The commandment of faith in it

שו”ת › Category: general › The commandment of faith in it

asked 6 years ago

Hello Rabbi
According to the Samag, which believes that there is a mitzvah to believe that the one who gave the Torah is the same one who brought them out of Egypt, do atheists also fulfill this mitzvah (in an empty way, of course)?

Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

0 Answers

0 Vote Up Vote Down

מיכי Staff answered 6 years ago

One can of course argue about this, but I am quite convinced that it is not. Mitzvot do not deal with mere knowledge, unless knowledge is relevant knowledge. This is kind of the distinction between mathematics and physics. A mathematician can know that if the axioms of Euclidean geometry are true, then the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180. But if you ask him what the sum of the angles really is, he must answer that he does not know (it depends on the basic assumptions). The physicist, on the other hand, has the job of telling you what the sum of the angles in a triangle is (that is, he must know what the assumptions are that are true for our world, and therefore what the theorems are derived from them).

Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

אילון replied 6 years ago

Atheists do not fulfill this mitzvah in any case, even if they actually perform the (lack of) action in it. One needs faith in the mitzvah of the action (or virtue. in God) for the action of the action to be considered fulfilling the mitzvah. Here there is no faith in the mitzvah. It is like taking a lulav without believing in God that they will not fulfill the mitzvah, but indeed in practice they will take a lulav.

מיכי Staff replied 6 years ago

Ayalon, you are absolutely right, but the other side of the coin is that you cannot define such a mitzvot even for believers. A mitzvah to know something cannot exist.

ההוא גברא replied 6 years ago

Why can't it exist? They believe that NULL gave the Torah (because no one analyzed the Torah) and they also believe that NULL brought us out of Egypt.

א' replied 6 years ago

Similarly, I once thought that to the extent that the mitzvah of ‘faith’ is to learn and be educated (the mitzvah is about action and not about an action that is not dependent on me), it turns out that when a secular person comes to the conclusion that there is no God, he has fulfilled the mitzvah, since he has strictly performed the mitzvah, that is, the action. And there is pepper