Gate Five: Lishmah — Command and Essence in the Service of God

From the book Like Grass by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

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Lishmah (For Its Own Sake): Command and Essence in the Service of God¹

Introduction

A Supra-Categorical System

At the end of the previous gate, we arrived at the conclusion that at the basis of human thought and belief there must stand a supra-categorical system, within which all the other categorical systems exist, maintaining within it, and in its own terms, some hierarchy and some set of relations among them, and by virtue of which evaluative and factual decisions can be made despite the problem of incommensurability.

When we try to examine the question of what the principles of value are for all the systems we regard as norm-directed, we will ultimately find them within this system. But when we seek the principle of value of the comprehensive system itself, the one that represents the entire supra-categorical whole, we inevitably run into a paradox. This principle of value cannot be found within it, because a principle of value, by definition, is located outside the system whose binding force it grounds. But neither can it be found outside it, because if this system represents the entire categorical whole, then nothing can exist outside it.

We saw that the principle of value of a norm-directed system is a norm or rule that establishes commitment to the system and to its contents. By contrast, the principle of value of a constitutive system is an observation of what is, not a logical derivation from a principle or a norm. If so, this comprehensive system, which is necessarily constitutive, since there are no principles outside it, must be based on cognition and not on logical derivation. This cognitive act is nothing other than an observation, or “listening,” in the language of Rabbi HaNazir, of some being that constitutes the ontological basis of all the other systems.

It should be emphasized that this conclusion is binding for any synthetic position. Anyone who believes in the possibility of deciding matters of fact and matters of norm, regardless of the specific content of those decisions, must assume in the background such a supra-categorical system, whatever its nature may be. In addition, the grounding of such a system must have a cognitive dimension and cannot suffice with the dimension of thought alone.

The Torah as a Supra-Categorical System

As we saw in the previous gate, in the Jewish Torah worldview the Torah is the root of all reality. In fact, it is God’s “ambassador” in reality, as was discussed around note 37. If so, in the Jewish synthetic position, the Torah is the supra-categorical system within and through which everything receives meaning and importance.

The commonplace statement that for a believing person everything receives meaning only through faith in God is now interpreted as a statement about the Torah. That, in fact, is the definition of the Torah. The meaning of what we have seen is that the Torah fulfills the divine function of a supra-categorical system that gives meaning to values and truths. We saw that it determines the relation among the different categories, so that for one committed to the Torah and the mitzvot (commandments), the only constitutive system is the Torah. All the other systems are norm-directed, and their value-principles are rooted in it and draw their force from it.

When we ask ourselves what the principle of value is that grounds commitment to the Torah itself, we seemingly arrive here at the limit of our capacity for discussion and understanding. As we saw above in general terms, one cannot define any plane more fundamental than our comprehensive supra-categorical system itself.

Hence the question now arises: is this commitment arbitrary? That is, does the fact that it is undertaken without a reason make it meaningless?

The Relation Between Being and Norm: Back to the Naturalistic Fallacy

We saw that the foundation must be an observation of some being. But what does such an observation mean? How does an observation of something bind us on the normative plane?

This question arises with respect to all ontological value-principles. As we saw in the third gate, values cannot be derived from facts; this is Hume’s naturalistic fallacy. Therefore, when we discuss norm-directed systems, the value-principle at their basis is normative in essence and belongs to a system higher than they are in the comprehensive categorical hierarchy. But ultimately every grounding reaches a constitutive system, and that system itself is grounded in an observation of some being. We saw this with respect to “beauty,” or “the good,” and the like, and we are now generalizing it to the supra-categorical system.

But one must note that this is not yet a real answer to the naturalistic fallacy. After all, we are again in a situation in which viewing some being, admittedly an abstract one, leads us, or grounds for us, a normative commitment. But abstract being is still being, and as such it is not clear how it can serve as the basis for normative obligation. According to the argument of the naturalistic fallacy, which we have mentioned several times above, facts cannot constitute an obligation to values or norms. Facts can answer questions of the type “what exists?” but not questions of the type “what ought one to do?”

We are therefore forced to conclude that the abstract being that stands at the basis of constitutive categorical systems is a being of another kind. It is a kind of being with which we are not familiar. It is not neutral like a fact, or like material being. It is “colored,” or “charged,” with some directionality that leads us to commitment. We are compelled to speak of a being that is not subject to the naturalistic fallacy. Put differently: its characterizations and descriptions are prescriptive claims, not descriptive ones. See chapter 1 of the third gate, where we referred to these as moral “facts.”

What Is the “Torah”?

Above I argued that the Torah is the only system that truly has a constitutive character. As we saw above, it is here that the question of epistemological grounding arises in full force; in fact, it arises only here, since there is no other constitutive system.

Hence the obvious conclusion is that the solution proposed above is in fact the answer to the question posed here. The epistemological value-principle, that is, observation of an entity charged with normative directionality that leads to normative commitment, is relevant only with respect to the Torah itself.

That being which we observe in order to derive from it the normative commitment to the Torah and to everything derived from it is, in Kantian terms, “the Torah as it is in itself,” or more accurately, God as He is in Himself. We saw at the end of the previous gate that God’s representative in the world is the Torah, and in fact there is an identity between Him and it; in the language of the Zohar: “The Holy One, blessed be He, and the Torah are one.” In conventional terms, the being is God, and the supra-categorical system that He constitutes for the believing Jew is the Torah. The relation between God and the Torah is like the relation between noumenon and phenomenon. God is the Torah as it is in itself, and the Torah is His appearance in the world. “Observation” of God yields the Torah. This is the system that is formed in the consciousness of the observer when he “contemplates” God.

It should be noted that the course of the argument here is necessary in a certain sense. We saw that a synthetic position necessarily rests on a supra-categorical system. We saw that such a system is constitutive by its very nature. We saw that the grounding of a constitutive system can only be epistemological, meaning that at the root of such a system there lies some sort of being. All this was a course of necessary logical derivation, assuming a synthetic starting point. If not, then we do not believe in science, in the rules of thought, in cognition, or certainly in the meaning of judgments. All that remains now is the identification: that being is called “God,” and that supra-categorical system is called “the Torah.” Of course, there is here an additional identification between these two and the Torah and God of Jewish tradition, but that is not our concern here. Our argument leads only to the necessity of the conclusion that these two essences exist, and no more.²

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, in his book Nefesh HaChayim, throughout Gate IV, elaborates this conception of the Torah. At the beginning of chapter 10 there he writes:

When one is occupied with and studying Torah, there is certainly no need then for the matter of cleaving at all, as explained above. For through occupation and study alone he is attached to His will and His speech, blessed be He, and He, blessed be He, His will and His speech, are one.

And this is the meaning of what our sages of blessed memory said in Exodus Rabbah, section 33: if a person takes an object, can he thereby acquire its owner? But the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, and says to them, as it were: by taking it, you take Me… And this is what is written in several places in the Zohar: “The Holy One, blessed be He, Israel, and the Torah are one.” Greater still, in the section Beshalach, 60a: “And we have learned that the Holy One, blessed be He, is called Torah… and Torah is nothing other than the Holy One, blessed be He.”

As we saw at the end of the previous gate, the Torah is a kind of being, namely the world, or reality, as it is in itself. This is how one may understand the expressions so common in the halakhic world: “the Torah wants,” “the Torah commands,” and the like. There is no contradiction here to the theological assumption that only God can will and command. This is identity: God’s will and speech, that is, the Torah, are identical with His own self. See Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, part III, chapter 13, and elsewhere.

Ontological Prescription

As we see here, however, the Torah is a being essentially different from all other beings. It is a “colored” reality, not a neutral one. It is charged with a directionality that leads us to undertake commitment toward it. As we saw, it is the only being not subject to Hume’s naturalistic fallacy, that is, the only one from which normative conclusions may be derived.

Analytic philosophers of ethics, and we saw examples of this in chapter 1 of the third gate, have already proposed similar solutions to the problem of grounding moral principles naturalistically. They argued that normative statements do not describe neutral facts; rather, as part of their basic meaning, they include commitment to performance. In their terminology, these are prescriptive statements. But whence do statements in language really acquire such a strange property? Here analyticity repeats its usual trick, hiding the absence of a solution to a substantive problem behind a cloak of linguistic analysis. In analytic method, defining a different type of sentence is treated as though it solves the underlying philosophical problem.

As often happens, here too we have pointed to the ontological root of the analytic solution. These philosophers are indeed right to claim that there are prescriptive claims. But their root lies in the fact that they are derived characteristics of beings endowed with directionality. Each of us can observe such beings directly and ascertain that observing them indeed generates commitment. This is ontological prescription, not merely linguistic prescription, as the analytic philosophers proposed.

This is also the basic synthetic solution to the problem of the apparent meaninglessness of commitment to the supra-categorical system. The commitment arises from the system itself, because it is itself colored with directionality. It needs no grounding outside itself, because God, who is its very essence, constitutes the ground of commitment to it.

Every religious person who asks himself why he feels obligated to the Torah and to halakha (Jewish law) experiences directly the fact that there is no principle outside the Torah that grounds commitment to it. If one asks himself this question, he will answer: I am obligated because God commanded. And if he then asks himself why he should obey God’s command, the question itself is not understood. Ultimately, there is no external argument for this commitment, nor could there be, as we have seen, but it is not meaningless. It is the most basic commitment, and it is the foundation and root of all other commitments.

By analogy, this is like asking whether the axioms of some axiomatic system are arbitrary. We accept them without an argument, and therefore they seem arbitrary. On the other hand, every argument is nothing other than a reduction to them; if they are arbitrary, then every proposition derived from them is arbitrary as well. The way out, which I already discussed in the first book, gate 8, chapter 3, is that axioms are not logically argued for, but that does not mean they are arbitrary. On the contrary, as we saw there, axioms are so clear to us that they do not need arguments at all. They are the truest and most certain part of the whole system.

The same applies to adoption of the supra-categorical system. Such adoption is necessarily made without an external anchor, that is, without an argument, but that does not indicate arbitrariness. On the contrary, this is the most basic commitment of all, and therefore it does not need arguments. One who observes the “colored” object, the object charged with directionality or prescription, that is the source of this system, immediately understands the commitment that derives from it to the principles of the system. This is a natural and direct path, requiring no more basic arguments, from God, the ontology, to the Torah, the system of categories and norms.

Rav Kook on the Torah

For Rav Kook, the uniqueness of the Torah as a different kind of being is expressed at the beginning of his central work, Orot HaKodesh, at the start of the section “The Wisdom of Holiness”:

The wisdom of holiness is superior to every wisdom, in that it transforms the will and the psychic disposition of those who study it, drawing them nearer to the exaltedness with which it itself is filled. Not so with all worldly forms of wisdom. Even though they depict sublime, beautiful, and noble matters, they do not possess that operative quality of drawing the essential being of the thinker toward their own level. In truth they bear no relation at all to the other powers and aspects of human essence, except to his intellectual faculty alone.

Rav Kook is pointing here to the fact that the wisdom of holiness differs from all other forms of wisdom chiefly in this respect: it is active and directional, whereas they are neutral. It acts upon the student and pulls him in a certain direction, or toward a certain orientation, whereas the other forms of wisdom are nothing more than neutral facts. They lack the operative power possessed by Torah.

In our terminology, we can say that with respect to all facts in the world, Hume’s naturalistic fallacy applies. They are not charged with a directionality that acts upon the learner and draws him to commitment. The Torah is the only being not subject to Hume’s naturalistic fallacy, but through it all the other sciences and categorical systems, which are located within it and are intelligible only from within it, receive that same operative power. This is the source of all our commitments, a source that philosophers seek in vain because of Hume’s fallacy. They know only the ordinary kinds of beings, and therefore they are unaware of the existence of a basic and supreme being above them all, one that bestows upon all of them the directionality toward the good, the beautiful, and the other categories.

There is a well-known joke about a philosopher who researched and taught ethics and was caught behaving immorally. When asked how this was possible, he replied that just as a mathematician need not be a triangle, so a lecturer in ethics need not be moral. Usually this joke is taken as a slur against scholars of ethics. But in my opinion its message is not that a person cannot be moral without the Torah, for that is simply not true. Its message is that the grounding for commitment to morality does not exist without the Torah.

Without the Torah, the philosophy of ethics is at most a collection of facts about the opinions of different people, all of which describe “the good.” But what will obligate us to do the good? Facts or opinions are not reasons from which norms can be derived. The point of the joke is not to insult philosophers, but to point to the emptiness of the theoretical plane in relation to the normative one. No theory can, by itself, provide the force that charges us with directionality and commitment to act. This is the difference between the Torah and every other ethical doctrine.

In section 3 there, Rav Kook points out that the wisdom of holiness, that is, the Torah, includes all the sciences; in our terms, it is the most basic supra-categorical system:

The wisdom of holiness, in its purity and truth, when it is revealed in the world, gives life to everything. It opposes no science and no greatness, elevation, strength, or splendor. It only crowns everything with the aspiration to righteousness, with its goodness and humility. All aspirations to justice in all their aspects, in the world at large and in the individual person, find through it their true entryway, and through it they are aided in the realization of their enterprises in practice and in life.

Rav Kook is pointing here to the fact that the Torah wraps all the other systems in that same directionality, which they cannot possess on their own because of the naturalistic fallacy. It is the only directional being, and because of it there is directionality, that is, value in all its shades and forms, in the world and in man. It bestows something of itself upon all the other sciences.

For this reason it also cannot be opposed to all the other sciences, for all of them draw their meaning and essence from it. It is the framework within which they operate.

As we saw throughout the trilogy, without the synthetic power, which we called faith, see gate 13 of the first book, and which includes both thought and cognition, there is no truth, as explained in the first book, no science, and no scientific cognition, as explained in the second book. In the present book we have seen that there is also no ethics or aesthetics, nor any other category. All of them draw only from it, and without it they have no existence.

The analytic entanglements that fail to ground even a single field, neither cognition nor judgment, all stem from one source: the absence of faith. The analytic stance is lack of trust in the synthetic faculty, which is itself faith. All analytic flight is nothing other than flight from faith and from what faith obligates. Intelligent human beings are willing to get tangled in nonsense and fantasies merely in order to escape commitment. As we have now seen, they are right: without faith there is no commitment of any kind. Even if they try to create artificial commitments out of faith in man, or other fictitious values, they cannot succeed.

In the first book we explained in detail that the emptiness of the analytic-secular wagon applies mainly to the intellectual plane. We pointed out there that there are indeed good people among those who do not believe, but their intellectual grounding for morality, as for the rest of their worldview, does not exist. Here we see the root of the matter. Absence of faith, that is, analyticity, deprives all the other fronts of human action and reflection of the directionality that drives them.

With respect to the normative plane as well, it can now be stated that the source that gives meaning to the array of valid norms must be a different kind of being or existence. Without faith in the existence of such a being, we always fall into Hume’s naturalistic fallacy. No other factual anchor can ground ethical, aesthetic, or other norms. A source is always required that will give the various systems the directionality they need, or color them with value. That source cannot be descriptive, neither linguistically nor ontologically-factually, because grounding norms requires prescription.

