Thank you.
I read the article you attached, and I agree with almost every word in it.
But there’s a paradox here (or an apparent paradox): according to halakhic Judaism, which is the authentic Judaism even in my very secular eyes, a person like me is a Jew in every respect. I assume you agree with that.

Now for a secular person—at least a secular person like me, who isn’t afraid of being “less” Jewish in his way of life and beliefs than “halakhic” Jews—the question still remains about the realization of his thinned-out Judaism. How important is that to him, if at all?
To be sure, I assume your answer, in the name of rational and consistent discourse, would be that you can’t help me “save” my Judaism if I chose to believe and live as I do. If that is your answer, I accept it.
But I’m simply asking myself whether there is something in your fundamental philosophical outlook (and not the specific view about the nature of authentic Judaism) that could help me formulate a position in light of the “secular” place I’m in.

Since you wrote that you agree with what I wrote in the article, I’ll allow myself, with your permission, to be direct, and I hope—I get the impression and assume—that you’ll take what I say as substantive arguments and not, Heaven forbid, as an attempt to offend.

As a secular person you are certainly Jewish, but only on the ethnic plane. That is a neutral fact devoid of meaning. Exactly the way a Belgian is Belgian and a Filipino is Filipino. A fact is not a value, and anyone who sees it as a value is mistaken. I, as someone committed to Jewish law, do see significance in that fact, because I have obligations toward you and in my view you have halakhic obligations to fulfill as a Jew. But from your standpoint as a secular person, it is just a neutral psychological fact without meaning. If you nevertheless do see meaning in it, search carefully, because in my opinion there’s a pretty good chance that you are an unconscious religious believer.
It’s not only that I can’t help you save your Judaism; in my opinion there is no such thing as “your Judaism.” In short, there is nothing there to save, apart from the neutral fact of your being ethnically Jewish, which is a true and simple (and neutral) fact even without your saving it.
By the way, Reform and the other renewal movements (including Zionism) are failed attempts to deal with the problem you are presenting (defining Judaism without religion. That’s why they all get so offended when they’re asked in what sense they are Jewish, or that they’ve forgotten how to be Jewish, and all the rest of those polemics). In my opinion this is a psychological problem, not a philosophical-value problem. People who have this ethnic identity are in psychological distress because they want to turn the fact into a value, and they don’t see how that can be done. Well, the truth is that it can’t be done. The only question is why to be distressed about it. Take a pill and get over the sense of lack, or else really examine whether there may, Heaven save us, be some implicit faith in your heart after all (see “the little clerical,” at the end).

As usual, your words are sensible.
There is a practical layer to my reply, and it is the main one, but it’s also very boring: I’m comfortable in the inauthentic place (from a Jewish standpoint) where I am. Literally.
You may not think highly of me because of that, but I can’t deny that it is an existential fact for me. I have no desire to become Orthodox. That will probably never change. Besides, there are plenty of “light” religious people or traditionalists who believe (like you and me) that Torah Judaism is the truth and still desecrate the Sabbath, eat non-kosher food, etc.
From that perspective my situation is like theirs, and it’s not all that terrible, not for them and not for me. I’m definitely not offended when people tell me that my Judaism is thinned out, unlike many good people in the camp I come from. What bothers me more is the distortion of truth and the damage to the rationality of that “tribe” which so badly wants validation for its Judaism, but gets stuck in conflict when standing מול the Orthodox “enemy,” and so has to fabricate for itself that the authentic core Judaism is דווקא its own. Those guys love appealing to the “morality of the prophets,” to the “creativity of the Sages,” and to all kinds of psychological defense mechanisms that will differentiate them from the “enemy” while still preserving their “Judaism.”
(So that there won’t be any misunderstanding: like everyone else, I need validation and reinforcement for my identity, including my “Jewish” one; but for me this identity is not the central thing—as it seems to me it is central for most of “my tribe”—and therefore it bothers me less that reality nibbles away at it a bit.)

