Q&A: The Oath Our Ancestors Swore at Mount Sinai
The Oath Our Ancestors Swore at Mount Sinai
Question
It is stated in the words of the Sages that our ancestors who stood at the foot of Mount Sinai swore to keep the Torah [and from this follows, among other things, that “an oath cannot take effect upon an oath”].
A. Why was this oath needed at all? The force of God’s command is binding even without it.
B. I did not swear; my ancestors did. What does that have to do with me? [That is not like God’s command, which applies to all generations and is therefore binding on me as well.]
Answer
A. It has already been pointed out that there was not really an oath there. More likely, this is a legal fiction, like any normative system that defines, from its own perspective, the binding model. Just as the social contract is the basis for morality, the Sinai oath is the basis for halakhic commitment.
You could ask how an oath can obligate at all, if the whole force of an oath exists only by virtue of the Torah’s prohibitions and the obligations to keep oaths. I have already discussed this in several places, and this is not the place for it.
B. The Rosh, in a responsum cited by the Rema in Yoreh De’ah, wrote that a communal ban also applies to future generations (unlike an ordinary vow or oath, which a person imposes only on himself). The explanation is that the community issuing the ban is a collective and not the individuals, and the collective does not die—only its individual members are replaced. Anyone who belongs to it is obligated to uphold those bans and oaths. Exactly like the laws of a state that are enacted today: if they are not changed, they will still bind those living here two hundred years from now. That is the force of the Sinai event: the one who was “placed under oath” there is the public collective.
Discussion on Answer
The role of a fiction is not to provide a basis for something that has no basis; otherwise, even after the fiction it still has no basis. The fiction brings it into a halakhic category. Now our obligation has a halakhic form—an oath—and one can discuss the implications of that (such as being “already under oath from Mount Sinai”).
Okay, thanks.
In your interview with Noam Oren you said this:
“But it seems that even if we accept the fact of the Sinai revelation, it does not concern you at all. Why are you obligated by an event that happened thousands of years ago?
The reason I am obligated by an event that happened before I was born is the same reason that you are obligated by laws the state enacted before you had the right to vote. When a group accepts certain laws upon itself, that obligates, to some extent, its children as well, even if all the lawmakers have long since died. Laws enacted by the American Congress two hundred years ago still bind the American citizen of today. The reason for this is that the entity that committed itself to those laws was the American collective and not the collection of individuals who lived at that time, and the contemporary American is still part of that same collective. In addition to that, I believe that I am obligated to do the word of God. For these two reasons, I feel obligated by the laws that were revealed at the Sinai revelation.”
And I just want to sum it up for myself:
A. It comes out that the main (?) argument is that the very word of God and His will—that itself obligates me. Period. And anyone who doesn’t understand that is blind, etc.
B. In addition, there is also the reasoning that I am indeed part of “Judaism” and my ancestors accepted it, etc.
C. Would it be correct to say that without the first reason—if the whole reason were only “my ancestors”—you would kick the system away? I mean to ask: in your opinion, is it plausible (though not justified) that someone would continue the entire tradition—which is mistaken at its root!—just because of ancestral acceptance? That sounds implausible to me (and then the real engine is always the truth of God’s word).
Do you agree?
Absolutely. I am not obligated to a foolish tradition even if all my ancestors practiced it.
See Column 457, where I distinguished between the reason some act is moral—which is a kind of forced definition that applies even to the Holy One, blessed be He—and the fact that His command is still required in order for it to become binding. Also in The First Existent, fourth talk, part 3, there is a similar distinction regarding Kant (who writes that morality requires God, while grounding it in an a priori humanistic and secular analysis).
Thank you very much!
Rabbi, following up on point A, I’d appreciate some clarification—
I understand that this was a legal fiction, but why is there any need for it at all? If the word of God itself is binding (and I’ve seen that you’ve written this several times), then what does the obligation from the human side add? In other words: even without an oath, one would still have to fulfill God’s word because that is His will.