We thus arrive at the conclusion that the synthetic alternative is grounded fundamentally in the Torah. It should be noted that the word “Torah” derives from a root meaning instruction. That is, the Torah, unlike other forms of wisdom, is an object that contains directives and commands, not merely neutral facts. By its force, and only by its force, other categories too can be charged with directionality.

The Content of This Gate

In the present gate we will deal with that most basic level of grounding, the level that colors the whole range of human activities with directionality and prevents them from being trapped in the paralyzing and sterilizing neutrality described in the first book, in gate 1, as “the emptiness of the analytic.” As we have seen, this directional value-principle is bound up with the concept of faith, that is, syntheticity. As we shall see here, halakha has a special term for this. It is the concept called lishmah.

In this gate we will discuss it and its implications, and we will try to describe it from several different angles. We will see here how it colors first and foremost halakha itself, in its various parts. The continuation of the process outward has already been described in the previous gates. Here we will consider some of the meanings of command as opposed to essence in Torah and halakha, and we will examine additional aspects of the identity, already discussed, between God Himself and the Torah.

Chapter 1: The Concept of Lishmah

Intention and Lishmah³

In halakha, the concept of lishmah denotes an intention that accompanies certain halakhic activities. It should not be confused with the term “intention” in the context of the dictum that mitzvot require intention. Performance of mitzvot should be accompanied by the intention to fulfill one’s obligation in the mitzvah; there is a dispute about this in Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 114b, and parallels. But lishmah is a different concept. Usually it appears as a thought accompanying the preparation of ritual objects for their designated purpose. We make tzitzit, ritual fringes, lishmah; we offer a sacrifice lishmah; we write a get, a bill of divorce, lishmah; and so on. At least some of these acts, except sacrifices, are not mitzvot at all. They are preparations of various objects for the purpose of fulfilling a mitzvah through them.

Beyond the difference in halakhic function between these two concepts, the content of the thought called lishmah is also not fixed, and it does not necessarily overlap with the content of “intention.” For example, lishmah in sacrifices is defined in the Mishnah discussed in Babylonian Talmud, Zevachim 46b, and it includes six components. In a get, the meaning of lishmah is “for the sake of the woman being divorced.” By contrast, in matzah or tzitzit, the concept of lishmah has content that almost overlaps with the concept of intention: these objects must be prepared for the sake of the mitzvah of matzah or the mitzvah of tzitzit.

More generally, the concept of lishmah is found not only in the context of specific mitzvot, but also in broader contexts of Torah study and of the service of God in general. In the specific mitzvot we saw above, it is part of the process of preparing the object, and usually if the preparation is not done lishmah, the object cannot be used to fulfill the mitzvah. But in Torah study, study lishmah is presented as a superior kind of study, not as a condition for fulfillment of the mitzvah. Certainly in the service of God generally, it is not a strict condition whose absence invalidates the act, but rather something that improves and elevates the service.

Beyond that, in Torah study and the service of God generally, the function of lishmah is not its usual one, as we saw in the specific mitzvot. Here we are not dealing with preparation of ritual objects, but with an intention that accompanies the act itself. In these contexts, it would have been more fitting to use specifically the term “intention.” The very use of the term lishmah in these contexts therefore requires clarification.

Torah Study Lishmah

In order to try to understand the special appearance of the concept of lishmah in the contexts of Torah study and the service of God, let us examine Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin’s Nefesh HaChayim, Gate IV. He opens the discussion there by defining Torah study lishmah, and in chapter 3 he brings the words of the Gemara in Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 62b:

Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Tzadok says: Do things for the sake of their Maker, and speak of them for their own sake.

The Rosh explains this passage there as follows:

“Do things for the sake of their Maker” means for the sake of the Holy One, blessed be He, who made everything for His own sake. “And speak of them for their own sake” means that all your speaking and involvement in matters of Torah should be for the sake of Torah itself…

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin explains there that the Rosh’s intention is to account for the change of wording: with respect to mitzvot, “do things,” the language is “for the sake of their Maker,” whereas with respect to Torah, “speak of them,” the language is “for their own sake.” The difference is that mitzvot are to be done for the sake of God, and this is the intention required to fulfill one’s obligation, whereas Torah is to be studied for the sake of the Torah itself, that is, lishmah. Later in the chapter he explains that this is the meaning of the term lishmah in all places where it appears in a sense similar to its sense in Torah study.

If so, Torah study lishmah means, in effect, that Torah study has no external reason beyond the study itself. It is an end in itself. One studies Torah for the sake of Torah. This fits thoroughly with what we saw in the previous gate, that the Torah is the overarching system, for which no external principle of value can possibly be found outside itself.

Service of God Lishmah

In the context of the service of God in general, where, as we saw, the concept of lishmah appears in a sense similar to that of Torah study, this term can be understood similarly. Let us try to learn its meaning from the halakhic definition of idolatry. Idolatry too must be performed lishmah in order for the worshipper to violate the prohibition involved in its worship. From that we may learn about the corresponding requirement that the service of God be done lishmah.

The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 61b, says:

It was stated: One who worships idolatry out of love or out of fear, Abaye says he is liable, and Rava says he is exempt. Abaye says he is liable, for he has worshipped it. Rava says he is exempt: if he accepted it upon himself as a god, yes; if not, no.

Abaye and Rava dispute the status of one who worships idolatry out of love or fear. Abaye holds that he is liable, for in the end he did worship it, whereas Rava says that if he did not “accept it upon himself as a god,” that is, accept it as a deity, he is exempt. The halakha follows Rava, meaning that one who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt.

The question that arises here is: from what motivation must one worship an idol in order to violate the prohibition of idolatry? At first glance, the highest religious motivation would seem to be worship out of love and fear. What could be more “religious” than that?

And indeed, Rashi there, s.v. “out of love or fear,” as well as other commentators, explain:

“Out of love or fear” means out of love of a person or fear of a person, and he did not entertain in his heart that it is a deity.

That is, the intention is not to worship the idol out of love or fear of the idol itself, for that would be the highest form of religious worship. Rather, the Gemara refers to fear or love of some human being. In other words, the case is one who worshipped idolatry because he loves a certain person and that person very much wants him to worship it, or because he fears someone who will harm him if he does not worship it.

But Maimonides, in Laws of Idolatry 3:6, interprets the passage literally, and writes:

One who worships idolatry out of love, for example because he was attracted to that image on account of its beautiful workmanship, or who worships it out of fear of it lest it harm him, as its worshippers imagine that it does good or evil, if he accepted it upon himself as a god, he is liable to stoning. But if he worshipped it in its customary manner, or through one of the four forms of worship, out of love or out of fear, he is exempt.

From Maimonides’ language it is clear that he interprets the Gemara literally: idolatry that incurs liability exists only when a person does not worship out of his love or fear of the idol, the image, but when he “accepted it upon himself as a god.” The problem therefore returns in full force: what is the religious motivation required in order to violate the prohibition of idolatry? Apparently because of this difficulty, the Raavad, in his gloss there, explains according to Rashi’s approach cited above.

In any event, according to Maimonides, in order to be an idolater in the full halakhic sense, one deserving stoning, one must worship the idol lishmah. Worship out of love or fear is not considered worship lishmah, and therefore one is exempt.

The explanation is that religious worship in its essence is not based on love of the idol or fear of it, but first and foremost on a basic sense of obligation. Those loves and fears are foreign motives, and they cannot serve as the basis for genuinely religious worship. Put differently, idol worship motivated in that way is just the fulfillment of human needs, the satisfaction of one’s love and fear, and not worship lishmah. Worship lishmah is only worship without any external motive at all, simply to worship for the sake of worship itself. The idol is a god, and by virtue of that alone the obligation to worship it rests upon me. That is idolatry in the strictest sense.

It stands to reason that from this we may also learn about the service of God. Here too, service motivated only by love or fear is service not lishmah. Service of God lishmah is the acceptance of unconditional obligation, or what Maimonides here calls “accepting as a god.”

A famous Hasidic story is told about Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev, known as the defender of Israel. When he saw a Jew leaving the middle of prayer wrapped in tallit, a prayer shawl, and tefillin, phylacteries, in order to fix the yoke of his wagon, he said before God: “Master of the universe, see how Your children always serve You, at every hour. Even when they are repairing the yoke of their wagon, they are praying.”

Usually this story provokes amusement, because it seems naive to the point of banality. Clearly, that man is not praying while fixing his wagon; rather, he is fixing his wagon in the middle of prayer. But in light of what we have seen here, the story seems to contain very great religious depth. If we think about the situation of that wagon driver, he could simply have refrained from coming to prayer at all and fixed his wagon at home. He chose to come to prayer and only then cut corners by going out in the middle to fix the broken yoke. Why, really, did he come to prayer at all, instead of doing the obvious thing in that situation? From a purely halakhic standpoint, that Jew’s prayer very likely does not count as prayer. He certainly does not fulfill his obligation without minimal concentration. But all this only sharpens the difficulty: why did he bother to come to the synagogue that morning at all?

As anyone who has experienced mitzvah observance understands, provided he is not a perfect human being, what drove that wagon driver was clearly the basic religious obligation. He came to prayer because… simply because. He did not do so out of love of God, and certainly if he had even a little fear of God he would not have done what he did, so this is not fear of Heaven either. So why did he come at all? The answer is: simply so. He came because there is an obligation to pray every morning. He does not even fulfill his obligation, because he cannot restrain himself and postpone the repair, but he still comes. That is what Rabbi Levi Yitzchak saw in him, and the strange interpretation he offered of the act is in fact the simple truth. This is a genuine servant of God. He comes to the synagogue in order to pray, despite the fact that he has no interest in it. It bores him, it seems unnecessary and burdensome to him, and still he comes.

Almost every Jew who comes to prayer every morning does not do so out of love of God, nor out of fear of Him. He is not expecting healing to be sent to him, nor complete redemption. In fact, he is usually not thinking about God at all, and usually not about the words of the prayer either. He comes out of a sense of duty, and no more. He comes because the Shulchan Arukh says that one must pray every morning.

Usually such a Jew is sharply criticized for the fact that his prayer is worth nothing, and that he does it only out of habit. The conventional term for this is “a human command learned by rote.” But this criticism reflects a basic misunderstanding. He does not do it out of habit, because habit is not sufficient to explain why a person gets up every morning at an early hour and dedicates about an hour of his time to this act. Any habit will cease sooner or later if we see no point in it. Without question, a sense of duty lies in the background. A person feels obligated to pray because that is what the Shulchan Arukh says, and that is what God expects of him. Some will say that he serves the Shulchan Arukh and not God, but that too is a mistake, another mistake, which is not our subject here.

If so, the sense of duty, and not habit, is what stands at the basis of every Jew’s mitzvah observance and service of God. Habit contributes to it, but as we have seen it cannot by itself be a sufficient explanation. This phenomenon is not at all understandable to someone who has not experienced a routine of mitzvah observance. Although the power itself exists within every person, the phenomenon appears very strange and unintelligible, and certainly irrational, to one who observes it from the outside.

To sharpen this point, let us bring an interpretation by Rabbi Shach of Rashi on the portion of Bereishit.⁴ The Torah says, in Genesis 4:16: “And Cain went out from before the Lord.” Rashi there writes: “‘And Cain went out’—like one who deceives the mind of the One above.” What does this expression mean?

Rabbi Shach explains that a human being has the power to recognize his Creator and yet try, as it were, to steal His mind. This is like that Jew in Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev’s story whom we met above, who as it were “pulls one over” on God and “pretends” to pray, even though what he is doing does not count as prayer in any respect other than obligation.

Rabbi Shach recounts there a case he saw of a Torah-observant Jew who walked on the Sabbath up to the edge of the Sabbath boundary. Suddenly a strong wind blew his hat beyond the boundary, so that it was forbidden on the Sabbath to bring it back from there. He could not overcome his impulse, and in Rabbi Shach’s words, he lost his composure, bent down, picked up the hat, and brought it back into the boundary. Rabbi Shach, who was watching him at that moment, says he did it quickly and furtively, as though he were cheating God. In fact, almost every sin contains such a state, as we saw above in the discussion of weakness of will; and, in a different and horrifying context, like that Nazi who gets drunk in order to manage to commit his atrocious acts, that too is a form of self-deception.

Indeed, this phenomenon seems familiar to every person: when he sins, he feels as though he has succeeded, as it were, in tricking himself. But the case of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev is more extreme, because the man does it in the middle of prayer, and one wonders why he comes to the synagogue at all if such prayer does not count for him. Does he think that God will be misled and credit him anyway with that prayer?

Still, in order to complete the provocative picture sketched here, one clarification must be added. The criticism of this formal prayer, devoid of love and fear of God, is justified, but it must be formulated differently. After the level of obligation, we should add another level, a level of love of God and fear of God, as an additional and higher religious content, beyond that routine prayer, but not in its place. Love and fear are levels above the level of simple obligation. If love and fear come in place of obligation, and not in addition to it, then a person is praying to himself and not to God. A person who does not pray when he does not feel love or fear is not really serving God. In the language of the sages and of Maimonides, it can be said of him that he has not “accepted God upon himself as God.” A god is one whose commands we carry out without any reason at all, simply because he commands us. There is no further reason for this, not even love and fear of Him. God Himself stands at the center, and not we. See the third gate, in the discussion of the relation between love and desire.

Acts motivated by love or fear are things we also do in response to the commands of human beings, a policeman, a judge, or just a violent person, but that does not mean we have accepted them upon ourselves as gods. In such cases there is an external reason for obeying them. I obey Reuven because otherwise he will beat me or harm me. This is similar to fleeing fire so that it not burn me. That does not mean I worship the fire as idolatry out of fear. Divinity is an entity one serves without any external reason. Therefore it can serve as the basic infrastructure of my entire categorical framework, since it itself requires no external reason. It does not need, and cannot possibly be grounded in, more basic value-principles external to the commitment to it itself.

If so, the concept of lishmah denotes an action that is its own cause, that is, an action requiring no external justification. Such an action counts as an action done for religious reasons. Therefore, with respect to the service of God, it is the superior form of worship, while with respect to an idol it is the prohibition of idolatry, that is, religious service rendered to a foreign object.⁵

Here again we identify the supra-categorical framework with the religious commitment to God and His commands. This is in fact a definition of a religious framework: any framework that is the most basic one, requiring no external justification, is defined as “religion.” Action according to such a framework is called in halakha “acceptance as a god.” To accept someone or something as a god means to obey it unconditionally and without any external reason.

It should be noted that this very power of commitment, which is revealed in its purest form specifically in the religious context, itself constitutes an anthropological proof of the existence of God. The fact that a human being possesses the capacity to undertake such commitment and act on it is itself evidence that there is an addressee for that commitment. It is commitment toward some entity that serves as the framework for our entire categorical system, and we define that entity as God.

This is a proof parallel to the anthropological proof from the existence of the faculty of faith, or in our terminology, the synthetic part of the intellect. The proof formulated here concerns the will rather than thought, but it is parallel to the earlier one. It should be added that it is not plausible that this faculty exists only among Torah- and mitzvah-observant Jews, for they are not built differently from other human beings. Such a power exists, even if only latently, in every person. Hence this “proof” is universal.⁶

Two Kinds of Love, and Lishmah

According to Maimonides, love and fear are foreign motivations that cannot replace unconditional commitment. In the third gate we saw that they can be treated either as emotions or as character traits containing some intellectual dimension. In any case, whether we treat them as emotion, in which case it is obvious that we are dealing with motivations entirely external to cognition, in the terminology of the second gate, impulse rather than will, or whether we treat them as having an intellectual element, they still involve an external justification, and that is incompatible with religious worship.