The more interesting layer, and the one relevant to your question, is the theoretical one.
Here I’ll answer you that I certainly do have faith in God, and even an “inclination” toward Torah and Judaism.
Since, in the name of rationality, I reject all non-Torah interpretations of Judaism, I am definitely in the seemingly awkward position where I have to agree with the various Orthodox people, like you for example. In such a case I seemingly have to accept the claim that authentic Judaism must lead to a life of Torah and commandments.
But…
My claim is—and I tried, in my clumsy and very unsuccessful way, to express it in the correspondence with you about the witness argument—that there are deeper religious reasons than what Judaism offers us, as I in my smallness understand it.
Judaism is not dualistic enough for my taste (it is “actualistic”). In its implicit essence (the centrality of the Torah as a medium between God and man), there is not enough room for faith. Too much mediation.
Of course it’s possible that I am completely mistaken on this point.
Therefore, although I allow myself to drink from this spring only sparingly, my ethnic Judaism is still very strong, and it pushes me to keep drinking. Just not too much…

Hope this time I was clear.

Just as Jewish law and the world do not leave the choice of Jewish identity in the hands of the secular Jew, but inform him with complete necessity that he is Jewish, so too the secular Jew decides that he is Jewish without needing to justify it by some implicit faith in God or the like. And it is clear to everyone that Jewish ethnic identity is not similar to Belgian or French ethnic identity. No one sent the Belgians or the French to the crematoria (that is not a reason for the uniqueness of Jewish identity, but a sign of the uniqueness of Jewish identity), and therefore the secular Jew cannot escape his identity. At most he can combine it with the identity of other Jews, believers or nonbelievers. And the claim that the secular Jew is a hidden believer is, begging your pardon, a bit inconsistent with other things the Rabbi has written.

Subtle historians will say that the Jews are a corporation that lost its way. That is, an estate with an independent legal system which, like the nobility and the church, lost its privileges in the Enlightenment. Corporations (or estates) are a pre-modern social structure that was dismantled by modern political philosophy. And since the Rabbi has decided to adopt modern assumptions, it’s no wonder the Rabbi can’t find his way through the thicket. Zionism, by the way, in inheriting the Ottoman millet structure, preserves the corporate structure through the Chief Rabbinate. And as long as secular people are faithful to tradition, they are faithful to their Jewish identity. The question of belief is a separate question and is unrelated (a matter of stating a fact, not of value).

To be an authentic Jew is to be connected to this historical corporation, out of an understanding that you probably do not want to flee from it.

I expanded on corporation and the Jews here:

האם ישנם יהודים-ערביים?

Doron, hello.
What you are describing is basically a situation of belief in God that is connected to the commandments, except that the commandments do not fulfill you and you are missing deeper spiritual content. It seems to me that this is not a reason not to observe commandments, but rather to seek a meaning in the commandments that will fulfill you. By the way, all the deeper meanings you can think of, even if they are not connected to Judaism (and in my view Judaism is only Jewish law anyway; thought and facts are by definition universal), also do not contradict it. So you can live both of these planes together.
Let me clarify that I am not trying here to seize an opportunity to bring you to repentance—though not that I have a problem with that. I am happy about every Jew who repents and fulfills his obligations—but genuinely to respond to the need you expressed.
Bottom line, I still don’t completely understand what you are looking for. Is it an answer to a psychological need, or do you really see value in being Jewish (that is, it’s not just a neutral fact from your standpoint)? And if it is a value, why?

And to Y.D., it does not contradict anything I have ever written.

