Q&A: Reward for Fulfilling Commandments
Reward for Fulfilling Commandments
Question
Rabbi,
You’ve written several times (for example, in Column 278) that God is bound by the laws of morality because they are necessitated by the very existence of the world in an absolute way. (Without getting into right now why they obligate each person to keep them.) Therefore, the creation of the world is כביכול forced upon God, since His will is to bestow good without the creatures feeling shame.
If that is the purpose of the world, why is fulfilling commandments for the sake of reward not considered serving for its own sake, if after all that is the whole purpose of carrying out God’s will?
I hope my question was understandable even though I didn’t define it precisely.
Answer
There are several answers to this.
- Bestowing good upon us does not mean only reward. Commandments are supposed to turn reality (spiritually) into something better.
- Even if morality is dictated by that consideration, we have commandments that are unrelated to morality (and in my view there are no commandments at all that are connected to morality).
- There is a difference between His consideration and ours. Like a father who wants to get his child to do something good and offers him a prize. From the father’s perspective this is education, but clearly for the child, acting for its own sake is superior.
- Of course, if you perform commandments in order to receive reward only because in that way God’s will is fulfilled (since He wanted to give us reward), that is entirely serving for its own sake.
Discussion on Answer
I numbered it, but the numbers don’t show up, so it didn’t come out so clearly. Sorry.
Each new paragraph refers to a different number.
I don’t know whether this is talking about a reality that was created or one that always existed (as part of the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself). The thesis of serving a higher need speaks about repairing His.
The desire to bestow good is itself His own need, and that—and the “bread of shame”—is itself baseless speculation.
I didn’t understand the rest of your questions.
I’ll try to clarify what I mean.
If I fulfill the desire to bestow good, and that is my intention in fulfilling the commandments—to receive reward for the sake of fulfilling that desire—do you think that is serving for its own sake? If so, does that fit into Maimonides’ phrase, “to do the truth because it is truth”?
In that connection I only noted that the analogy you brought about a father who educates and gives reward is not similar, since here the end goal is the reward and not the act.
How can one explain the desire to bestow good as the reason for the creation of man if not because of the “bread of shame”?
Either I don’t understand you or you don’t understand me (or both). I already answered this above when I wrote that if you act for a certain purpose (such as reward) because that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants you to do, that is for its own sake. But learning for the sake of reward is not for its own sake.
I’ll try one last time.
My questions are as follows.
1. If the ultimate purpose of God’s will in creating the world is to give reward (“bread of shame”), why is one who serves for the sake of reward not serving “for its own sake,” namely for the final purpose, which is the giving of reward? A person who fulfills commandments only because that is what God wanted misses the ultimate goal of God’s will in giving the reward.
If the purpose of the creation of the world and the fulfillment of commandments is not the giving of reward, you need to provide another reason for why the world was created.
Even though my throat is hoarse, I’ll repeat once again the answer I’ve already written several times: I have no idea why the world was created, and nobody else does either. I assume it was not in order to give reward, since reward is intended for people, and if people had not been created there would have been no need to bestow good on them. At most one could say that the world was created for the sake of the Holy One, blessed be He, so that He could give reward, and not so that we could receive reward. More generally, and so as not to commit myself to anything too specific, I prefer to phrase it by saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, has purposes in creation for Himself (He needs us).
Even if in your opinion the world was created in order to give us reward, I wrote that this is the Holy One’s consideration. But our consideration is supposed to be for its own sake, and the reward comes automatically. By the way, the Maimonides passage you quoted—“to do the truth because it is truth”—says this in contrast to serving for reward. If you serve God for the sake of reward, but not because you want reward, rather because He wants you to receive reward—that is serving for its own sake.
I’ve already written all this several times, and as I said my keyboard is getting hoarse too. So that’s it—if nothing new comes up here, I’m done.
I didn’t understand. What reality was created as not good, and why was it created if not because God wanted us to repair it and thereby merit reward? If so, the repair is only a means and not the ultimate end.
So then why? Does the Rabbi have an alternative explanation for why the world was created, if not because of the desire to bestow good and the “bread of shame,” which exists objectively and therefore cannot be changed?
That’s different. Here the whole command is not necessarily about a good act (as the Rabbi wrote, there are certainly commandments that are not moral), but rather so that there should be a reason to give reward.
Okay. How then does this fit with Maimonides’ words: “not from hope for reward and not from fear of punishment, but one does the truth because it is truth,” etc.?