Yet as we saw, Rashi and the Raavad interpret those motivations themselves as the most basic religious motivations. It may be possible to understand this in light of the analysis we made in the third gate of the traits of love and fear. It may be that they understand love and fear, at least in their higher sense, as relations to the thing in itself and not to any of its characteristics, as we saw there. If so, love and fear too are actions without an external motive. An external motive usually refers to some feature of the entity toward which we relate. A direct relation to the essence is equivalent to action without a motive. If that is so, then there is no substantive disagreement here between them and Maimonides.⁷

Back to the Relation Between Lishmah and Intention

We may now perhaps understand why the requirement to serve God or study Torah lishmah does not use the term “intention” but specifically the term lishmah. True, we are not here dealing with preparation of an object for the sake of a mitzvah, as in the other appearances of lishmah, but the intention that accompanies the act is not similar to the intention required for performance of a mitzvah. In doing mitzvot, there is an intention that goes beyond the act itself; we intend to do the mitzvah in order to fulfill our obligation. But when we say that we study Torah or engage in the service of God lishmah, our meaning is that we do so without any reason at all.

Torah study is done for the sake of the Torah itself, that is, without a reason. The service of God generally is not done for the sake of the service of God, for that would be a tautology. It is done without any external reason. If so, the term lishmah is indeed the correct one in this context, and not the term “intention.”

Again, Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Yeshayahu Leibowitz dealt in many places with the concept of lishmah, which is very basic in his thought. His definition of the concept is exactly what I have proposed here, namely: without any reason. One example among many may be found in his essay “Practical Mitzvot,” where he writes:⁸

If practical mitzvot are the service of God and not service of man, then they need not be directed or oriented toward human needs. Any rationale for mitzvot in human needs, and any grounding of them in human needs, from any conception of need, cognitive, moral, social, national, empties the mitzvot of all religious meaning.

For if the mitzvot are the expression of a philosophical recognition, or if they have moral content, or if they improve society, or if they preserve the Jewish nation, then the one who fulfills them serves not God but himself, or society, or his people, and renders a good service to himself. In any case, he does not serve God, but uses the Torah of God for his own benefit and as a means to satisfy his needs.

In Leibowitz’s language this commitment is sometimes called “arbitrary,” but the intention is not meaningless action, like a lottery. As we saw in the second gate and also in the introduction to this gate, it is the most basic evaluative decision of all; it is simply impossible to offer it a logical justification on the basis of another principle outside it. In the appendix I will discuss this point and several of its implications at length.

Another important point, relevant to many of Leibowitz’s discussions and to discussions about him, is the extremity of his approach. Leibowitz concludes from this that prayer, and especially its contents, has no essential significance beyond the fact that it is imposed as an obligation, like any other mitzvah. All the intentions that should accompany prayer simply do not exist according to Leibowitz, except for the intention to fulfill one’s obligation, as with all other mitzvot; he identifies that intention with lishmah.

The usual argument for this is that any religious service with goals related to man is service of ourselves and not service of God. Hence it has no religious value at all.

But here we see the weak point in Leibowitzian positivism: his basic claim is correct, but he derives from it conclusions that are too extreme.⁸ As we saw, love and fear as motivations for the service of God are indeed unacceptable. The basic motivation must be simple commitment, without any external justification. But once that exists, there is no doubt that adding love and fear to it, not as the basic motivations but as additional levels of the service of God, is a great and important virtue.

The fact that the fundamental motivation for the service of God is duty does not prevent love and fear from accompanying it. By the same token, prayer is indeed a mitzvah like every other mitzvah, and it should be done even if one feels nothing beyond duty; but that does not rule out the possibility of adding further layers to prayer, layers of intentions, requests, and praises, as explicitly described by the sages and by all the halakhic authorities.

Another example of this may be seen with respect to the mitzvah of Torah study, as I will detail in the following note.

Note 38: The Motivation for Torah Study

The Sochatchover Rebbe writes in the introduction to his book Aglei Tal, on the labors of the Sabbath, about a common mistake concerning the mitzvah of Torah study:

While speaking of this, I remember what I have heard, that some people err against reason in the matter of studying our holy Torah. They say that one who studies and develops new insights, and is happy and delighted in his study, is not studying so much for its own sake as one who studies plainly, taking no enjoyment from the study and doing it only for the sake of the mitzvah. But one who studies and delights in his study has his own benefit mixed into the study.

In truth this is a famous mistake. On the contrary, this is the essence of the mitzvah of Torah study: to be joyful, happy, and delighted in one’s study. Then the words of Torah are absorbed into his blood. And since he enjoys the words of Torah, he becomes attached to the Torah.

The view of those who err is like Leibowitz’s, that the service of God should be done from a sense of duty and nothing more. But the author of Aglei Tal states that one should study with joy and pleasure, and that this is the essence of the mitzvah of study. If so, it is not clear how, on his view, Torah study lishmah should be defined.

According to what I have said, there is no problem with this definition, and Leibowitz’s conclusion does not follow necessarily from his premises. True, the basic motivation for study should be the sense of duty. But there is nothing to prevent pleasure, joy, fear, or love from accompanying it. As long as these are on the second level and do not constitute the basic motivation for the study, there is no defect in that.

Indeed, later there the Aglei Tal writes this explicitly:

And I concede that one who studies not for the sake of the mitzvah of study, but only because he takes pleasure in his study, is engaged in study not for its own sake, just as one who eats matzah not for the sake of the mitzvah but only for the pleasure of eating…

But one who studies for the sake of the mitzvah and delights in his study, this is study for its own sake, and it is wholly holy, for even the delight is a mitzvah.

In fact, as the Aglei Tal says, the joy of study adds value to it. It is not merely a second level that only eases the observance of the mitzvah; it itself constitutes a valuable component in the fulfillment of the mitzvah. As he writes, joy causes the words of Torah to be “absorbed into his blood.” Connection to Torah is created only through joy. As is well known, in classical Hebrew the verb “to know” denotes both connection and knowledge. Learning that adds knowledge connects to us things that were previously outside us. Therefore knowledge involves connection.

The inverse identity is also true. The verb “to rejoice” also denotes connection. Genuine connection, both materially and spiritually, is always accompanied by delight and joy. This is expressed even in halakhic terminology. We know the pair of length-measures called the expansive handbreadth and the constricted handbreadth. A constricted handbreadth is a compressed handbreadth, whereas an expansive handbreadth is slightly more than a handbreadth. Joy and laughter express a movement beyond oneself and connection to things outside oneself. Sadness is contraction and withdrawal into oneself.

If so, knowledge and joy are two verbs that accompany acts of connection, and the two are intertwined. Therefore every morning, in the blessings over the Torah, we say: “Please make the words of Your Torah sweet in our mouths…” We ask God that the words of Torah be pleasant to us, because joy in Torah is part of the mitzvah. It is therefore clear that joy cannot be opposed to the obligation of study.

Beyond all this, it is very important to distinguish between the claim that one aspect is more important than another and the claim that it is more basic. What is more basic is not always what is more important.

When we say that unconditional commitment is the most basic aspect of the service of God, or of prayer, we do not thereby say that it is the most important aspect. It may be that serving God out of love and fear is far superior, provided they constitute an additional level and not a replacement, as in the previous note, but they are not the basic infrastructure without which there is no service of God. As we shall see in the following note, it is often precisely the opposite: the more important, elevated, and unique an aspect is, the less basic it is, and vice versa.

Note 39: Between “Important” and “Basic”

Nahmanides, in his commentary to Exodus 20:8, discusses the duty to observe the Sabbath. According to most enumerators of the commandments, with the exception of Saadia Gaon, this duty is expressed in the list of commandments as two different mitzvot: a positive commandment, “Remember,” and a negative commandment, “Observe.” Nahmanides there distinguishes between positive and negative commandments, and we touched briefly on his distinction in note 29 of the first book. Here I want to focus on a secondary point that arises in his words there, concerning the relation between positive and negative commandments:

It is also true that the quality of “Remember” is alluded to in positive commandments, and it emerges from the quality of love and belongs to the quality of mercy. For one who performs his master’s commandments is beloved to him, and his master has mercy upon him. The quality of “Observe” is in the negative commandments, and it belongs to the quality of judgment and emerges from the quality of fear. For one who refrains from doing what is evil in the eyes of his master fears him.

Therefore positive commandments are greater than negative commandments, just as love is greater than fear. For one who fulfills and does with his body and his wealth the will of his master is greater than one who merely refrains from doing evil in his sight. That is why they said that a positive commandment comes and overrides a negative commandment. And for this reason the punishment for negative commandments is greater, and punishment is imposed in them, such as lashes and death, whereas no such punishment is imposed at all for positive commandments, except against those who rebel…

After determining that positive commandments express love of God and negative commandments express fear of Him, Nahmanides concludes that positive commandments are greater than negative commandments.

Rabbi Chavel, in his edition, cites several commentators who noted from several contexts that it is specifically negative commandments that are more severe.

But in truth the difficulty is not on Nahmanides, but on the Talmud itself. In halakha in general there are aspects in which positive commandments are more severe; for example, when a positive and a negative commandment conflict, the rule is that the positive commandment overrides the negative one. On the other hand, there are aspects in which the negative commandment is more severe; for example, a person must spend all his wealth in order to avoid violating a negative commandment, whereas that is not the case with respect to a positive commandment.

Moreover, this difficulty raised against Nahmanides is very strange, for Nahmanides himself deals with it explicitly. He himself notes the contradiction, and his entire discussion there is intended to resolve it.⁹

The gist of Nahmanides’ words is that one must distinguish between “important” and “basic.” A positive commandment is more important, but the duty to avoid failure is more basic. The basic demand is required of every person, at every level. It is an elementary demand: do not fail. The more important and superior demand is not required of everyone, but only of those possessing special elevation. Therefore a person is not required to spend all his wealth in order to fulfill a positive commandment, but he is required to do so in order not to violate a negative one.

Nahmanides’ explanation is not complete, however, because it still is not clear why, when a positive and a negative commandment conflict, halakha rules that the positive overrides the negative. There the comparison between the two alternatives is not simple at all. If he violates the positive commandment, he preserves the negative commandment but nullifies the positive one. If he keeps the positive, he violates the negative. That is, the comparison is not between different commandments, but between the difference in value between two severe states, fulfilling a positive commandment and violating a negative one, and the difference between two lighter states, nullifying a positive commandment and avoiding a negative one. These differences do not stand in a simple relation. For discussion of this, see Meshekh Chokhmah, Deuteronomy 34:12, though this is not the place.¹⁰

In any event, what emerges from Nahmanides is that there are two opposite relations between the important and the basic. On the one hand, realization of the important has greater value; on the other hand, failure of the basic is more severe.

That is exactly what we saw regarding the service of God and Torah study lishmah. On the one hand, we must act from a sense of duty. This is the most basic service of God. On the other hand, there is criticism of those who do only that, because service from love and fear is qualitatively superior and more important. As we saw, there is no contradiction between these two claims. The sense of duty is more basic, and therefore it is required of everyone; one who lacks such a sense, all his love is worth nothing, for he serves himself and not God. On the other hand, one who has only that level performs a lesser service than one whose service also contains dimensions of love and fear.

Leibowitz was therefore mistaken in arguing that there is no place at all for love and fear in the service of God. They do have a place, and it is even a more important and elevated place than mere service from obligation. But he is correct that love and fear without commitment are valueless. Their value exists only if love and fear come merely as an additional level above commitment and not as its replacement. Put differently: commitment is the basic thing, and love and fear are the important things.

Lishmah and the Question of Prescription

The concept of lishmah as presented here is the Torah term for what I called in the introduction “ontological prescription.” We saw there that the principle of value capable of grounding commitment to the Torah and halakha can only be observation of “the Torah as it is in itself,” that is, of God. We saw that this is a directional, “colored” essence, such that observing it itself dictates commitment. It is not subject to Hume’s naturalistic fallacy.

This is precisely the essence of the halakhic concept of Torah study and service of God lishmah. It is action without an external reason, without an external value-principle, but rather with unconditional commitment that arises from the very recognition of the existence of the obligating essence. We study Torah because we have encountered the Torah, and that is all.

It is not surprising at all that when we examine commitment to the Torah and to its study, taking into account that the Torah is a supra-categorical system, we find ourselves without any argument for that commitment. There is not, and cannot be, an argument grounding the very possibility of argument. A value-principle that grounds the possibility of value-principles does not exist. The halakhic and Torah expression of this is the concept of lishmah, as we have encountered it here.

A Contemporary Application: The Trend of “Connecting”¹¹

This is the place to comment on all the trends of “connecting” that have become common in the religious world over the last generation. In the religious world there is a powerful demand to develop identification with the Torah and the mitzvot, and opposition to blind obedience to them. At first glance, this demand seems to emerge from deep religious identification, and therefore one would expect it to be welcomed. Yet, surprisingly, most of the religious establishment, in its various shades, usually opposes it. Many accuse that establishment of petrification and lack of openness to deep and exalted desires. After all, what could be better than developing experiential identification with the service of God?

Some explain this as a power-driven desire to preserve hegemony, or more sympathetically, as a desire to preserve the stability of the religious framework. The concern is that if service is based on identification, then when identification disappears, the service too will disappear.

But in light of what we have said here, these matters take on a deeper significance. These demands for “connection” can come from two very different directions: a desire to make identification a substitute for commitment, or a desire to add identification to commitment. When the demand comes from the first direction, it is plainly invalid, as we saw above. It does not reflect service of God, but service of oneself. But if it comes from the second direction, it is indeed positive.

The distinction we have made here is therefore very important on the practical plane as well. True, it is difficult to discern a person’s motivation, which lies within the heart. This is similar to the demands for religious renewal discussed above, which are also deeply connected to our subject. Still, we are not exempt from being aware that there are two different shades of such demands and from trying to diagnose their source and direction. It is true that automatic rejection of every such demand fails to give expression to positive tendencies, and is therefore tactically problematic, aside from being intrinsically incorrect as well.

The model proposed here as a constitutive basis for the service of God is therefore a two-level model: commitment at the foundation, and above it on the second level, “connection,” that is, emotional identification. This is not Leibowitz’s model, which believes exclusively in the first level, commitment, nor is it the model of those who demand connection as a substitute for commitment, who believe exclusively in the second level. My proposal also differs from the approach of Rabbi Amital, in the article mentioned above, where he proposed an intermediate term, “loyalty,” as a substitute for the whole structure. Our model is a classic yeshiva-style solution to the dilemma, according to the dialectical method of two distinct categories.¹²

One final point relevant to this subject. In light of what has been said here, there is actually no contradiction at all between commitment and connection. Commitment, as stated, expresses the deepest possible identification with the system to which we are committed. It is the foundational principle that cannot be based on any more fundamental principle. Therefore service from commitment does not contradict “connection.”