First, Judaism is certainly also a value for me. That is a factual statement about me. (It does describe a psychological fact, but it is still a fact.) It may be that I don’t understand—like most other secular people—why it is a value. If that is the case, let someone come and set me straight. In any case, for many long years I have been trying to answer this for myself, even if someone were to claim that my answers are invalid…
That is, beyond a psychological need to “hold on to” my Judaism, I want to compliment myself and claim that what moves me is also an idea. There is rationality and there are reasons behind the psychological inclination.
I like to toy with the thought that my rationale for seeing Judaism as a value is actually connected to the extreme dualistic mode of thought from the school of Pauline Christianity.
Extreme dualism (which in my eyes is consistent, and therefore rational, dualism) must open as large a gap as possible between God on the one hand and the world and man on the other, but at the same time it must also show how, by means of the “miracle”
(intellectual intuition, existential leap of faith, etc.), we can bridge that gap.
So for me stage one is to seek the required gap. I find it in the Christian model, at least as I in my smallness understand it. (Notice that right now I’m speaking in generalizations and putting the diverse phenomenon of Christianity into one basket. If you were a postmodernist, you would never forgive me for that…)
Stage two requires me to “return home”: to return to the earthly, practical, psychological world in which I am rooted. In this context that is the world of what you call “ethnic Judaism.”
My choice of the supposedly heavenly Christian model (in practice I am not a Christian at all, of course) is supposed to serve as the infrastructure for the second and “earthly” layer of values to which I turn—the layer of Judaism.
You could sum it up by saying that, both philosophically and existentially, I am looking for a synthesis between the Christian and Jewish models (out of the thought that the Christian one must logically be on the foundational level). Choosing only one of the models would not satisfy me, either philosophically or emotionally.

Practically speaking: it would be easier for me to connect (philosophically and emotionally) to the desired synthesis and to the commandments it would demand of me—and this relates to your question to me.

Perhaps my words will seem unintelligible to you or simply nonsensical. In any case, this has been my consistent position for many years, and I keep trying to clarify it to myself and ground it rationally, to the best of my limited ability.

Indeed, I don’t understand it. There is only a psychological need here, and nothing more, which you insist on seeing as a value without having any reason whatsoever to assume that. A person can of course claim that he sees value in eating whipped-cream cake or living on 374A Hyacinth Street in New Zealand. I would call that a psychological need (and sometimes a fixation).
By the way, the claim “Judaism is a value for me” is not a psychological fact but a philosophical one. If it is a psychological fact, then we are not talking about a value but about a drive or a need.

You may be right when you say that this is a psychological need or fixation. As I said, on the practical and “boring” level that isn’t all that important. I act, I think like most (or all) human beings, to a large extent from practical considerations.
But on the theoretical-philosophical level—the interesting level—I don’t think you are right.
Maybe the following example will support my claim that Judaism is also a value for me.

Think of a believing Christian. Would you agree with me that for him Judaism, insofar as it is the Old Covenant between God and man, is a value and not a need? After all, by definition the Christian relies in his faith on the importance and necessity of that belief. The Old Covenant (not the book, the reality) is like a “springboard” for the “next generation,” which in his eyes is religiously upgraded.

For present purposes I think there is something in me in common with that Christian. Like him (and in fact like many fine Jews, probably even you yourself), I aspire to “improve” historical Judaism.

Why is that not a value?

And one more tiny thing. I’m not sure I understood your position regarding the status of “thinned-out Jews” like me. Does the principled Orthodox position (which may perhaps be only implicit) say that people like me are only “half” Jews? “Two-thirds”? Not Jews at all?
I’m not asking in order to provoke, but because I think that from its own standpoint Orthodoxy has a very great challenge here. After all, it explicitly insists on “Judaizing” us and thinking of us as brothers, but at the same time this inclusive approach may weaken the club’s rules from within.

This is a confusion between different planes. Halakhically you are a full Jew. Culturally, not at all. There is a difference between a Jew and Judaism. Judaism is a worldview or a cultural-normative framework, and a Jew is an ethnic nationality.

