, 2011. 

Pope Francis on Youth Unemployment, War, and the Idolatry of Money

It is not often that the global economy’s military-industrial complex is tied to youth unemployment and, moreover, to the idolatry of money. Yet this is precisely the thread woven by the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church. While the pope’s comments risk a certain overreach from the theological to the terrain of international political economy, which proffers its own body of knowledge, it can also be said that having a transcendent referent as one’s focus enables a person to make subtle taken-for-granted assumptions in our economic, social, and political systems transparent. In articulating an economic (and related political) center and giving it a distinctly theological interpretation stemming from the Biblical passage, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,”[1] the Roman pope provides the world with a way to do political economy from a distinctly religious vantage-point.

“At the center of all economic systems must be man, man and woman,” the pope asserts; “everything else must be in service to this man.[2] In itself, this claim is not religious in nature. Rather, the tone is philosophical, reminiscent perhaps of Kant’s “kingdom of ends” in which morality means respecting rational beings as objective ends in themselves, rather than only using them as means. For Kant, a lack of goodwill, due to pathology, lies behind the lack of adequate respect that would otherwise put people first—hence the need for public legal justice. This is not to say that Kant secularizes the matter completely; any rational creature is an end in itself “by virtue of the autonomy of his freedom he is the subject of the moral law, which is holy.”[3]  Using reason, the rational being is an assigner of value; such a being thus has absolute value (hence deserving to be treated as an end in itself, rather than merely a means to someone else’s agenda). Now a rational being is uniquely free to subject himself to his own law, which, given the necessity that lies in reason itself, binds him.  “The moral law is holy (inviolable),” Kant writes; “the humanity in his person must be holy to him.”[4] For Kant, the humanity is the rational nature, which makes the moral law sacred because reason cannot be bent out of sheer caprice. Put another way, rational beings have absolute value in that we use reason to hold ourselves as if by necessity (though freely) to that which we assign value to.

Pope Francis can be read as substituting love for reason—that men and women are made out of love, and thus inherently to be loved rather than used as mere means. Here we can discern glimpses of Leibniz’s claim that human beings are due love as a matter of justice as per the extent of being or existence that we have, and Augustine’s emphasis on caritas, or human love that can be sublimated to love of God.

Whereas Kant points to pathological self-love as thwarting the respect due beings of love, Pope Francis argues in terms similar to Aquina’s misordered concupiscence—placing a lower good above a higher one. “(W)e have put money at the center, the god of money,” the pope claims. “We have fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money.”[5] Where your treasure is, there may be found your heart. In this case, money, which Aristotle calls barren metal, has come to be loved rather than other people, not to mention God, which as Augustine stresses, is love itself. The basic problem, in other words, is warped priorities.

Not surprisingly, greed is not far away, lying behind money as a god at the center of all. “The economy is moved by the ambition of having more.”[6] That ambition is an end in itself, so no amount of money is ever enough. Interestingly, we can distinguish ever-lasting here from the eternal; whereas love cuts through time in having value, greed is of infinite, or unlimited, desire. Value that cuts through time, such as holds with love, gets expunged by the all-consuming god of money. Put in Kantian terms, people are treated as mere means rather than also as ends in themselves.

It is no wonder that the young and old are tossed to the wayside because of their relatively low utility. Regarding youth unemployment, the pope had this to say. “(W)e are discarding an entire generation to maintain an economic system that can’t hold up anymore, a system that to survive must make war, as the great empires have always done.”[7] The system, being designed to funnel money, must be protected, and it is no accident that the people-as-means, or human resources, attribute so easily translates into an economy of war. Rather than being at the center, the human being is reduced to collateral damage, or targeted outright.

Because “a Third World War can’t be done, they make [regional] wars,” the pope explains.[8] This involves the production and sale of weapons, which sorts out “the balance sheets of the idolatrous economies, the great world economies that sacrifice man at the feet of the idol of money.”[9] Here the pope explicitly relates making money an idol of inviolable worth and sacrificing people as if they are worthless. Barren metal, in other words, is put over beings capable of holding themselves to a moral law and of loving themselves and others—even those who would sacrifice them on an altar of gold. Not unexpectedly, an international political economy oriented to sustaining an arms trade divides economies—even sorting them reductively along the lines of weapons production and consumption. The United States is a “superpower,” whereas Africa has value only in as much as it has the wherewithal to purchase weapons and sustain its intestine squabbles.

Once held up as a coming cacophony of diversity “like a polyhedron, all united but each preserving its particularity, its wealth, its identity,” globalization has become impoverished, “a sphere in which all points are equidistant from the center” whose sheer gravity “takes away the wealth of diversity of thought and therefore the wealth of a dialogue between peoples.”[10] That is to say, the reductionistic, weapons-oriented organizing principle of the global military-industrial complex saps globalization of its many differences, essentially nullifying this sort of wealth in favor of a more banal form in which the dark hole of a bank vault functions as a god with a suffocating embrace.

Beware the military industrial complex. U.S. President Eisenhower delivered this starkly public warning as he embraced some free speech in his farewell address in 1960. It is dangerous to have so much financial and related political interest lined up on the side of war. This is hardly unknown, yet we tolerate it because the interests of capital have beguiled us into supposing that they have labor’s back. In other words, we have been made to fear the onslaught of mass unemployment that would ensue from a structural realignment off the weapons trade. 

In his interview in 2014, Pope Francis takes a more subtler look at what is really at stake. Whereas historically religion and then morality operated as viable constraints on the profit motive, the god of money seems to have a relatively free hand as of the early twenty-first century at least; correspondingly, people are secondary, and thus expendable, in the system designed and inhabited by the same. Money has come to be regarded as an absolute, with the worth of persons being defined exclusively according to its measure. Put another way, the unit of measurement has become an end in itself—inviolable, and thus an idol—while the measurers—the assigners of value—have come to accept their place as mere means, or human resources. 

Living in the “system”— an artifice entirely changeable even in its basic contours—many people just assume that the constantly-felt subterranean, subtly existential instability or uncertainty is a necessary part of life. Life means being expendable. Life means that money rules. From a transcendental referent point, a spiritual person can see the world differently—atypically—and thus make transparent our systems’ basic premises. Once recognized, they can be changed; the changers can take back their innate power to set the priorities for the systems, whether they are social, economic, or political in nature, and to see to it that the designs are in sync with those priorities. Where our treasures are, there too are our gods.

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[1] Luke 12:34; Matthew 6:21. Not being in Mark, the source is likely the book of Q (which stands for Quelle, or “source” in German), a book of Jesus sayings hypothesized to have been a source used by the writers of Luke and Matthew.

[2] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[3] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788)

[4] Ibid.

[5] “Full Text of Pope Francis’ Interview with ‘La Vanguardia,” Patheos, June 13, 2014.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.