The contradiction arises only when the term “connection” is understood on the emotional plane rather than on the plane of will and choice. Commitment is our deepest will, but it is not necessarily accompanied by conscious emotional identification. In the first Hasidic intermezzo we saw that there are situations in which the mind is detached from the heart, and in such cases the mind is what must determine the direction and call upon the heart to follow it. Emotional identification is important, but not as the guide to the directions of growth; rather, as a companion that provides force and power, an engine, for the direction that the mind has chosen.

What is said in this section is only an application of what was said in that intermezzo, using the conceptual system developed in the course of our discussion since then. The concept of lishmah gives halakhic expression to what the author of Tanya describes there as the mode of operation of the divine soul.

In the following note we shall see that the view according to which commitment is the basis of connection is a conscious and explicit halakhic ideology.

Note 40: “If as Children, if as Servants”: On the Relation Between Commitment and Emotion in Halakha

In many contexts, halakha wears an ice-cold rationalist garment. This is especially striking in situations in which we would expect a dominant emotional dimension. For example, in prayer we might expect to find such an experiential dimension, and we have already seen above that the foundation of prayer is cold and non-experiential. The experience appears only on the second level.

Another striking example is the marriage ceremony. Usually the common attitude toward this ceremony is highly emotional. This is particularly notable against the absurd backdrop of our own day, in which that ceremony has almost no meaning left except for the formal meaning of commitment, since many couples already live together before marriage. And still, the emotional dimensions are intensified enormously. Today the ceremony is generally a kind of production designed to create a unique experience for the participants.

By contrast, specifically in the religious public, where by nature the marriage ceremony has far greater significance beyond the formal contexts of commitment, the emphasis is placed mainly on the formal dimensions. Everything else is a matter for the participants themselves, and they can decide whether and to what extent they wish to pour experiential or emotional contents into the ceremony. Halakha deals mainly with the cold formal dimensions.

A blunt expression of this appears at the beginning of the wedding canopy ceremony, at the stage when everyone is supposed to be seized by emotion and participation in the experience of the young couple. At precisely that point someone, usually a rabbi or another respected person, stands and reads aloud the ketubbah, the marriage contract. In this document, drawn up like any contract between two parties, the financial obligations are listed, and it is specified what will be done to one who fails to fulfill them, from which assets his debt will be collected, his immovable property, and even the cloak on his shoulder, and the like.¹³

In fact, the entire marriage ceremony is full of formal halakhic expressions, even if they are felt less sharply than the reading of the ketubbah. Not to mention the Torah-halakhic discussions concerning marriage and the wedding canopy, which deal only with the formal legal rules and contain no reference at all to feeling or experience.

The message conveyed by such a ceremony is the classical halakhic message. Marriage is first and foremost a contract of mutual commitment. This does not mean that the relationship thereby created contains no experiential or emotional dimensions, but its primary basis is contractual and formal. On that basis one may, and should, build additional levels, experiential or emotional, but this is not an indispensable part of the legal establishment of marriage.

It seems that this expresses a broader halakhic conception, according to which formality is a necessary stage on the way to experience and essence. Sometimes this approach creates the impression that formality replaces experiential and emotional essence, but that is a Leibowitzian mistake. It is an initial and necessary basis for creating that essence, not a substitute for it.

One can survey other ceremonies in the same way, burial, memorials, redemption of the firstborn, and also the festivals and holy days, whose content is a message accompanying the formal mitzvot that define the festival. It would be interesting to conduct a survey examining what occupies an observant Jew during Passover or Sukkot. Is it remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, or rather a hysterical cleaning of the house for leaven, the building of a sukkah, and checking the fitness and beautification of the four species? Shavuot is perhaps an exception, since it has no distinctive mitzvot beyond what was done in the Temple.

This halakhic relation between the two levels can be understood in several ways:

1. Every such halakhic act has two dimensions, the experiential and the formal. Halakha deals with the formalism and leaves it to us to shape the essence.
2. Only the formalism is important, and experience is a neutral dimension.
3. The formalism shapes the essence.

It seems that the Torah-halakhic conception is the third. The formalism is necessary, and so is the essence. But the formalism is a condition for a proper experiential essence. Without it, experience or feeling will arise in forms and intensities that are not right.

Maimonides explains in the Laws of Marriage that before the giving of the Torah, a man would meet a woman in the marketplace and bring her into his home, and in that way they would marry. After the giving of the Torah an earlier stage was added, called kiddushin, or betrothal, a preparatory stage toward marriage. This stage is formal-halakhic in essence, whereas marriage itself is the creation of the bond proper, and indeed there are almost no specific laws attached to it. The precedence given to the formal stage as preparation for the emotional stage teaches the conception I presented above.

A marriage formed in a purely emotional way, without any contractual-formal infrastructure, will not be built correctly even on the emotional plane itself. Only if, from the very beginning, while all the rosy emotions are still present, there exists an unconditional contractual commitment, whereby each person knows that he owes his spouse what he has committed himself to in the contract, even if he will not feel like doing so, only then does he have motivation to do it in a more whole and harmonious way. In that way the experience and the emotion are built in a more complete and correct way. One who builds everything on feeling and experience, and when these are absent the whole structure collapses, has not built the structure correctly. Part of the structure is the mortar between the bricks. The infrastructure of commitment creates an emotional bond that may be less stormy, but is undoubtedly more complete.

The experiential marriage of the white knight who found the princess of his dreams often ends tragically and unsuccessfully, sometimes with startling speed.

Perhaps this is what the sages meant when they said:

Any love that depends on something, including even the feeling of love itself, as noted above in the third gate, chapter 8, and note 25, when the thing ceases, the love ceases. But any love that does not depend on something, when the thing ceases, the love does not cease.

“No One Is Free Except One Who Engages in Torah”

Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, in the course of Gate IV of Nefesh HaChayim, mainly chapters 15-18, and Leibowitz in the continuation of the same essay, continue the line of argument and derive from it the essential freedom of the servant of God.

Service of God, or any human activity, that is aimed at some need or value points to subjugation of the person to that need or value. If that need is a response to the person’s own impulse, which in our culture is often considered the peak of freedom, it is really deep enslavement. As we saw in the second gate, impulse is not part of the person himself, but an intimate periphery of his self. Therefore one who responds automatically to his impulse is not free but a slave to his impulses.

Hence one who does not serve God because of his needs, and not because of any external justification beyond the service of God itself, is truly free. He is liberated from the chains of all reality and in fact acts against it. He does deeds that are not derived from reality and are not natural to it. All his motivations are derived from considerations and commitments unrelated to the considerations of this world, and therefore he is truly free. We dealt with this point in the third gate, and will not return to it here.

Concerning this, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi already said in his famous aphorism, than which nothing could be more fitting to conclude the chapter:

The servants of time are servants of servants. The servant of God alone is free.

Chapter 2: Freedom: Between Command and Essence

Introduction

In this chapter I will present several implications of what we have seen in the present gate so far, implications concerning the relation between command and essence in the mitzvot of the Torah, and the relation between both of these and the concept of lishmah as we have encountered it here.

From the very definition of the service of God lishmah, as presented in the previous chapter, the importance and centrality of halakha emerge clearly. The fact that the Jewish religious system includes a ramified and detailed network of practical commands is one of the essential points distinguishing it from other religions. For this reason Kant defined Judaism as a collection of statutory laws and not as a religion in the usual sense.¹⁴

Halakha is the purest expression of that unconditional commitment. A religion that demands nothing of a person but only gives to him will not express such commitment, and Leibowitz, as expected, repeats this many times. Halakha is the system of norms and demands that the believing person must meet as an expression of that commitment.

Yet such a picture naturally brings with it the conception that the observance of mitzvot is not intended to achieve anything, but that its value lies wholly within itself. In fact, any reason or purpose given for observance of the mitzvot detracts, to some extent, from their religious meaning, that is, from doing them lishmah.

It is therefore not surprising to discover that we are fundamentally required to serve God lishmah. Beyond Torah study, which must be undertaken lishmah, every other act of mitzvah is also required to be accompanied by intentions. We saw above something of the relation between this concept and lishmah. The principal content of those intentions is “to fulfill one’s obligation,” and not necessarily other essential contents, which may certainly be desirable, but are not necessary.¹⁵ Leibowitz, as expected, insists with full force that the existence of any other aspect vitiates the very concepts of the service of God. In his view there can be no essential reasons for the mitzvot, for otherwise a person serves himself and not God.

Yet despite the apparent harmony of this picture, it is certainly incorrect. Every mitzvah also has essential reasons beyond our sheer obligation to obey it. As we saw above, in the discussion of lishmah as opposed to love and fear, the Leibowitzian argument cannot demonstrate the impossibility of reasons; it can only show that they cannot serve as the basis of religious commitment. Their existence on a second level, beyond the basic commitment, is not theologically unfounded.

The opposite is true. There are significant theological reasons in favor of the claim that every mitzvah has various essential reasons. God’s goodness, and His will to bestow good, stand in tension with demands for senseless obedience.

The solution to this dilemma is precisely the description I proposed. The mitzvot indeed achieve various purposes, but these are not the reasons for our commitment to them and our performance of them. The commitment is lishmah, but from God’s perspective they are intended to benefit us by achieving various goals.

Obedience and Essence

In the standard halakhic definition, every mitzvah, whether positive or negative, has at least two levels: obedience itself, or disobedience, to the command, and the consequences of the act of the mitzvah, or the transgression. These consequences are generally spiritual. Some interpret them as an effect of the mitzvah-act upon the spiritual worlds, while others interpret them as an effect that repairs the soul of the person who performs it, or the society in which he lives.

One source for this conception is Ramchal’s Derekh Hashem, chapter 4, where he writes:¹⁷

The in general of the commandments, the positive and the negative, each is directed toward an end: the acquisition in man and strengthening in him of one of the degrees of true perfection, and the removal of one of the aspects of darkness and deficiency, through doing that positive commandment or refraining from that negative one…

As for the act of the mitzvah, its purpose for man is clear: to fulfill his Creator’s command and do His will. He fulfills His blessed will in two ways, one following from the other. First, by doing what He commanded him to do. Second, through this act he perfects himself in one of the degrees of perfection, which is the result of that mitzvah. Thus His blessed will is fulfilled, for He wills that man be perfected and come to enjoy His goodness.

The distinction between these two components underlies quite a number of halakhic phenomena. In this chapter I will briefly describe some of them. There are differing views on these matters, beginning with the very question whether mitzvot require intention, and I do not claim to cover them all here. The point is mainly to illustrate some of the meanings of what has been said thus far.

The point of departure for the discussion is the need for intention in the course of performing a mitzvah. In Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s essay “Essay on Repentance,”¹⁶ he associates the intention required in performing a mitzvah with the duty of obedience, whereas the act of the mitzvah itself is associated there with achieving the purposes of the mitzvah. According to Rabbi Elchanan, fulfilling a mitzvah requires both components: one that expresses obedience, and another that actually brings about the intended result. For example, putting on tefillin without intending to fulfill the obligation of the mitzvah of tefillin does amount to performance of the act, and the spiritual purposes of the mitzvah are indeed achieved, but the dimension of obedience is still lacking, because without awareness there is no meaning to obedience. Obedience must be conscious and cannot be merely implicit.¹⁷

The same is true with respect to sins. In order to commit a transgression, one must perform the act of transgression, and then the spiritual damage is created. But the dimension of disobedience will be part of the transgression only when the perpetrator is aware that this is indeed a forbidden act.

According to halakha, even an unwitting transgression is still a transgression, and sometimes it entails punishment or atonement, a sacrifice or payment. But the dimension of guilt is reduced, since the person was unwitting, meaning that he was not fully aware that the act was a transgression. Here the act of transgression exists, but the dimension of disobedience is missing, and therefore it is a lighter transgression. In legal terminology, the criminal intent is absent.¹⁸

There are opposite cases, in which there is intent to transgress but no act of transgression. For example, the Gemara in Tractate Nazir 23a discusses one “who intended to have pork come to his hand, and lamb came to his hand instead.” Here criminal intent exists, but in practice no transgression was performed. In legal terms this is an attempted crime, for example attempted murder that does not succeed, and in some systems it is itself defined as an offense.

In halakha, such an act is not formally defined as a transgression, but the Gemara there states that one who does this requires atonement. That is, one cannot regard such an act as entirely neutral. Criminal intent is not considered a transgression in itself, but neither is it something wholly neutral.¹⁹

If so, a “complete” transgression, like a complete mitzvah, requires both components: intention, meaning awareness,²⁰ and action.

Some Implications

1. One implication of this distinction between the two components is found in the well-known words of Rabbi Yaakov of Lisa, author of Netivot HaMishpat, on Choshen Mishpat 234, concerning one who unwittingly violates a rabbinic prohibition. The author of Netivot HaMishpat claims that one who unwittingly violates a rabbinic prohibition, unlike one who unwittingly violates a Torah prohibition, has committed no prohibition at all.²¹

There are major disputes on this issue, and the matter is rather problematic. But what concerns us here is the reasoning given there. According to the Netivot, rabbinic prohibitions contain no essential component at all, only obedience. The duty to heed the sages, at least according to Maimonides in Principle I and at the opening of the Laws of Rebels, is derived from the Torah’s command not to deviate from what they instruct you. This means there is a duty of obedience, but no essential importance to the contents themselves. For that reason, one who unwittingly violates a rabbinic prohibition, that is, without awareness, certainly has not sinned in disobedience, since he did not know there was any prohibition involved, and therefore he has done nothing. By contrast, in a Torah prohibition, although the unwitting sinner is not regarded as rebelling against the authority of halakha, the spiritual damage is caused by the very fact that the act was done.

2. Another implication of this distinction was mentioned in note 20 above, where we saw that the prophet Jeremiah asks God to punish the men of Anathoth by causing them to give charity to unworthy poor people, and thereby lose the mitzvah of charity. This is a case of proper intention that does not find expression in an act of mitzvah, assuming that charity to an unworthy poor person is not an act of mitzvah.

3. Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman in the essay cited above brings the Talmudic statement that if a person intended to perform a mitzvah but was prevented by circumstances, Scripture credits him as though he had performed it. In his view, it is clear that this counts as obedience to God, but the spiritual repair produced by actually doing the mitzvah cannot arise in such a case, because in the end the mitzvah was not performed.

4. Likewise, a perfectly righteous person who later regrets his earlier good deeds, the Gemara in Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40b, says that he loses his merits. Rabbi Elchanan explains there that he loses the merits that derive from obedience, but the good consequences of the deeds themselves still remain, because in the end the deeds were actually done.

Kantianism versus Taoism in Halakha

In light of what has been said here, we can readily understand the well-known saying of the sages: “Greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does,” Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 31a, and parallels. Many have struggled to explain this dictum, since it appears to contradict simple intuition. At first glance, one who is not commanded but acts voluntarily seems greater. I will discuss this further in the next chapter in connection with character refinement. Many explanations have been offered, most of them based on “technical” considerations, for example that one who is commanded has a stronger impulse resisting the act, so overcoming it is a higher virtue. In many respects it is easy to be a volunteer and harder to be obligated.

