Q&A: The Commandment of Belief in Him
The Commandment of Belief in Him
Question
Hello Rabbi,
Is it the view of the SeMaG that there is a commandment to believe that the One who gave the Torah is the same One who took us out of Egypt? If so, do even atheists fulfill this commandment as well—albeit in an empty sense, of course?
Answer
One can of course engage in some casuistry about this, but I am fairly convinced that the answer is no. Commandments do not deal with mere knowledge; and if they do involve knowledge, it is relevant knowledge. This is somewhat like the distinction between mathematics and physics. A mathematician may know that if the axioms of Euclidean geometry are correct, then the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. But if you ask him what the sum of the angles really is, he has to answer that he does not know—it depends on the underlying assumptions. The physicist, by contrast, is tasked with telling you what the sum of the angles in a triangle is (that is, he must know which assumptions are true of our world, and therefore which propositions follow from them).
Discussion on Answer
Ailon, you are completely right, but the other side of the coin is that you cannot define such a commandment even for believers. A commandment to know something cannot be fulfilled.
Why can’t it be fulfilled? They believe that NULL gave the Torah (because nobody gave the Torah), and they also believe that NULL took us out of Egypt.
Along these lines, I once thought that if the commandment of “belief” means to study and gain understanding—the commandment is about an action, not about a resulting state that is not dependent on me—then it would follow that when a secular person reaches the conclusion that there is no God, he has fulfilled the commandment, since he performed the commandment—that is, the action itself—in the most scrupulous way. And one can certainly argue it through.
Atheists do not fulfill this commandment in any case, even if in practice they do the very (non-)action involved in it. In order for the act to count as fulfilling a commandment, there has to be belief in the commandment, in the action of the commandment (or in its efficacy—in God). And here there is no belief in the commandment. It is like taking a lulav without believing in God: they would not fulfill the commandment, even though in practice they did take a lulav.