You gave me food for thought regarding Judaism’s relation to those Jews whose Judaism is thinned out. But I’m not sure that answers my question. The reason is this: from what you say, it emerges that precisely in the part most important to Judaism (the halakhic part), even a secular person like me has received a stamp of approval. In that case there is no difference, in this respect, between me and the righteous foundations of the world who fulfill all 613 commandments.
Is authentic Judaism (Orthodoxy) comfortable with such a position? Does it not thereby lead to its own emptying of all content? From this point of view, can one criticize me at all for the fact that my Judaism (or my conception of Judaism) is flawed?

Perhaps you will answer me like this: the Orthodox determination that the secular person is a “kosher” Jew exactly like the religious Jew is not itself a normative determination. It is only a fact or an “objective” criterion of Judaism for distinguishing between who is inside the club and who is outside it.
If that is your answer, in my opinion it is not enough. There is a critical evaluative (normative) significance in Orthodoxy’s very reliance on this fact.

But the first part of my question is even more important to me: why do you think the question of my Judaism—whatever its status may be—does not go beyond the psychological sphere?

I’m not sure it’s your fault, but your wording (Doron) is very cumbersome and difficult (not only here). In your claims about the problems with the witness argument I understood nothing even after a huge effort, but here the matter is much simpler:
There is no connection here to the Orthodox position (the authentic blah-blah-blah one), etc. Rather, the Rabbi is simply claiming that the only way to define Jewish *culture/identity* is through observance of Jewish law. There is no connection between that and normative determinations that Orthodoxy will accept or be comfortable with, etc.

Besides, of course you are Jewish according to Jewish law because your mother is Jewish (or because you converted). Everyone agrees on that. The Rabbi’s novelty is that if we want to define Judaism (not “who is a Jew” but what Judaism is), the only way is by the criterion of observing Jewish law.

I’m actually quite sure it is my fault… the responsibility for my cumbersome formulations is mine alone. Still, maybe it will comfort you to know that I have much greater faults.

There are still 2 questions that I haven’t managed to understand Michi’s answer to: 1) why can’t a secular person take an interest in his Judaism from a philosophical-value perspective? (According to Michi, if I understood him correctly, a secular person with integrity should say that his Judaism is not important to him, and therefore his engagement with it is motivated only by a psychological need.) 2) doesn’t halakhic Judaism fall into contradiction when, on the one hand, it sees commandment violators as Jews in every respect, and on the other hand it (or people speaking in its name) claims that secular people have “forgotten what it means to be a Jew”?

(This is an answer to the second question.)
A. He is not making his claims in the name of halakhic Judaism or in the name of anyone else, but in his own name and in the name of truth.
B. Even if halakhic Judaism were making that claim, there is no contradiction in it: you are indeed a Jew, but your behavior, if we can call it that, is not Jewish.

The secular Jew is not a kosher Jew, but a completely non-kosher Jew. What I wrote was that he is a Jew (not that he is a kosher Jew). He is obligated in commandments and was among those who were commanded in them. Exactly like a thoroughly wicked person is a human being, but not a kosher human being. He is obligated by moral commands but does not observe them.
When a secular person says that Judaism is a value for him, that is like my saying that being 1.83 meters tall is a value for me. We are talking about an (ethnic) fact, so what does that have to do with values?! Especially when you yourself define nothing beyond ethnicity as Judaism, meaning you do not add any value dimension to it. So you have left it as a fact, and a fact is neutral by definition.

Sorry, something doesn’t add up for me. My feeling is that there is tension (maybe even an outright contradiction) within halakhic Judaism in its insistence on spreading its wing even over non-kosher Jews like me.

Michi, the analogy you brought (wicked person versus person = non-kosher Jew versus Judaism) doesn’t seem relevant to me.
The connection between the noun “person” and one of its possible modes of expression (“wicked,” “good,” “diligent,” etc.) does not seem all that necessary. So-and-so can be wicked, or good, or diligent, or all together (or even none of them).