But from what we have said here, a simpler explanation emerges. One who is commanded and does fulfills two different things: he obeys God, and in addition he achieves spiritual results by means of the act of the mitzvah. By contrast, one who is not commanded does indeed achieve good results, but his act does not express obedience. In that respect, there is no doubt that the one who is commanded and does is greater.

In note 6 above I dealt briefly with the character of command-verses in the Torah. We saw there that a command-verse is not merely a declarative verse; it contains an additional component, the command. Thus a verse commanding Sabbath observance contains two dimensions:

1. A declarative dimension: factual revelation about the value contained in the norm of observing the Sabbath.
2. An imperative dimension: the imposition of an obligation to uphold the norm.

We can now understand the importance of these two components. The revelation that Sabbath observance is an important norm, together with our recognition of the many spiritual benefits that may arise from observing the Sabbath, can lead to an act of essential importance. But there is no meaning to service of God as obedience unless there is a command. Obedience exists only when there is a command that can be obeyed or defied. In order to make possible for us a service of God as those who are commanded and do, the Torah addresses us not only with declarative verses but with command-verses as well.

The picture that emerges here is Kantian in essence. An act has value only if it is performed from awareness of the duty to perform it. A voluntary act may perhaps deserve a medal, but it cannot be considered an act of value, religious or moral. The sense of duty and its fulfillment are necessary parts of the evaluation and judgment of the value of every moral act. As we saw above, opposed to this stands analytic Taoism, which locates the value in the act itself, so that motivations, including the sense of duty, do not matter to it at all.

For the Taoist, declarative verses are certainly enough, and command and obedience have no importance. The very fact that the Torah contains command-verses clearly demonstrates its Kantian character.

If so, the dictum that “greater is one who is commanded and does” means that Jewish morality and Jewish service of God are not Taoistic. The sense of duty, and the intention to obey and not to fail, are inseparable parts of the value of the religious act.

Lishmah: Between Kant and Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin

As we have seen until now, the concept of lishmah means acting from a sheer sense of duty and without any other external justification. At first glance, this is simply the Kantian sense of duty, which is a necessary condition for the evaluative meaning of an act, both morally and religiously.

In the third gate I discussed at length the basis of this Kantian conception, which opposes analytic Taoism. In fact, this is a confrontation between a conception of freedom in the sense of license as the basic value and a conception of freedom in the sense of liberty as the fundamental value. As we saw there, liberty requires a framework imposed from outside, for otherwise a free act has no meaning as liberty. This is another angle from which the importance of command in the Torah may be viewed. Command does not contradict our autonomy; it is precisely what constitutes it.

We can now understand that the Kantian sense of duty is a kind of projection of the concept of lishmah. The reasons for commitment to the mitzvot and to halakha, that is, the object we observe in order to arrive at a decision about unconditional commitment, are located in higher worlds. In fact, this is God Himself, who is above all worlds. The Kantian grounding for commitment to morality proceeds similarly. As we saw, it too must be the result of an observation of the object of “the good.” This “object” is nothing other than a projection of divinity itself. It is the moral aspect, or the moral appearance, of divinity in the world.

Analyticity attacks Kantianism for the same reasons that it attacks religious commitment. Sometimes this is itself done from moral considerations, but we have already seen more than once that consistency is not exactly the chief light by which analyticity walks.

Let me repeat here as well: the way to understand these commitments is simply not to ignore intuitions that exist within every one of us. If we do not suppress them as belonging to “non-rational” or “primitive” layers, but understand that their source lies in higher worlds, in kinds of beings unfamiliar to us and therefore indescribable in the terms of our world, then all the problems and paradoxes that so disturb the peace of mind of the analytic philosophers simply do not arise.²²

Conclusion

In light of the centrality of halakha, we would expect that the more central a given obligation is, the more it would belong to an inner core of halakha; and the less central a given norm is, the more likely we would be to find it entirely outside halakha. But, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Torah presents a very surprising phenomenon: some of the most basic obligations it recognizes are not included in the commands of halakha. In the next chapter I will discuss the meaning and scope of this phenomenon. There too we shall return once again to the relation between command and essence.

Chapter 3: On “Mitzvot” That Are Not Derived from Command²³

Introduction: Halakha, Mitzvot, and What Lies Beyond

It is well known that the foundation of the entire Torah is halakha. As we saw in the previous chapter, one of the main reasons for this is that halakha gives expression to obligation, or the sense of duty, which is the focal point of the service of God, as distinct from “religiosity” in its modern sense.²⁴ Yeshayahu Leibowitz formulated this sharply, as was his way, by saying that various sects and movements were included within Judaism, or separated from it, not because of their views, but solely on the basis of their commitment to halakha. For example, Hasidism, despite its innovative views that appeared to many to fall outside traditional bounds, is today included within halakhic Judaism, what is now called Orthodoxy. By contrast, Karaism and similar movements were decisively placed outside the boundary solely because of their lack of commitment to halakha. Some have already noted that even Spinoza, who today is regarded as a heretic because of his views, was driven out of traditional Judaism mainly because the conclusions of those views entailed a lack of commitment to halakha.

Note 41: What Is “Religious”? On Morality and Religiosity as Criteria of Religiosity

For many people in our time, the term “religion,” or “a religious person,” is associated with religiosity and morality. In the Jewish context, by contrast, religiosity is usually expressed in other ways. A religious Jew is generally someone committed to a strict normative system, halakha, and less to religious experiences or even to moral behavior.

For this reason, Kant tended to classify Judaism as a kind of social regulation rather than a religion.²⁵ His students and followers criticized him for not knowing Judaism well enough and for taking a position out of ignorance. But it seems there is something deep in Kant’s characterization, even if he indeed did not know Judaism in depth.

The modern criteria for religiosity are products of the Christian concept of religion. Already at the beginning of Christianity’s formation there was criticism of Pharisaic Judaism, which placed halakha, the normative part of Torah, at the center and emphasized experience and morality less. Therefore Christianity abolished practical mitzvot and placed emphasis on morality and religious experience. That criticism was indeed based on correct observations, and the Christian alternative created a different form of religiosity, one centered specifically on the elements missing in Pharisaic Judaism, and therefore also in the Judaism of the generations of exile that continued it.²⁶

To be sure, there is substance to this criticism also on more essential planes. This lack is indeed sometimes problematic, and a cold religiosity can seem somewhat detached. For this reason there has been a renewed infiltration in recent generations of such “Christian” elements into Judaism. This infiltration takes place through Kabbalah, though in its central stream even it is essentially an intellectual discipline, and through Hasidism, and finally also in the Judaism of modern Orthodoxy, which believes in integrating external ideas into Judaism, including these characteristics.

One might say that the system of mitzvot also includes the mitzvah of love of God, which seems on its face to be a religious experience, and that there are also explicit verses and many sayings of the sages emphasizing the importance of moral duties. If so, how can we claim that morality is not an essential category in Judaism?

The answer is empirical. In the end, the moral or religious-experiential trait was not accepted as an essential parameter of Jewish religiosity.²⁷ A person who murders is considered a religious Jew who failed, whereas a person who does not eat kosher is, of course, not considered a religious Jew at all. If so, at least on the empirical level, morality does not constitute a basic criterion of religiosity within Judaism, unlike the Christian position, which places it at the center.

Within the religious renewal mentioned above, many criticize this character of halakha and Judaism and regard it as an exilic distortion. Is “You shall not murder” less severe than eating pork? Certainly not. So why is it not an essential criterion of Jewish religiosity?

Surprisingly, the answer lies on the logical plane.²⁸ When we seek to define something, we must describe its distinctive features. We would not define a human being as something that breathes, for animals breathe too. We define him as a living being with consciousness, speech, and the like, because these are the distinctive traits of the human species. For precisely the same reason, when we seek to define the term “religious,” we must describe its distinctive characteristics. To say that it is a person committed to morality is true, but not distinctive. Every human being as such is supposed to be committed to morality. Morality therefore cannot serve as part of the definition of Judaism, because it is not unique to it.

I do not mean to say that the moral aspect is unimportant, or even that it is less important than the ritual commandments, for at least some of the moral commandments are of the highest halakhic importance. In the case of murder, one is commanded to be killed rather than transgress. I mean only that it cannot serve as a distinctive definition of Judaism.²⁹

We saw in the previous gate that Maimonides, in Laws of Kings 8:11, rejects performance of moral mitzvot on the basis of autonomous reason. That is, the religious service of God must add a religious dimension even to morality.³⁰ If so, morality as such certainly does not define religiosity. On the contrary, such a definition would be very misleading, because we would tend to ascribe it to the moral behavior itself, whereas the religious value of the moral act arises specifically from the fact that it is done as part of the service of God and not from its morality as such.

Of course, behind the logical analysis I have proposed lies a religious-evaluative assumption: Judaism is not a substitute for humanity but an addition to it. In the same law Maimonides rules that a non-Jew who keeps the seven Noahide commandments because his reason so dictates “is not among the pious of the nations of the world but among their wise.” Some textual versions of Maimonides read “and not among their wise,” but it seems that the version with “but” is better established. See the textual apparatus in the Frankel edition there. The conclusion is that the moral act as such has value, but not religious value. One who does it is wise, that is, moral, but not a servant of God.

If so, the Torah demands of every Jew three different levels of service:³³

1. To be wise, that is, moral, like every other human being. This demand applies to everyone, even to a non-Jew who is not included in the category of a resident alien.
2. To be a resident alien, that is, to fulfill the moral commandments because God commanded them, as part of the service of God. According to the version “but among their wise” in Maimonides’ text, this is an additional demand and not an alternative one, as the other version would imply. We saw in the previous gate that Maimonides’ commentators explain that his words apply to Jews as well.
3. To fulfill the commandments unique to Israel, from that same motive.

We can now see more sharply that the trait of fulfilling moral commandments, and even fulfilling them as part of the service of God, cannot serve as a distinctive trait of Jews and therefore it is not correct to define Jewish religiosity in that way. Judaism is defined specifically through its ritual characteristics.

If so, one who murders, steals, or harms another person is a Jew, but he is not a human being. What he lacks is the first level, not the second and third levels, which are unique to Judaism. If so, it is not less important, but it is less unique. Definition is based on the unique and not necessarily on the important.³¹

Let me add one more aspect. The first of these three planes, the moral one, parallels what I called in the body of the chapter the essential aspect of the mitzvot. This is the result they are supposed to achieve, and for whose sake we were commanded in them. But as we saw, in addition to that aspect every mitzvah also has an aspect of command and obedience to command. The value in fulfilling the command, which is an added value beyond the value achieved through the substance of the mitzvah itself, is precisely the essence of the second and third planes listed above. The concept of lishmah is expressed mainly in those layers.

I mentioned that part of the new criticism of halakhic Judaism concerns religiosity. Here too there is a religious value that is Christian in its basis, at least in its proportion and in its dominance within religious consciousness. The analysis made above therefore applies here as well. First, religiosity is not unique to Judaism, for every religion is characterized by it to some degree. Hence one may argue that it is not a distinctive feature of Judaism and therefore is not a criterion for defining Judaism. To be sure, with respect to religiosity there are those who will argue that in truth it should have no place at all in the service of God. That is, not only is it not unique, it is not needed at all, certainly not as a basic condition of Jewish religiosity. This is attested by the small number of early sources dealing with religiosity. Even the mitzvot of love and fear of God are not necessarily interpreted as belonging to the experiential-religious sphere. See the discussion I conducted of the concept of love in the third gate.

In the previous chapter we saw that mitzvot and the service of God do have essential reasons beyond the bare duty of obedience. Every mitzvah has reasons and purposes that it achieves, even though commitment to perform and obey it is not conditioned by them. We saw there that the existence of reasons is not necessarily opposed to the concept of the service of God lishmah. If the motivation to fulfill the mitzvot is not conditioned by those reasons, then this is service of God lishmah, even if in the end we also achieve those purposes, and even if we want to achieve them.

The conclusion of the previous chapter, then, is that every mitzvah has two levels: obedience, the lishmah dimension, and essence. Obedience is carried out within a context of command, which gives a framework imposed on us from outside. As we saw, this reality expresses the fact that the basic value of the servant of God is liberty and not license. Let us now advance one more step in the dialectic between obedience and essence.

Strangely enough, despite all that has been said thus far, the Torah contains quite a number of extremely fundamental elements that do not enter the system of mitzvot at all. Moreover, this does not always happen because their importance is lesser; sometimes it is specifically because of their great importance. As we shall see below, some of the most fundamental spiritual and religious obligations do not fully enter the system of mitzvot, apparently specifically because of their importance.

This is a problematic phenomenon, especially against the backdrop of what we have seen thus far. If command is indeed the essence of halakha, and essence alone does not count as service of God at all, then it is unclear how in any halakhic area, especially in such important ones, there can be no dimension of command. These acts lie entirely outside the boundaries of halakha and contain only dimensions of purpose, an external goal, without any dimension of obedience and commitment. In the terminology of this gate, one would say that the dimension of lishmah is almost entirely absent in these mitzvot.

In this chapter I will deal with these points. First I will describe several of them, and afterward I will return to discuss their meaning and status within the service of God in general, and their relation to concepts of liberty.

Examples of Service of God Without Dimensions of Obedience

There are several examples of this basic principle. I will discuss some of the more important ones, one by one:

1. The mitzvah of repentance.
2. Character refinement.
3. Torah study.
4. Love of God.
5. Choice.

Those of these examples that do appear in the enumeration of commandments appear immediately near its beginning, and are therefore also elaborated in Sefer HaMadda of Maimonides, the first and most foundational of the fourteen books of the Mishneh Torah. This indicates that they are among the most fundamental bases of Torah and the service of God. As we shall see below, despite the presence of these mitzvot in the list of commandments, they are not fully included in halakha, and some items on this list are not included in the count of commandments at all.

In the course of the brief discussion of these subjects, I will also point to several different mechanisms that may explain this unique phenomenon: why such basic matters do not enter fully into the system of mitzvot.

It should be noted that most of these matters are discussed by Maimonides in the framework of the Laws of Repentance. Later I will draw conclusions from this regarding the nature of those laws in Maimonides.

In light of the foregoing, questions arise concerning the mitzvah of faith in God, which did enter the system of mitzvot despite, and perhaps because of, its being one of the very foundations of Torah and halakha. I will therefore conclude with a discussion of the mitzvah of faith, which opens Maimonides’ list of commandments.

1. The Mitzvah of Repentance

Nahmanides, in his commentary to Deuteronomy, at the beginning of chapter 30, states simply that there is a mitzvah to repent. This mitzvah is learned from the verse there, “And you shall return to the Lord your God.” By contrast, Maimonides writes in Laws of Repentance 7:5 that this verse is a promise by God that Israel will in the end repent. As Nahmanides himself already notes there, according to Maimonides this is not a positive commandment but a prophecy and a promise. This dispute was also discussed above in note 31.

But reflection on other sources in Maimonides’ writings reveals an apparent contradiction on this point. On the one hand, in Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 73, he writes:

He commanded us to confess the sins and iniquities that we have committed before God, exalted be He, and to speak them together with repentance.

There is no command here to repent. The matter of confession is mentioned here as a conditional mitzvah. If a person repents, he must confess in the course of repentance. The mitzvah to repent itself is not mentioned in Maimonides’ enumeration of the commandments.

