Ready Now – look, I understand that you don’t agree with reading certain kinds of literature, but that’s no reason to completely mangle a Rambam by taking it out of context. I assume that when you refer to him ‘despising works of the imagination’ you are referring to the statement in Shemona Perokim (1,4) where he is referring to the philosophical position of the Muttakalimun who held that, seeing as imagination cannot create anything new, anything that could be imagined must by definition exist. This is what the Rambam decries as “absurd” because, whilst it may be true that the imagination cannot create anything conceptually new it can take elements of what does exist conceptually and blend them into something which cannot exist in actuality, for example the concept of wings exists as does the concept of massive reptiles, the imagination can take these and create from them a dragon which, categorically,does not. It is this sort of PHILOSOPHICAL imagination, as opposed to reasoned philosophy, that the Rambam objected to. Nothing to do with imagination in artistry. And the Rambam read the works of Plato, which, if you’ve ever read them (and I doubt you have) are not simply philosophical works, but literature as well, they are stories (e.g. the tale of Atlantis). If the Rambam hated literature so much, I doubt he’d have done that. And by the way, your repeated assertions that reading secular literature can lead to ‘more aveiros’ (incidentally implying that the reading is in itself an aveiro, something I have spectacularly failed to find in any of the minyan hamitzvos…) bear no more water for your constant repetition of them. No matter how much you say it, it simply isn’t true. I suppose that R’ Avrohom Gurvitz SH’lita, Rosh Yeshivas Gateshead must be very surprised to learn of all the aveiros he’s done as a result of him having read Shakespeare, the collected works of which you can see on the very bottom of one of his bookshelves, just under the World Atlas. I’m not saying that he reads them all the time, or even that he has read them within the last 50 years, just that, at some point in his life, he did.