By contrast, the connection between the noun “Judaism” and “Jew” seems necessary to me.
I simply can’t accept (unless you convince me otherwise) that Judaism would relate to its judgments—in this case the halakhic judgments—about the question of who is a Jew only on the factual plane. As I understand it, its insistence on saying that I too am a Jew is actually a claim that has (also, and mainly) normative significance.
It is important to the Jewish norm to keep me inside.
Why?

I really can’t understand what is unclear here. From the perspective of Jewish law, anyone born to a Jewish mother is a Jew. Does that mean that if he does not observe commandments he is okay (a kosher Jew)? Absolutely not. Exactly as anyone born to a mother is a human being. Does that mean that if he is not moral he is still a kosher human being? Absolutely not.
Judaism is the way a Jew is supposed to behave. And likewise morality is the way a person is supposed to behave. One who does not behave that way is a Jew (and a human), but that is only a statement about himself (what he is), not about his culture/behavior. A secular Jew is Jewish in the halakhic ethnic definition, but he does not behave in a Jewish way. He is a Jew, but his way is not Judaism. In terms of his behavior and way of life, he is a complete gentile.
It’s not all that complicated, and I truly cannot understand where the difficulty is.

The secular Jew is my partner on the road. He may not believe (I don’t know whether that is Doron’s case), but even when he does not believe he is still a partner. One for all and all for one (the Three Musketeers and all that). And that partnership is full and complete. Religious people marry secular spouses and vice versa, and there is nothing flawed about that (as there is in a mixed marriage with gentiles, Heaven forbid).

There are Jews who, in the Jewish way, are in a rush for the messianic age and the brotherhood of nations, and they are always full of wonder as to why the nations do not accept us. The religious among them see this as a technical halakhic matter. We were supposed to marry, but Jewish law forbids it. The messianic age is still not here, and therefore most Jews are not in a hurry to assimilate. Rather, they go together wherever the road won’t take them.

Gentlemen scholars,
I understand from your words that Judaism’s insistence on seeing a secular person as a Jew in every respect is basically just the noting of a neutral fact. That doesn’t make sense to me. Where on earth did this Jew “get” his “Judaism” from if he does not meet the halakhic bar required of him?
I give up my (Jewish) hands.

From his mother.

Exactly as an Arab who chooses to observe Jewish law is not Jewish, so too a Jew who does not observe Jewish law remains Jewish. Why? Because he belongs to the Jewish people, and therefore he is expected to observe Judaism (= Jewish law). If a secular person were not considered Jewish (as you think should be the case), he would be exactly like any other gentile, and we could not expect him at all to observe Jewish law. Precisely because he is Jewish (ethnically), he is expected to observe Judaism. He “received” his Judaism the moment he was born, and observance of Jewish law is the “Judaism.” These are two completely different things with the same name.

(By the way, it’s not accurate that according to Jewish law he is a Jew in every respect. Sometimes he is treated like a gentile [depending on the issue and on what “type” of secular person he is].)

Although according to Rabbi Michi, if he does not believe in a commanding God, then there is no point expecting him to observe commandments either (it would be monkey-like behavior):
https://mikyab.net/%d7%9e%d7%90%d7%9e%d7%a8%d7%99%d7%9d/%d7%91%d7%a2%d7%a0%d7%99%d7%99%d7%9f-%d7%94%d7%9b%d7%a9%d7%9c%d7%aa-%d7%97%d7%99%d7%9c%d7%95%d7%a0%d7%99-%d7%91%d7%a2%d7%91%d7%99%d7%a8%d7%94/

So first one has to convince him that there is a commanding God (the trilogy), and only afterward expect him to observe commandments.

The claim that a Jew “gets” his Judaism from his mother seems to me to lead to tautology… It’s like saying that a table gets its tableness from the fact that it was decided that it is a table. If I decide to call a chair a “table,” it will still remain a chair.
And as for the mother test… from whom did she get her Judaism? From her mother, who got it from her mother, and so on… it seems to me there is a regress here. In any case, in the end this is not a normative claim but a neutral factual one.