From this, the author of Minchat Chinukh, commandment 364, concludes that if a person sins and does not repent, he incurs no punishment at all for failing to repent; he is punished only for the transgression he committed. He adds that even if one repented but did not confess, he has not violated any positive commandment of confession, because this is not an obligatory mitzvah at all. It is rather a fulfillment-type mitzvah: one who does it receives reward, but one who fails to do it has not neglected anything.

In light of what emerges from Maimonides’ words quoted above, this seems quite clear. It is not plausible that one who repents but does not confess should be worse, because he has thereby nullified a positive commandment of confession, than one who does not repent at all. Of course, this consideration assumes that repentance, though not included in the count of commandments, is unquestionably of positive value. I will return below to that point.

Against all this, however, in the list of commandments preceding the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides writes:

There is one positive commandment, namely that the sinner return from his sin before the Lord and confess.

This seems to yield a different picture. A sinner is commanded to return from his evil deeds, and in addition he is commanded to confess. Here repentance is presented as an obligatory positive commandment, meaning that one who fails to do it sins thereby that he has neglected a positive commandment, and it seems on the surface that it is included in the list of commandments. This contradicts what we saw in Maimonides’ words in Sefer HaMitzvot.

Various approaches have been offered to explain Maimonides’ view. I will suggest here one direction, based on the principle stated at the outset of our discussion.

Maimonides holds that repentance is a great virtue, and that there is clearly a full obligation to repent of our evil deeds. But in his view, such an obligation has no place within the framework of the list of commandments. It is an extra-halakhic obligation.

For that reason, within Sefer HaMitzvot, where Maimonides enumerates those things that the Torah commanded as mitzvot, the mitzvah of repentance does not appear as a positive commandment. The reason is that in that enumeration Maimonides counts everything the Torah commanded as a mitzvah, and as we saw, in Maimonides’ opinion repentance does not appear in the Torah as a command. But in his halakhic work, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides tries to gather all that a Jew is obligated to do, whether because the Torah commanded it or for another reason, such as rabbinic commandments, health conduct, correct beliefs, character traits, and the like. Therefore, the obligation to repent does appear there.

The solution to the contradiction, then, is that according to Maimonides too there is indeed an obligation to repent, but it is not considered a positive commandment and therefore it is not counted. Why, then, is it not actually a positive commandment?

The reason the obligation to repent is not included in the count of commandments is that including it there would alter its basic character. One who repents by force of a command is not like one who does so on his own initiative, by virtue of his understanding that he ought to return from his evil deeds. Of course this does not lessen in the slightest the force of the obligation to repent. On the contrary, this very consideration shows that the obligation to repent is so fundamental that including it in the count of commandments would detract from its value and place it merely as one mitzvah among the 613. True, this obligation does not arise from obedience to a command, for there is no such command, but from the obligation to act in accordance with the will of God.³²

2. Character Refinement

A discussion similar to the one we conducted regarding the mitzvah of repentance can also be held with respect to the duty to improve our character traits.

There are enumerators of commandments who include the obligation to improve our traits within the positive commandment of “and you shall walk in His ways.” Maimonides writes in Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 8:

The eighth commandment is that He commanded us to imitate Him, exalted be He, according to our ability. This is what He said: “And you shall walk in His ways.” This command is repeated again in the verses “to walk in all His ways.”

The explanation given of this is: just as the Holy One, blessed be He, is called merciful, so you should be merciful; just as He is called gracious, so you should be gracious; just as He is called righteous, so you should be righteous; just as He is called pious, so you should be pious. This is the language of the Sifrei at the end of the portion Eikev.

This command is repeated again in different language: “After the Lord your God shall you walk.” It is also explained in Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 14a, that its meaning is to imitate the good actions and noble traits by which God, exalted be He, is described metaphorically, exalted infinitely above all.

On the other hand, there are those who do not find a clear halakhic source for the duty to improve one’s character. It is not clear whether this stems from disagreement with Maimonides’ words here, or because the commandment to walk in His ways does not encompass the full obligation to improve our character, for various reasons that are not our concern here.

For example, it is well known that Rabbi Chaim Vital, the foremost student of the Ari, asked: why did the Torah not command us to improve our character traits? He answers that the obligation to improve one’s traits is a condition for any person to be someone subject to command. If one needs to be commanded to improve his traits, the command will be of no use to him anyway.

Some formulated this differently: character refinement is part of the most basic shape of a human being. If someone does not fall under the category of a human being, one cannot command him in any mitzvah whatsoever. Clearly, one cannot command someone to become subject to command.

An illustration may be taken from the well-known story about the yeshiva student who reached marriageable age and began meeting pious young women for the purpose of fulfilling the important mitzvah of being fruitful and multiplying. After some time he had rejected them all, saying that he had not found anyone suitable for him. The spiritual supervisor in that yeshiva called him in and told him that he needed to work on improving his character, because he seemed to be arrogant. It was not plausible that none of those lovely young women suited his exalted stature.

After a year of strenuous work on his character, the same student returned to the supervisor and said he was ready to begin the process again. But apparently nothing had changed in him. He again rejected all the young women he met, just as in the previous round. When the supervisor asked how this could be reconciled with the intensive character work he had done throughout the year, the student answered: “If last year, when I was arrogant, not one of those girls suited me, then all the more so now, after a year of hard work, when I am already famously humble, certainly none of them will suit me.”

This is exactly what one looks like when one works on one’s character because there is a mitzvah, or a halakhic clause, obligating character refinement. Character refinement has to come from self-awareness of the importance of the matter, not from submission to a command.

Rav Kook, in several of his letters, formulates this even more sharply. He says that the sages teach us a revolutionary novelty: “Greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does.” Whatever the explanation, says Rav Kook, it is clear that there are matters regarding which our basic intuition still remains valid, namely that specifically the one who is not commanded and does is greater. Therefore, he explains, the Torah refrained from commanding us in these matters. In this chapter we are dealing with several examples of such matters. Character refinement is one of the most prominent.

Finally, let me note that regarding the obligation to keep oaths, we saw something similar in note 27 above. There too we saw that this obligation exists even before the giving of the Torah, and it is not derived from commitment to halakha, but rather forms a basis for it. As we saw there, the oath is the halakhic value-principle.

3. Torah Study

It is well known that Torah study is the foundation of the whole Torah. Sages throughout the generations have spoken at length and in exalted terms about the importance of this mitzvah. Thus Maimonides writes in Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 11:

He commanded us to study the wisdom of the Torah and to teach it. This is what is called Torah study, as He said in the section of the Shema: “And you shall teach them diligently to your children”… And there, in the Sifrei, it is said: “And you shall teach them diligently” means they should be sharp in your mouth, so that when a person asks you something, you will not stammer but answer him immediately. This command is repeated many times… And the exhortation concerning this mitzvah and the command to be constantly diligent in it are scattered throughout many places in the Talmud.

One of the strongest expressions of the importance of Torah study is the concept of neglect of Torah study, a concept that already appears in the Talmud and is also implied in Maimonides’ language above. Every moment that a person does not study Torah, it is not merely that he does not receive reward for the mitzvah; he is punished for the prohibition of neglecting Torah study.

A piquant example of the depth of this principle may be seen in a famous question. There is a well-known saying of the sages: “Torah study is suspended for the reading of the Megillah.” Many have already asked: what neglect of Torah study is there here? Is reading the Megillah not itself included within Torah study?

Some answer this in light of the determination of the Hazon Ish that there is a concept of “qualitative neglect of Torah study.” There are kinds of Torah study that are included in the mitzvah of Torah study, but because they are an inferior or lower kind of study, they have an aspect of neglect of Torah study. This is neglect in terms of the quality of the study. Reading the Megillah is an important mitzvah because it publicizes the miracle, and every person is obligated in it on Purim. Yet reading the Megillah is still considered a qualitative neglect of Torah study in comparison to analytic study of halakha. The depth of Torah analysis is what defines the quality of the study.

Yet precisely against the backdrop of all this, we find a surprising halakha. In the Gemara, Babylonian Talmud, Menachot 99b, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, precisely he, despite the fact that there he is presented as taking a stringent view of the mitzvah of Torah study against Rabbi Yishmael,³³ states:

Anyone who recites the Shema morning and evening has fulfilled “This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth.”

From this it emerges that it is enough to recite the Shema in the morning and evening to fulfill the obligation of Torah study. If so, it is not clear how one can explain the attitude that every moment in which one does not study Torah is “neglect of Torah study.”

At first glance one might still say that “it shall not depart” is only one of the commandments relating to Torah study; Maimonides above indeed said that the command is repeated several times, and perhaps there are additional commands obligating us to meditate on it constantly.

But the Talmudic sugya in Tractate Nedarim makes it quite clear that this is not so. Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 8a, brings the following ruling:

Rabbi Giddel said in the name of Rav: One who says, “I will rise early and study this chapter; I will study this tractate,” has made a great vow to the God of Israel.

That is, an oath to study a chapter of Torah is a valid oath. On this the Gemara asks:

But is he not already sworn and standing from Sinai? And an oath cannot take effect upon an oath.

In other words, an oath to do something that a person is already sworn, meaning halakhically obligated, to do cannot take effect. The Gemara answers:

This is what it teaches us: since if he wished he could exempt himself by reciting the Shema morning and evening, therefore the oath takes effect upon him.

The Gemara says that Rabbi Giddel has a novelty regarding the laws of Torah study. Following Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s statement above, Rabbi Giddel teaches us that in fact there is no obligation to study this chapter or that tractate; therefore the oath is an oath to do something he is not already obligated to do, and it is consequently a valid oath. From this it emerges that there is no Torah obligation to study beyond reciting the Shema morning and evening.

It should be noted that the medieval authorities on the passage disagree about this. From the explanation of the Rosh there, and apparently also from the words of the anonymous commentator printed there in place of Rashi, it appears that there is indeed no obligation at all to study Torah beyond reciting the Shema morning and evening. By contrast, the Ran there disagrees and holds that there is an obligation to study all the time, but that this is not quite a biblical commandment in the ordinary sense, but rather an obligation derived from exposition.³⁴ In any event, according to both of them, it emerges that there is no ordinary positive commandment to study all the time or to learn the whole Torah. How, then, does this accord with the concept of “neglect of Torah study”?

Here again we encounter an extremely fundamental Torah matter, Torah study, about whose importance all commentators and decisors agree there is no comparison, and it is explicit in the Talmud in several places that neglect of Torah study is a severe sin for which one is punished, and yet it is not fully included in the formal halakhic framework, the enumeration of commandments. True, in Maimonides’ list of commandments it does appear, and he even says there that there is an obligation to study every moment, but from the Gemara and the authorities just mentioned it appears that it does not have such a definite halakhic status. The mitzvah to study obligates us to recite the Shema morning and evening, and no more. It turns out, then, that the principal matter of study is not the formal halakhic mitzvah, but what lies beyond it.³⁵

It should be noted that Maimonides really does not discuss the obligation of Torah study in detail in the Laws of Repentance, a collection devoted, as will be clarified below, to halakhic areas of systemic and not merely pointwise importance. Instead, his main discussion of Torah study is in a separate set of laws bearing that name. This may stem from Maimonides’ view that Torah study is in fact an ordinary halakhic field, unlike what emerges from the approaches of the Rosh and the Ran cited above. See further below in the section dealing with the meaning of the Laws of Repentance.

4. Love of God

Another mitzvah, which also appears near the beginning of Maimonides’ list of commandments, is the mitzvah of love of God. Thus he writes in positive commandment 3:

The third commandment is that He commanded us to love Him, exalted be He. This means that we should contemplate and understand His commandments and His actions until we apprehend Him and delight in that apprehension with the utmost delight. This is the obligatory love.

And the language of the Sifrei, on the section of the Shema, is: since it says, “And you shall love the Lord your God,” I do not know how one loves the Omnipresent. Therefore Scripture says: “And these words that I command you today shall be upon your heart,” for through this you come to know the One who spoke and the world came into being.

Maimonides later details that we are also obligated to make God beloved to human beings:

We are to preach, call, and bring all of them back to His service, exalted be He, and to faith in Him, as our father Abraham did.

The laws concerning love of God are detailed in chapter 2 of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. There Maimonides explains that the basic obligation is:

To contemplate His wondrous and great deeds and creatures, and from them to perceive His wisdom, which has no measure and no end. Immediately he loves, praises, glorifies, and longs with a great longing to know the great Name.

Immediately thereafter Maimonides begins to detail, over three chapters, his cosmological conception, spheres, angels, and the like, as part of detailing the path to love of God:

In accordance with these matters I will explain great principles from the works of the Master of the worlds, so that they may serve as an opening for one who understands to love God, as the sages said concerning love: “For through this you come to know the One who spoke and the world came into being.”

It is worth noting the difference between the two formulations. In Sefer HaMitzvot Maimonides states that one must contemplate His commandments and His actions in order to delight in apprehending Him. Here, by contrast, he states that one must contemplate His deeds and His creatures, and that indeed is what emerges from the exposition that follows immediately thereafter.

In any case, it is quite clear that contemplation is not a mitzvah in itself, but what halakha would call an instrument of mitzvah, a means. There is no mitzvah in the study of natural science as such; rather, it is an instrument by means of which one fulfills the mitzvah of love of God.³⁶ The same applies to “contemplation of His commandments” in the formulation of Sefer HaMitzvot. Here too, Torah study appears to serve as an instrument for fulfilling the mitzvah of love of God, beyond the dimension of lishmah discussed earlier.

Yet at the end of the Laws of Repentance, Maimonides returns to deal with the love of God. The entire tenth chapter is devoted to the duty to serve God out of love and not out of fear. According to Maimonides, this is the service of God lishmah. In laws 2-3 there he writes:

One who serves out of love occupies himself in Torah and mitzvot and walks in the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil and not in order to inherit good, but does the truth because it is truth, and in the end the good comes because of it. This is the level concerning which the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us through Moses our teacher, as it says: “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” And when one loves God with the proper love, he will immediately do all the mitzvot out of love.

And what is the proper love? It is that one should love God with a very great, exceeding, intense love… as though he were lovesick, whose mind is never free of love for that woman, and who is always preoccupied with her, whether sitting, rising, eating, or drinking… And the entire Song of Songs is a parable for this matter.

It is striking that specifically in the Laws of Repentance Maimonides details the definition of the mitzvah of love of God. In the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah, where the main treatment of this mitzvah appears, as is explicit in the list of commandments at the opening of that section, there is only a terse reference, dealing mainly with the path to love and not with the definition of the mitzvah itself.

Maimonides concludes the Laws of Repentance by saying:

Therefore a person must set himself apart to understand and comprehend the wisdoms and insights that make his Creator known to him, according to the strength a person has to understand and apprehend, as we explained in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah.

This effectively includes everything Maimonides wrote in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah: the duty to apprehend God as the way to love Him. See also the discussion of love in the third gate above.

It seems that the solution here too lies in the principle on which this chapter insists. The mitzvah of love of God is one mitzvah among the others. But the principle of love of God as a foundational principle of the service of God is one of the very pillars of Torah and of the service of God in general. This principle cannot be constrained within the halakhic framework, because putting it there would diminish it.

