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Several reasons for one mitzvah

שו”תCategory: philosophySeveral reasons for one mitzvah
asked 4 years ago

I wanted to ask about the phenomenon of multiple reasons for one mitzvah. The rabbi has already quoted the joke about reading Ecclesiastes and Esther more than once. But I remember that there was also talk about the possibility of multiple reasons (perhaps related to multiple causality, but not really). Is there an official philosophical source that deals with this?

There is also a thinker who calls the reasons for the mitzvot benefits, meaning what is beneficial in the mitzvah. Is there a philosophical difference between the ‘benefit’ and the ‘reason’ of the mitzvah?


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מיכי Staff answered 4 years ago
The story of Ruth and Esther. In the second book of my Quartet, the fourth part is devoted to parallel planes of explanation. There I argued that examples of how we receive several reasons/explanations for a single phenomenon (Newton’s apple, the sadness of the Happy Prince, repentance or questioning). Although I noted there that in principle this is not possible because a reason/explanation is supposed to provide a sufficient condition for the explained/explained. Therefore, either there is a mapping between the explanations (for example, each of them at a different resolution, such as a biological and physical explanation for the same phenomenon), or each of them separately is not an explanation, but the combination of all of them is the explanation. I think the term “benefits” is a benefit in this context, and apparently its literal meaning is “what arises from the mitzvah.” Benefit in our sense is a particular case. But if you mean everything that arises from the mitzvah, then it seems to me that every benefit would be of this type. I once wondered whether every reason is necessarily a restriction/boundary, since giving a reason means tying the mitzvah to something else, and this is ostensibly the restriction. Although these are mainly reasons for prohibition, it is possible to simultaneously propose reasons for commandments as “restrictions” to an action, i.e. something that promotes the doing of something else. But there my conclusion was that no. There are reasons for prohibition that are not restrictions (for example, when the bad result results directly from this action and not from another action that it would lead to). And evidence of this is that although a reason for prohibition is not required in practice, there are reasons (as the Rambam says, for example), and yet it is accepted among the latter that there is no restriction in the Torah (the words of the Atavan from the Torah are known, which brings exceptions to this rule). In any case, if benefit is a result (direct or indirect), then it seems to me that there is no possibility of anything else. Even seeing the prohibition or mitzvah as a means of creating a commitment to the word of God without intrinsic value for this action, is a dependence on the result.

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משה replied 4 years ago

Kudos for the detailed answer!

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