The problem is that if this is a factual-neutral claim, it does not fit with Judaism’s most basic definition: Judaism is first and foremost a normative system that comes to instruct and educate man, not a system for transmitting facts.

The halakhic definition of a Jew is someone whose mother is Jewish (and also her mother, and her mother, and her mother, etc., back to conversion or, I think, being present at Mount Sinai). The table example is irrelevant, and there is no tautology or regress here.

Indeed, Judaism is a normative system—but a Jew is not one who observes Judaism, for the simple reason that Judaism does not obligate or seek to obligate gentiles, and a gentile who observes Jewish law as a Jew is not Jewish. A Jew is someone whose mother is Jewish, and he is obligated to observe Judaism (Jewish law).
“Jew” and “Judaism” (in the sense of Jewish culture, not ethnic-genetic Jewishness) are different things. A Jew is obligated to Judaism, but it is not what defines him. Just as a person is obligated to morality, but even if he is not moral he remains a person, and you do not ask from whom he “received” his humanity.

My dear friends, in my opinion the position that you attribute (justly!) to Judaism can be formulated in “analytic” terms (in Michi’s language):

Judaism identifies a neutral fact (a person is born to a Jewish mother) that exists on the empirical plane, and from that point it jumps to the evaluative and perhaps even metaphysical plane when it derives from this fact a unique “quality” that it bestows on the newborn. The newborn is “Jewish” in its view, meaning that he is fated against his will to receive an evaluative and spiritual essence (“Judaism”).
“Israel according to the flesh,” in Paul’s language.
This jump is based on a fallacy (a confusion between two completely different planes of discourse).

The use of the example of Christianity illustrates the differences well: a person is born to a “Christian” mother (= a fact), but by that alone he has still not taken upon himself faith in the Son of God, nor has he even taken upon himself any norm (he can, for example, be a criminal or a “bad person,” and then Christianity certainly will not see him as “one of its own”). Christianity does not sentence its members to “Christianity” in advance.
Christianity, unlike Judaism, is “synthetic.”

Doron,
To the best of my knowledge, even a Christian child who has not been baptized remains Christian. It is only the Baptists who require baptism in adulthood out of conscious recognition.

As for the rest of your claims: nothing can be done. By his very appearance in the world, the Jew represents God, whether he wants to or not. From the moment he is connected to this historical phenomenon, there is an expectation that he represent it properly. For this he received a suitcase whose clothes he is supposed to wear. He can say that he does not believe the suitcase came from God. In that case, even the sender is not sure he wants him to wear the clothes (it does not really represent him). There are those who claim that not only does he represent God, but they do too, in a spiritual sense (“Israel according to the spirit”). There are those who claim that he received the wrong suitcase and they received the right one. But there is one thing he cannot claim—that he has no connection to this historical phenomenon. If he is Jewish, then he is connected, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Exactly to the same extent that there isn’t much we can do about the height we were born with, our hair color, our body structure, or our sex. A man can castrate himself and take steroids that give him the form of a woman, but that will not turn him into a woman. He will simply be a castrated man (or in short, a eunuch). A Jew can deny his connection to this historical phenomenon, convert to Christianity or Islam, head a neo-Nazi party, and more—and still he will remain connected.
Sorry.

This has nothing to do with analyticity and syntheticity (for some reason this reminds me of your claims about the actuality of the Torah).

The Torah does not derive a value from a fact. The value is that Jews must observe Judaism. What is the fact? There isn’t one. You could also claim that Judaism derives from the revelation at Mount Sinai the obligation to observe commandments. That too is a mistake. There is a value that says one must listen to God, and the revelation at Mount Sinai merely reveals to us the will of God. Here too, there is a value that says one must listen to God, and God determined that a Jew must observe Judaism.
It is true that the fact that I am Jewish is a necessary condition for my being obligated in the commandments. But it is not the reason for that: the reason is the value of fulfilling the word of God, who commanded Jews to observe Judaism.