The elementary legal threshold, the one binding on everyone, is to study reality and the mitzvot in order to arrive at love. That is what is detailed in the laws of love of God, which appear in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. But the actual obligation is far broader. In reality, a person is to be preoccupied with the love of God constantly. As we saw above, he is also obligated to perform all the mitzvot out of love of God.

Of course, performing mitzvot out of love of God constitutes fulfillment of the mitzvah of love of God. But this is not included in the halakhic obligation binding on everyone. The reason is that if it were imposed as an obligation, it would neutralize the core of its value, as we saw above regarding character traits. In addition, one may argue that complete love is so great a virtue that it is hard to demand it of everyone. Halakha sets only the minimal threshold that can be demanded of each and every person.

Let me stress: there is no concession here, and no reduction in the value of the obligation to love God. The reason that this love is not fully included within the halakhic framework and in the count of commandments is specifically because of its greatness and importance, not because of any diminution in its value.

It seems, however, that a different type of argument may also be made to explain why Maimonides does not fully include the mitzvah of love of God in his count of commandments. Maimonides rules in Principle IV, compare also his remarks in Principle IX,³⁷ that commands encompassing the whole Torah are not to be counted in the enumeration of commandments. His examples are “My statutes shall you keep,” “You shall keep My charge,” “You shall be holy,” and the like.

Some of these commands are not counted because they contain no practical content beyond the obligations already included in the other mitzvot. Usually a general mitzvah is not counted because it is merely repetition and lacks halakhic content of its own. But in some of the general mitzvot, such as “You shall be holy,” see Nahmanides at the beginning of the portion Kedoshim, another principle seems to be at work: something too basic cannot be included in the enumeration of commandments. There are foundations of the entire system of mitzvot that accompany the fulfillment of each and every mitzvah. Logically, therefore, they cannot be counted as one ordinary mitzvah among the others. Counting a systemic foundation within the system of commandments is an error analogous to inserting a value-principle as one of the principles within the very system that it grounds. See above, gate 4, chapter 1.

Love of God may be such a foundational mitzvah. Beyond its intrinsic importance, it has a comprehensive significance overlapping the entire system of commandments. As we saw, all the mitzvot should be performed out of love. If so, there is a logical problem with including this duty itself in the enumeration of commandments. Just imagine: how could one fulfill the mitzvah of love of God itself, if it were itself included in the count, out of love?

Strangely enough, the enumeration of commandments includes only mitzvot that can be fulfilled even not for their own sake. The mitzvah of love of God in its broader sense cannot be fulfilled that way, and therefore it does not appear as part of the count.

5. Choice

The subject of choice is discussed in the Laws of Repentance, chapters 5-6. To be sure, some commentators learned that there is a duty to choose from the verse “And you shall choose life,” but I am not aware of any decisor who brought the duty to choose within the framework of the count of commandments.³⁸

At first glance, this is the most basic duty resting on any human being. Why then is it specifically not included in the enumeration of commandments?

Here too the answer is very simple. Precisely because of its foundational nature, the duty to choose cannot be included as an ordinary mitzvah in the count of commandments. Put differently: if a person does not choose, what sense is there in commanding him to choose? Will this mitzvah arouse him to choose more than all the other mitzvot? Or, in a third formulation: the mitzvah to choose is included in each of the 613 mitzvot, because the obligation to fulfill that mitzvah includes, obviously, a basic element of choosing to fulfill it. For example, the commandment to recite Grace after Meals obviously includes also an obligation to choose to recite it.

This claim about the foundational nature of choice has implications that are not as trivial as one might think. Is it preferable to educate a child or a student toward independent thought and autonomous decision, even at the price that he may choose contrary to what we want? Or is it preferable that he perform mitzvot even as a learned rote command?

The denunciation by the prophets, “their fear of Me has become a commandment of men learned by rote,” and by the sages, of performing mitzvot out of habit, is clear. But it does not necessarily follow that it is preferable to foster autonomous service of God when there is a risk of losing everything, rather than a service of God based on habit, which is “safer.”

Educators and sages differ on this question. Of course, the answers are not exhausted by a simple yes or no. There are different measures of autonomy, which also depend on the age of those being educated. But one point may nevertheless be extracted from the foregoing discussion: autonomy is important. It is a fundamental duty resting on each of us to choose our path.

If so, the Torah and God certainly expect us to choose the good, but commanding that is almost a paradox. This is the logical problem we encountered with regard to the service of God, and to some extent with regard to character traits, but here it appears in an even sharper and more extreme form.

The Meaning of the Laws of Repentance

In light of all that has been said thus far, we can now return and ask ourselves what the content of Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance really is.

At first glance, these laws contain an arbitrary collection of topics, and there seems to be no connection among them. Repentance itself naturally occupies a central place, five chapters, chapters 1-4 and chapter 7. The subject of choice occupies two chapters, chapters 5-6. The subject of reward, the World to Come and the messianic era, takes two chapters, chapters 8-9. And the duty to serve God lishmah and out of love occupies one chapter, chapter 10. What is common to all these?

First, it is worth noting that three of the subjects discussed thus far are included in the Laws of Repentance: love of God, choice, and repentance. Torah study, as noted above, see the discussion there, is not discussed there, apparently because according to Maimonides it is indeed an ordinary mitzvah.³⁹ Character traits are mentioned in 7:3, but they do not occupy a central place. The main discussion of traits is in the Laws of Character Traits.⁴⁰ And indeed, we saw above that according to Maimonides character traits too are included in the enumeration of commandments, and therefore on his view their status parallels that of other mitzvot.

The obvious conclusion, then, is that the Laws of Repentance are in fact the laws of choice. They include the foundational obligations that are not found in the count of commandments. These are the laws that, because of their foundational character, were not counted in the enumeration, or were included there only in an elementary and partial layer, and not in their full appearance within the service of God. In another formulation: the Laws of Repentance are the laws of the service of God. By their very nature, they cannot be fully included in formal halakha, because they constitute the infrastructure underlying it, and therefore must necessarily be prior and external to halakha itself.

This is also the reason that the discussion of choice is included specifically in the Laws of Repentance. As we saw above (and also in note 31), every mitzvah (commandment) contains within it a dimension of choice. A person must choose to recite a blessing, to pray, to honor parents, not to eat pork, and so on. But in the case of repentance, as in the other subjects we have discussed until this point, choice appears in its pure form. The subject matter of the Laws of Repentance is choice itself, not any particular content of choice. In the terms of note 10, we may say that the Laws of Repentance deal with level A (whether to choose) and not level B (what to choose). In this they differ essentially from all other laws. As we saw, repentance is the mitzvah that is not counted among the commandments: the mitzvah to be one who chooses.

The same is true of Torah study, the love of God, repentance, character traits, and certainly of choice itself. In all of these, the basic question — whether to observe or to transgress — is not bound up with obeying a command or violating it. Improving one’s character is not a commandment (according to some halakhic decisors), and therefore the decision to do so is autonomous. The same applies to Torah study, beyond the minimum of the morning and evening recitation of the Shema. The same applies to the love of God, beyond the minimum detailed in the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah. And the same applies to repentance, according to Maimonides’ own view, since he does not include a positive commandment to repent in his enumeration of the commandments. In all these cases, we must decide our path in a wholly autonomous way, without the dimension of command. Therefore it is precisely with respect to these obligations that the power of choice appears in its purest form, and this is what led Maimonides to place at least some of them within the Laws of Repentance.

It seems that this is also the reason that in these laws Maimonides departs from his usual manner and tries to persuade us to repent. Rabbi Yonah does the same in his book Gates of Repentance, which is devoted entirely to the subject of repentance. Rabbi Bahya, the author of Duties of the Heart, does the same with respect to all the character traits. Ethical-exhortatory works by the medieval authorities are rare; this is a genre that is mainly modern. But with respect to subjects connected to choice and repentance, already the early authorities try to persuade us to do what is incumbent upon us. The reason is that there is no commandment concerning them, or at least the commandment does not cover all the depth and scope that they involve.

The entirety of chapter 7 of Maimonides’ Laws of Repentance is devoted to persuasive argumentation. We find nothing similar anywhere else in his Yad Ha-Hazakah. There Maimonides writes:

Since every person has free choice, as we have explained, a person should strive to repent and shake off his sins, so that he may die as one who has repented and thus merit the life of the World to Come.

A penitent should not imagine that he is far from the rank of the righteous because of the iniquities and sins he committed. It is not so. Rather, he is beloved and cherished before the Creator, as though he had never sinned. More than that, his reward is great… And our sages said: “In the place where penitents stand…”

All the prophets commanded concerning repentance…

Great is repentance, for it brings a person near to the Divine Presence… Repentance brings near those who were far away. Yesterday this person was hated before the Omnipresent, detestable, distant, and abominable. Today he is beloved and cherished, near and dear…

How exalted is the rank of repentance. Yesterday this person was separated from the Lord, God of Israel… He cried out and was not answered… He performed mitzvot and they were rejected before his face… Today he cleaves to the Divine Presence… He cries out and is answered immediately… He performs mitzvot and they are received gently and joyfully… More than that, they are desired…

The reason for this unique phenomenon is that with respect to the other mitzvot, persuasion can be based on the fundamental obligation to fulfill God’s commands in the Torah. One may perhaps add to this the punishment imposed on one who does not fulfill his duties. But with respect to those contents that appear in the Laws of Repentance, there is no commandment, and therefore the punishment is not explicit, even though it does exist. It is therefore precisely in these matters that the sages try to persuade us. They try to influence us to choose the right path autonomously, even in the absence of a full command.

The Commandment of Faith

In light of everything said thus far, a difficult question becomes sharper and sharper. The first commandment that appears in the enumeration of the commandments, which clearly reflects its importance in Maimonides’ eyes, is the commandment of faith. Maimonides writes as follows:

The first commandment is the command by which we were commanded to believe in divinity: that we believe there is a Cause and a Ground who brings all existing things into being. This is what He, exalted, said: “I am the Lord your God.”

At the end of tractate Makkot (Babylonian Talmud, Makkot 23b), the sages said: “Six hundred and thirteen commandments were said to Moses at Sinai. What verse teaches this? ‘Moses commanded us Torah.’”

That is, the numerical value of the word Torah is 611. They raised a difficulty and said: “Does Torah have that numerical value? It is six hundred and eleven.” And the answer was: “‘I am’ and ‘You shall have no other gods’ we heard from the mouth of the Almighty.”

It has thus been made clear to you that “I am the Lord” is included among the six hundred and thirteen commandments, and it is a commandment of faith, as we have explained.

The problem with including the commandment of faith within the enumeration of the commandments is obvious. First, there is a circularity here: if I do not believe in the source of the command, then a command that proceeds from a factor whose existence I do not acknowledge has no meaning for me. Beyond that, the very command to believe is paradoxical. If I do not believe, how will a command help? Faith, by its essence, is an autonomous matter entrusted to each person’s inner decision. One who does not believe cannot do so merely by force of a command, whatever its source may be.

In the terms of our discussion above (Gate Four, Chapter 1), faith is the value-principle of the Torah and of halakha (Jewish law), and a value-principle must, logically, appear outside the system that it grounds.

In fact, all the reasons we have encountered so far for not including certain commands in the enumeration of the commandments exist here as well, and even more forcefully, with respect to the commandment of faith. But here there is an additional problem beyond all that has been said until now: apparently faith cannot, in general, be an obligation at all. This is not merely a formal problem — whether to include it in the count of the commandments or not. In the other matters discussed until now, our claim was that these are full obligations, but because of their importance they cannot formally be inserted into the enumeration of the commandments. In the context of the commandment of faith, however, we are dealing with something that cannot be considered an obligation at all — not even an extra-halakhic obligation that lies outside the formal system of commandments. Faith is an external condition that precedes commitment to the system of commandments.⁴¹ It is therefore clear that it cannot be included in that system at any level whatsoever.

First, it should be noted that Maimonides himself appears to have felt this difficulty, for he takes the trouble to prove from the Talmud in Makkot that this is indeed one of the 613 commandments. His need to bring proof for his words indicates that he himself sensed the problem.

It seems that the fundamental explanation of this question lies in a basic misunderstanding regarding faith. Today there is a widespread feeling that faith is a matter of personal decision. Hence some believe, and some do not. Like any dispute that concerns outlooks and values, there may also be disagreement about faith. Some go further and say that faith is something inherently opposed to thought and to the use of reason. They add that if there were a rational proof, or even some other rational consideration of any kind, we would have no need for faith.

This is a basic mistake. The Torah’s assumption is that faith is present in every human being. If it were not there, not only could one not command it, one could not even expect it to come into being. The concept of God cannot arise from human decision. It is a concept not drawn from our world, and therefore either it exists within us from the outset, or it cannot be understood or even discussed at all. Descartes’ anthropological argument (see the first book, Gate Eleven, the end of Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3) claims that the very presence of such a concept within us testifies to the existence of God Himself. The common discourse about each person’s subjective God, whom each one creates for himself, is mistaken and misleading.

Therefore, the essence of the mitzvah counted by Maimonides in the enumeration of the commandments is not a command to believe. It is a command not to deny and repress what is already present within us. For one may say that even a person who declares himself an unbeliever is generally in fact a believer; he merely denies that faith for various reasons, some justified and some perhaps less so. The command is to continue obeying this inner call, and not to disown it.

The proof that Maimonides brings from the Talmud in Makkot is directed precisely to this very principle: that faith is present in every one of us, and therefore it is possible to command us not to deny it. The fact that this is one of the 613 commandments is itself the proof of this principle.

Rabbi Elhanan Wasserman, in his Kovetz Ma’amarim, asks how one can hold an Eskimo accountable who never heard of the revelation at Sinai, nor of Adam, nor of Noah, for failing to keep the Seven Noahide Commandments that are incumbent upon him. His answer is that every person possesses the primary intuition that the world has a Creator, and therefore that there is also a role He has imposed upon us to carry out in His world. One who does not understand that role, for whatever reason, is expected to set out on a journey of searching and clarification in order to determine it. The demand implicit in the commandment of faith is to undertake that journey. At the end of the journey, one discovers that everything was already within us. Just like the Hasidic story of the person who went out to look for a treasure beneath a bridge in distant Prague, only to discover that it was beneath the stove in his own house in the village.⁴²

In the terminology we have used throughout the trilogy, faith is the synthetic power. Along the entire way we have seen that people repress their trust in this power only in order to flee the consequences entailed by its very existence. All analyticity is nothing but a flight from fulfilling the first mitzvah that Maimonides counts in his enumeration of the commandments. Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, used to say that the first commandment — and perhaps the only one — is not to be stupid.

Command and Essence in These Matters

Let us now return to the question of the relation between command and essence. In all the matters we encountered in this chapter, we found certain components of halakhic domains, and sometimes even entire domains, that are not included within the framework of halakha. Above we saw that the essence of serving God lies on the Kantian plane — that is, service performed from a sense of obligation, lishmah (“for its own sake”). The command within halakha is intended to create this type of service, about which it was said: “Greater is one who is commanded and acts than one who is not commanded and acts.” As we have seen, it is only within the framework of a command imposed upon us from outside that human autonomy, the measure of human liberty, can find expression.

