Death or life of a secularist
Hello Rabbi,
I doubt it if we were to force a person to either become secular (let’s say they would be hypnotized and forget Judaism…) or die.
Do I have to choose death?
Ransom or death?
Traditional or death? (A traditionalist is someone who respects tradition but is completely non-religious, but also does not observe prohibitions such as incest and bloodshed.)
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There is no difference between a traditionalist and a secularist. The question is the offenses he commits. If you define a traditionalist (for a reason that is completely unclear to me and completely disconnected from reality) as someone who does not commit adultery, incest, or bloodshed, then you are talking about the offenses themselves and not about the person. You are identifying a person who will commit Sabbath desecration and not the three grave offenses.
First, even for the three gravest crimes, it seems to me that in such a situation there is no obligation to choose death, since the crime he commits is committed through rape. Although in the law of one who introduces himself into rape, the first scholars disagreed about the one who is involved in rape, according to the rabbinic tradition, and apparently according to the rabbinic tradition, at most it is rape, and in the three gravest crimes one must surrender one’s soul even for the crime of rape. But in hypnosis, it is worse than rape (there is no crime here at all), and it is like someone who is thrown at a baby, who wrote that there is no obligation here to move himself aside and surrender himself to death in order to save the baby.
As for other offenses, there is a disagreement between Tos and Rashba (so the rabbi claims. This is not agreed upon, and Rabbi Yisraeli wrote an article about it in one of the first issues of Tecumin) regarding whether a Gentile who took his daughter to be destroyed (raised as a gentile) is obligated to desecrate Shabbat to save her or not. I do not remember whether they are specifically talking about the three most serious offenses, since for some reason, as far as I remember, they are talking about the very life as a gentile, which is like spiritual fiqun, and the disagreement is whether it is like physical fiqun or not.
This reminds me of an amusing dialogue by the logician Raymond Smolyan (which I also mentioned in my book), in which man asks God to take away his free will in order to remove moral responsibility from him. Then God asks him whether this request itself does not impose moral responsibility on him.
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Let's leave aside for a moment the rape of Pinoza, it's just a summary.
And isn't heresy a sin?
Doesn't the rabbi have some article about the fact that secular people are generally exempt from doing and fulfilling their duties?
Heresy is not a commandment. A commandment is a ritual work and heresy is a mental concept. It does not belong to him to be killed and not to commit heresy, because even if they force me, I believe in what I believe. I can be forced to do something but not think something. If I am hypnotized, then it is not me who thinks it, but my captive consciousness. Only the actions are problematic, and that is why I wrote that there is something less coerced here.
A secular person is not exempt from an act and has not fulfilled it, he must do all the commandments, but if he is still secular and does them, he has not fulfilled a commandment and, in my opinion, has not committed a transgression. This has nothing to do with this, because he now makes the decision as a religious person. After hypnosis, he is neither religious nor secular, he is not a person at all (in the sense of a being who makes decisions and is responsible for them).
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