I don’t think your answers are engaging with the problem I’m raising. In my opinion you also do not assign enough importance to the essential difference between Christianity and Judaism (“Israel according to the spirit” versus “Israel according to the flesh”).
D., what do you mean there is no connection to analyticity and syntheticity?! Is there any rational philosophical discussion that cannot be fitted into this paradigm (or into Bechler’s paradigm)? I don’t think so.
And then you ask: “What is the fact?” I already wrote to you:
The fact—the fact that a person was born to a Jewish mother. This is a neutral and naked fact, as naked as our mother Eve in her whispered conversation with the serpent. A pure fact.
It seems obvious to me that Judaism (which relies on Torah from an absolute transcendent source) takes this fact and imposes on all those newborns of “Jewish” origin the evaluative burden of Judaism (which is observing Torah and commandments).

Why do you claim there is no deriving of value from fact here? I don’t understand at all…

Your claim too that Judaism does not derive from the revelation at Mount Sinai the obligation to observe commandments seems to me, begging your pardon, puzzling and over-subtle. “There is a value here that determines that one must listen to God,” you write.
Really? And how will you listen to God if not by means of the absolute and eternal document that He passed on to His people? Just listen to Him however you feel like it? Is that what Judaism says..? I don’t think so. Sorry.

(I don’t know what “Israel according to the spirit/flesh” means, nor what Christianity and Judaism think about these things.)

I didn’t say there is no discussion that can’t be fitted into the analytic/synthetic paradigm, but rather that the example you gave (Judaism versus Christianity) is not connected to analyticity or syntheticity (that is: it is not correct to say that the view you presented in the name of Christianity is more synthetic than the other view).

Okay. That is simply not correct. These are the values and facts because of which I observe commandments:
Value: one must listen to God.
Fact: God commanded Jews to observe certain commandments.
Fact: I am Jewish.
Value: I am obligated in commandments.

I don’t know whether “Judaism” (what is that anyway? It seems you’re trying to “force” others to hold certain views just because “Judaism” says so. I don’t care at all what “Judaism” thinks, and why does it matter?) that “relies on an absolute transcendent source” (what does that have to do with it?) derives observance of the commandments from the revelation at Mount Sinai or from the fact that my mother is Jewish. If so, then that is indeed a naturalistic fallacy.
By contrast, “my Judaism” (that is, my personal opinion) is that there is an obligation to listen to God, and the revelation at Mount Sinai is only our way of knowing that God demands things and exactly what His commandments are.
Do you think that from the revelation at Mount Sinai (voices and lightning on some remote mountain) one can somehow logically derive an *obligation* to observe commandments? Why should I care what displays and performances happened 3,000 years ago on some mountain?

Likewise with the Jewish mother. No one derives the value of the commandments from that
(a strange argument:
Fact: my mother is Jewish.
Conclusion: I am obligated not to eat pork.
What?!?!?!)

I derive the value of not eating pork from the value of listening to God + God’s command specifically to Jews (fact) + my being Jewish (fact).

It is true that this derivation also involves facts. But there is no problem with that at all (you can say “fallacy, fallacy,” but when you think about it, there is no problem here. The problem is deriving value from cold facts).

(Only now did I understand what “Jew according to the spirit / flesh” means, and I’ll just note that deriving commandments from the fact that I feel connected to them and believe in the Son of God, etc., is also a fallacy by your method. The fact that I want to observe commandments is a fact, not a value.)

My friend, I truly did not understand your last response. When I find a philosophical paradigm that seems effective to me (and I can explain to myself and hopefully to others why it is effective to use it), that is what I do.
Bechler’s paradigm (and Michi’s, which in my opinion is basically a version of it) is good enough for me, unless someone convinces me otherwise. It may be that if you had explained to me why this paradigm is not suitable for our discussion, I would have accepted that. That hasn’t happened yet.
With your permission, let’s close this discussion here.
All the best.