If so, these matters raise a difficult question. How was it possible, in some of the most fundamental areas of serving God, to forgo the dimension of command? Is it not precisely in these matters that our autonomy should find expression? How can it be that in such fundamental matters there is only one of the two components that characterize every mitzvah — only the essence, without the dimension of obedience?

In some of the matters with which we dealt, we saw that their exclusion from the enumeration is rooted in technical reasons. For example, we saw that improving one’s character (according to Rav Kook), or repenting, would be impaired if there were a halakhic command to do so. In these matters, greater is one who is not commanded and acts. If so, the issue is not their importance or lack of importance, but the inability to perform them in their fullness within a framework of command.

The obligation to choose also cannot be included within the framework of the commandments, for it constitutes a condition for the very fulfillment of commandments. According to Rabbi Hayyim Vital, the same is true of improving one’s character.

Torah study, however, seems to be an especially troublesome trap in this context. On the face of it, there is no technical or principled obstacle to including it within the framework of halakha. If so, it is not clear why the Torah chooses not to include this fundamental norm within halakhic command.

Above we saw that this stems from the importance of Torah study. But in light of what has been said here, precisely the importance of study ought to lead to its inclusion within the halakhic system, in accordance with the principle that greater is one who is commanded and acts.

It appears that with respect to Torah study, just as with choice and faith, there is no place for including it within the enumeration of the commandments. The reason is that Torah study is cleaving to God Himself. We have seen that there is an identity between God and the Torah — the Torah is His phenomenon, and He is “the Torah as it is in itself.” If so, the obligation to study Torah is derived from the very commitment to serve God. As we saw in Chapter 1, this service is done lishmah, and not from an “intention to discharge one’s obligation.” Torah study, therefore, must be done lishmah, not with the intention of merely fulfilling a duty. This is the focus of the difference between lishmah and intention. Lishmah means without any external rationale, even a rationale of command. In this sense, Torah study lies on a much deeper plane than the other mitzvot.

For the same reason, the entire concept of “serving God,” which we suggested above is the subject discussed in the Laws of Repentance, cannot be included within the framework of halakha. One cannot command serving God or cleaving to Him. This must come voluntarily, and not by force of command.

The conclusion is that there is, after all, a deeper layer than service performed by virtue of command, and that is “service lishmah.” To be sure, this layer too expresses not freedom but liberty. The fact that a person serves God independently does not reflect freedom, but commitment. Yet this is commitment to the conclusions of his apprehension of the divine “object,” and not a result of the categorical system generated by that apprehension — that is, the commandments of the Torah.

For this reason, commitment to the principles of morality, although in the simple sense they cannot be regarded as part of halakha, also expresses not freedom but liberty. The imperatives of morality, and the determination of good and evil, are not placed in our hands. The decision whether to act in accordance with them — and that alone — is entrusted to us. That is, there is always a framework within which we act, but it is composed of several concentric circles. The circles we encountered here are: the command, extra-halakhic norms (= the will of God; see above, Gate Four, Chapter 3), and the very existence of God as the object that constitutes the root of obligation and of normativity itself.

The same applies to all the other topics surveyed in this chapter. All of them are not fully included within halakha, but our commitment to them is derived from our commitment to the will of God. If so, they do not express freedom, but liberty. As we saw, the framework that defines this liberty is not command, but the will of God.

The mitzvot, then, express liberty and autonomy within the tightest circle: halakhic command. The other subjects express liberty within a broader framework: the will of God. Torah study expresses the deepest liberty of all, because the framework that defines it is the very existence of God. The very contemplation of that Being is enough to bring us to the commitment to study Torah lishmah.

Thus, in the dialectical process of this gate between the poles of obedience and essence — Kantianism and Taoism — or between freedom and liberty, the last step has brought us back from apparent freedom, as it is expressed in the preceding extra-halakhic subjects, to the pole of framework and commitment. All these matters express not freedom but liberty. The difference between them lies only in the nature of the framework that surrounds the activity in each case.

We will now take one further and final step in this gate, in the same direction: from freedom to liberty.

The Commandment of Faith: Closing the Dialectical Circle between Command and Obedience and Essence

In this chapter we saw that there are obligations which, because of their fundamental character, are not included in the enumeration of the commandments, or at least are included only partially. Above we saw that these too express liberty and not freedom, that is, they are actions defined within various external frameworks. To conclude, let us recall that we also saw that the most fundamental obligation of all, faith — which is the basis and root of all other obligations — is also included in the enumeration of the commandments. If until this point we could have reached the conclusion that the mitzvot are merely second-order duties, whereas the most fundamental duties are precisely those not included within them, the commandment of faith reveals to us a deeper layer. The foundation of everything is, after all, located within the commandments. Even that which lies outside the system of commandments, and seems deeper and more fundamental than they are, begins with them. Let us now clarify this.

We saw that commitment to the mitzvot cannot be based solely on the fact that there is a command. The fact that there is a command is merely a fact, nothing more. But norms cannot be derived from facts — this is the naturalistic fallacy. If so, there must be some normative foundation for obligation in the mitzvot. But such a normative foundation must itself rest on an ontological anchor — on a moral object or a religious object — except that this is an ontology of a different kind. It is not normatively neutral, and anyone who apprehends this object should thereby understand his obligation toward it. This object is God, and faith is the apprehension of Him.⁴³

The inclusion of the commandment of faith in the enumeration of the commandments comes to hint to us that faith, as the apprehension of some object, is not the whole story. From it arises normative commitment, and regarding that we are already commanded. The difficulty of how one can command commitment is not essentially different from the question of how one can command any other mitzvah. All these questions receive their answer and their grounding from the fact that we are apprehending a normatively “colored” object. Therefore the commandment of faith, too, is nothing but a reflection of the fact that contemplation of the divine essence necessarily gives rise to principled commitment. This commitment is already present in every person who apprehends the divine object.

If so, the distinction between command and the fulfillment of the will of God that is not expressed in command becomes very blurred. Even the mitzvot are merely facts so long as there is no commitment to act in accordance with them. And one truly cannot reach this point through command itself, but only by virtue of the fact that God Himself plants it within us, and from it all the other obligations issue forth: those that exist in us as intuitions, and those that do not; those included within the enumeration of the commandments, and those that are not.

This mitzvah is placed first, because this is also where the enumeration of the commandments begins. The framework is required in order for an act of liberty to appear. Therefore the framework does not oppose liberty, but enables it. There is no difficulty at all in the fact that there is a command concerning the most basic act of choice. Its meaning is that even the most basic foundation comes to expression within an external framework. Even the act of faith involves a dimension of choice, because faith is not merely awareness of some fact, but also the acceptance of obligation and of what follows from it.

In the final analysis, faith is not something external to us. It is within us, like all the most fundamental intuitions that we receive as axioms. As we saw throughout the first and second books, the correspondence between our thought and the world itself stems from the fact that the fundamental structures are implanted within us, and the power to recognize this correspondence and derive from it claims about the world is what we called faith (see the first book, Section Four). The framework within which the act of liberty is performed is also not really external to us — not beneath the bridge in Prague, but beneath the stove in the house. Were this not so, we would have no way to arrive at faith, just as we would have no way to arrive at any of the fundamental truths, the synthetic a priori truths.

“It is not in heaven, nor beyond the sea… for the matter is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.”

Summary of the Discussion in Gate Five

In this gate we dealt with the supra-system within which all decisions take place and within which meaning is given to all the different categories, and above all with the question of the value-principle of that system. We were not surprised to discover that the question regarding the value-principle of such a system is almost devoid of meaning. In halakhic language, this principle is called lishmah.

It is important to note that this description actually fits every synthetic position, for at its base there must stand a supra-categorical system. Here we dealt with the system of Judaism: the Torah. As we saw, this is the very definition of the system, and not a synthetic claim about it. A supra-categorical system that includes everything is, by definition, the Torah given to us at Sinai. It expresses the will of God and His word to us.

We saw that the Torah constitutes a manifestation of God in the world, as the root of all categories: the good, the beautiful, the true, and so forth. We saw that serving God is identified with Torah study, because the Torah is identified with God Himself. This identity is equivalent to the identification between essence and form, or between phenomenon and noumenon.

From there we continued and argued that the value-principle from which one may derive commitment to the Torah as a constitutive system is a being, not a norm: God Himself. This is a purposive being, and therefore it is not included within the Humean fallacy. Norms can be derived from His very existence.

One implication of this picture is that one really cannot be committed to an additional normative system alongside the Torah. This also follows from what was said above in Gate Four.

We then turned to various halakhic expressions of this picture. We began with the concept of lishmah, which is nothing but a halakhic expression of the Kantian demand to see duty as the root of morality and values — in our case, religious values. We saw that lishmah is a principle that cannot be described in any language. It is the outcome of apprehending a normatively “colored” object, and nothing more. Any description that is given of it can only fail to convey the matter in its fullness.

From there we moved to the distinction between command and essence. We saw that command is a necessary framework within which one can serve God lishmah. This is an expression of the value of liberty, as distinct from Taoist freedom. We saw several implications of the fact that every mitzvah has two layers: command and essence. We then moved on to discuss the distinction between Torah and mitzvot. We saw that, in the case of Torah, the basis of obligation is the apprehension of it as such — that is, God. Beyond it there are extra-halakhic norms, such as morality and the improvement of one’s character, whose obligatory force stems from their conformity to the will of God. In the outermost circle are the mitzvot, whose accompanying intention should be the intention to “fulfill one’s obligation.” That is, the circle that envelops them — the value-principle at their basis — is duty, or command.

In the intermezzo that now follows, we will discuss an extreme expression that sharpens several new points in the description proposed thus far.

Third Intermezzo, This Time Lithuanian: The Story of a Watchmaker

This intermezzo is based on a meeting I had many years ago with an elderly man whom I did not know and whom I have never seen again since. Unlike the previous intermezzos, this one does not bear the label “Hasidic,” and that is because of its distinctly Mitnagdic — that is, Lithuanian — character.

It took place sometime in the 1980s, somewhere around Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. I entered the shop of a watchmaker in order to repair my wristwatch. When I entered, I saw before me an elderly Jewish watchmaker, bareheaded. He turned to me and asked: “So, where are we up to?” At first I did not understand what he meant. He clarified: “In the Talmud — what passage are you learning now?” After a few seconds of digestion, I answered him (if I remember correctly, at the time we were in tractate Sanhedrin). I remember that he asked me how I understood the Tosafot on that passage, and in the course of the discussion I discovered, to my astonishment, that this Jew was thoroughly at home in the subject, and certainly did not fall below me in his command of the material. One should remember that this was precisely the passage we were studying in those very days, whereas for him it was presumably only one passage among many.

After we had finished our brief scholarly exchange, I asked him about his background. He told me that he had studied in one of the Lithuanian yeshivot — I no longer remember which one — and that he had always loved studying Talmud. Today he does not believe at all; if I recall correctly, this was a result of the Holocaust. But that, he said, has nothing to do with study. He continued throughout all the years to study intensively, all the while holding an openly atheistic worldview.

This phenomenon astonished me, even though I had heard of other such cases. The Lithuanian yeshivot succeeded — or failed? — in creating among their students such a deep bond to Torah that continued study was not conditional upon faith. This phenomenon is not so familiar in our day. Today, study in general, and certainly study of a yeshiva and halakhic character, is usually a function of faith. One who abandons his faith generally abandons study as well, at least in its traditional yeshiva form, though the reverse is not necessarily true.

That experience has accompanied me ever since, and more than once I have found myself discussing it with students and with others. In those conversations there are those who interpret the Lithuanian yeshivot unfavorably, and there are those — among whom I count myself — who interpret them favorably.

On the one hand, this seems to be a classic case of Torah study that is not lishmah. Some would go even further and say that even when that watchmaker studied Torah in his youth in yeshiva, he did not do so in the service of God, but in the service of himself. Such a love of Torah, they would say, cannot lead to study that has religious value. But with respect to this last point, we have already seen that this conclusion is not necessary (see also note 38). If the study is done from the motivation of serving God — that is, if the person would study even if he did not enjoy it — then there is nothing in the love of study that makes it study not done lishmah. On the contrary: specifically with respect to Torah study, we saw in the introduction to Eglei Tal that pleasure and joy are an inseparable part of the mitzvah.

Against these claims, one may set the saying of the sages:

“Would that they abandoned Me and kept My Torah.”⁴⁴

That watchmaker abandoned God, but he certainly keeps His Torah — of course only in the sense of study, not in the sense of observance. The present state of his service of God cannot, of course, be regarded as ideal — study not for the sake of practice, and not from faith in God. But this bond to Torah, if we examine its character separately and in itself, is actually a very positive bond.

It is worth adding another important point here. As we have seen, the Torah and God are in fact one entity. They are the phenomenon and the noumenon of the same divine entity. If so, that watchmaker in fact believes in God, despite his declarations. Faith in the Torah is itself faith in God.

To be sure, one might argue that this watchmaker does not study from faith, not even faith in the Torah. He simply occupies himself with what he loves: studying Torah. But anyone who met him could see that this watchmaker believed in the life-giving power within the Torah. He was bound to it with every fiber of his soul, not in the way that any ordinary person loves a certain subject and engages in it for pleasure.

Beyond that, one might raise yet another important point. That watchmaker does not study Torah lishmah. Even if the description I gave above is correct, he studies Torah because of the profound love with which he loves it, not out of commitment to it. We have already seen, at the beginning of this gate, what emerges from Maimonides’ words in the Laws of Idolatry: a motivation of love does not count as lishmah.

At this point we must return to the discussion we conducted regarding Maimonides’ view of the love of God. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 3 here, and in Chapter 8 of Gate Three, love is a unique concept. When a person loves someone, that relation is not directed to characteristics, but to the very essence of the beloved. If so, love of God, or love of Torah, is not necessarily an external motivation. It is an expression of a relation to the thing itself, and that can certainly be interpreted in terms of lishmah.

In Chapter 1 here we saw that, according to some of the medieval authorities — Raavad, Rashi, and those who follow them — to serve God out of love is service lishmah. They do not posit a plane higher and more primordial than love and fear. In light of Maimonides’ words in Chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, we raised the possibility that Maimonides himself distinguishes between two kinds of love, one of which indeed deserves to be classified as lishmah.

If so, a person who loves Torah can certainly be classified as one who studies lishmah.

The subtleties in these matters require delicacy, and we will not enter into them here. Our purpose is only to illustrate several aspects of our earlier discussion in a case in which they appear in a distinctive way.

Why is this a Lithuanian intermezzo rather than a Hasidic one? The conception of “Torah lishmah” presented in the present gate is distinctly Mitnagdic. Its fullest expression is in Gate IV of the Mitnagdic manifesto, Nefesh Ha-Hayyim. To be sure, one can find a very similar approach in Tanya, one of the foundational books of Hasidism. The difference between the two is a matter for detailed research, and this is not the place for it.

On the other hand, there is here a fervent Hasidic defense of the sinners of Israel, who are full of mitzvot and faith like a pomegranate, and that, after all, is the craft of the Hasidim. And perhaps within every Hasid there is a little Mitnaged, or vice versa…

Footnotes