Q&A: Commandments Without Intention
Commandments Without Intention
Question
Hello Rabbi, there are several commandments such that even someone who performs them without intention, and sometimes even without knowing, has fulfilled them (charity, eating matzah on Passover night, etc.). My question is: is it possible that such a person would receive reward for that commandment? I’ll give an extreme example to illustrate the difficulty: a terrible person gets up in the morning and goes to work. On his way, he runs into a miserable poor man who asks him for charity. That person brushes the poor man off with contempt and even insults him. Further along the way, a 100-shekel bill falls out of his pocket, and the same poor man who asked him for charity finds the bill a few minutes later. Seemingly, that terrible person fulfilled the commandment of charity, but I think he is not deserving of its reward..
Answer
I don’t think there is any need to talk about a terrible person. Even with an ordinary person, I don’t see why he should receive reward for this. At most, perhaps one could offset against him the suffering of lacking the 100 shekels (that is, they gave him a bit of punishment / suffering, and it gets deducted from his account).
The Talmud says regarding one who gives charity on condition that his son live or that he merit the World to Come, that he has fulfilled the commandment. But fulfilling a commandment while merely being preoccupied with something else seems problematic to me. Even regarding transgressions they say that one who acts while preoccupied is considered as though he did not act, so to say that regarding commandments it is as though he did act is puzzling.
I don’t think there is fulfillment of a commandment in a case of mere preoccupation—neither in charity, nor in eating matzah, nor in anything else. The discussion is about someone acting under compulsion, or someone whom the Persians forced to eat matzah, but not about someone preoccupied who did not even know he was eating matzah. Admittedly, the Ran in the Rosh Hashanah passage there (regarding someone whom the Persians forced to eat matzah) brings in the reasoning of “since he derived benefit” (and if I remember correctly, the Maggid Mishneh brings it as well), which is a major novelty regarding positive commandments, but that is a very puzzling position.
In sum, in my humble opinion: neither fulfillment of a commandment nor reward.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know which approaches there are among the later authorities; I only know which approaches are logical. This isn’t one of them.
By the way, now on second look, I noticed that even Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah does not claim that the person from whose pocket money fell fulfilled the commandment of charity, but only that he “merited”:
Sifrei (Ki Tetze, section 283):
Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said: From where do we know that if someone loses a sela from his hand and a poor person finds it and supports himself with it, Scripture accounts it to him as though he merited? Therefore the verse says, “It shall be for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow.” Are these matters not an a fortiori inference? If one who did not intend to confer merit nevertheless merited, then one who intended to confer merit and did merit, all the more so.
It seems that this is considered a merit for him, not that he fulfilled a commandment. Maybe this can be explained in light of the well-known saying that merit is brought about through one who is meritorious.
Obviously. That is exactly what I was talking about. To the best of my knowledge, there is no source saying that there is fulfillment of a commandment in a case of mere preoccupation and without knowing that one fulfilled it.
A person who heard the shofar while preoccupied has fulfilled his obligation, no?
Simply speaking, no. If he does not know at all that he is hearing a shofar, then clearly he has not fulfilled it. But the later authorities have already noted that the definition of “preoccupied” is very difficult (the relation between it and lack of intention, which depends on the dispute over whether commandments require intention, and likewise in relation to inadvertence). See Maimonides, Laws of Shofar 2:4.
Perhaps one could say that a person who did a good deed without intention will receive reward for it based on the following consideration:
If I caused damage to someone else, I am obligated to compensate him even if I did so inadvertently, perhaps under the law of “property that causes damage”; just as I am liable for damage done by my property even though I did not do it myself, so too I become liable for my own damages done inadvertently.
And if that is so in monetary liability, why shouldn’t we say the same regarding reward?
There is no connection between the two. In the case of damage, there are two sides involved (this is civil law, not criminal law). If you do not obligate the damager, you obligate the injured party (who suffered a loss and was not compensated). Therefore the default is to obligate the damager even if he acted under compulsion (“a person is always forewarned”).
As for damage caused by your property, as is well known, the later authorities investigated whether this is because of negligence or whether the very fact of the damage obligates you. Your comparison works only with the first side, if at all. In Beit Yishai, volume 1, he makes your claim (that bodily damages done under compulsion, such as a sleeping person who caused damage with a stone in his lap, are like his property). But as stated, this should not be compared to reward for a commandment.
Since we’re already talking about reward for commandments, from where do you know that the Holy One, blessed be He, gives reward to those who do His will?
I have no idea. There is indeed talk in the Bible about reward, but it is hard to learn anything unequivocal from the Bible.
Does the Rabbi know whether there is literature that deals with the subject of reward from a philosophical perspective?
And if there is no philosophical literature on the subject, how can I investigate it? Where should I turn? What field of knowledge could help with this?
What’s wrong with the tradition in the Torah and the words of the prophets?
It doesn’t seem to me that there is any way to examine this philosophically. Either there is or there isn’t. These are questions of fact. I don’t know of a way to investigate it.
There is a nice article on this matter by our friend Avishai Grinzaig:
http://www.mgl.org.il/magal_article/%D7%94%D7%90%D7%9D-%D7%A6%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9A-%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%94-%D7%9C%D7%A9%D7%9E%D7%94-%D7%91%D7%9E%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%A6%D7%93%D7%A7%D7%94/
In his conclusion he writes:
Among the later authorities we find two approaches regarding the need for intention in the commandment of charity. Some wrote that the commandment of charity, like the other commandments, requires intention. But some of the later authorities wrote that the commandment of charity does not require intention, because in the end the poor person received his money and the giving of charity helped him.
Practically speaking, the primary view appears to be the first opinion. And an act that is not a clear-cut act of charity but does contain assistance and benefit for the poor person—if the giver intends it as the commandment of charity, the act will be considered actual charity for him; and the same applies if he intends both for the sake of the commandment and for his own personal benefit. But if he intends only for his own benefit, the act will not be considered charity for him, even if his action helped and assisted the poor person and provided him with all that he lacked.