Q&A: God's Commands to Think
God's Commands to Think
Question
In your reply to Inbal you wrote the following:
Notice that this analysis also applies to the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, and certainly with respect to the Torah, the Sages, or the Talmuds. If the Holy One, blessed be He, or Rabbi Akiva were to command me to believe in the coming of the Messiah, that would be an oxymoronic demand that cannot be fulfilled. Even though the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything, and even if I assume He does not lie, at most this could convince me that the Messiah will indeed come (that is, that my reasoning was mistaken), and then I would accept it because I was persuaded. But formal authority regarding facts means accepting it despite not believing it, and such a demand cannot come even from the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, and of course not from the Sages or from any other source.
If the Holy One, blessed be He, can command you to love Him, why can He not command you to know Him, to know about the Messiah, and every other truth?
Surely it is clear that the commandment "And you shall love…" means: do everything incumbent upon you in order to arrive at love. And implicit in this divine command is the simple fact that you can get there, and that it depends on your actions, and that is what you are commanded about.
In the same way, the Holy One, blessed be He, can command you to know quantum theory, or the coming of the Messiah, or even that 2+2=4, since He knows that this is within your ability and that you have a task to do the actions that will bring you to that knowledge/thought.
The claim of yours quoted above seems to me so shallow and superficial that I suspect I have not understood it at all.
I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me as to what you meant.
Answer
Why don’t you write this as a talkback on the column?
It is certainly possible to command someone to try to arrive at certain items of knowledge. But that is only where the assumption is that if one works at it, one will probably arrive at that knowledge (as in physics, or science). That is not the case in the theological context.
It is certainly possible that the Sages thought so, and perhaps in their environment that really was the case. It is evident that their assumption was that this is within everyone's reach, and therefore, on their assumption, someone who does not arrive there is being led astray by the evil inclination. And that is exactly what I wrote. But in our time this is not so, and as I wrote, this reality was not familiar to them.
At the end of the day, if I truly was not persuaded (not because of the evil inclination), then no one can make claims against me. At most one may presume that it happened because of the evil inclination, and that is probably what the Sages assumed. But the reality today is different in this regard, and they were not speaking about such a reality.
Discussion on Answer
Absolutely not. It is a complete oxymoron. At most, there can be a command to try to arrive at the correct conclusions, but in the end you will either get there or you won't. There is no justification whatsoever for making claims against a person who arrived at the wrong conclusion. This is exactly how people interpret positive commandment 1 in Maimonides (and the difficulties raised against it reflect precisely my position here).
I moved this as a talkback to the column. If you want to continue, do it there: https://mikyab.net/posts/81186#comment-73337
I was referring to your claim that God's commanding a person to know/think is an oxymoron.
Why did you jump to the Sages?
Do you agree that God's command, both in the realm of thought and in the realm of emotion, is not an oxymoron?