The work of
In Rambam, Avoda Zarah, 33, it is explained (following you) that the worship of God is strictly to obey Him because He said, He has completely formal authority.
And in Rambam’s Laws of Repentance, it is explained (still following you) that serving God out of pure love is to do the truth because He is the truth.
1. How do the two reconcile? Does doing the truth because it is true = obeying God because He said it? Obeying God because He said it means that I don’t care even if what He says is wrong or even if it is a lie. I don’t care. I obey Him because He said it. If I do it because it is true, then there is my assessment and my distinction of what I am doing that is true and therefore I do it.
2. Obeying God because He said so, seems to me to be the exact opposite of your entire Mishnah, that behind everything there is logic and that everything can be understood and that it is not appropriate to do things casually but rather to understand them to the point of ignorance, this seems to be the statement of a fundamentalist who does his religious work because he has to and not because he understands. In other words, if I have to obey God only because He said so, then why should I bother so much with Talmud and philosophy to understand the root of things if it doesn’t matter anyway?
I hope you understood what I wrote, these are questions that are very important to me and I would be very happy if I could understand your answer.
Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
- The truth is that one must obey what God says. This is itself truth. It is true that it is also the truth on its own part because God speaks the truth. Hypothetically, I would do the thing even without it being true, just because God said it (and that is itself doing the truth). But with regard to God, there are no two options here because everything He says is also the truth.
- Therefore, there is no contradiction to my teaching. What God says is the truth, therefore obedience is combined with doing the truth. It is not true that everything can be understood. Absolutely not. I do claim that behind everything there is logic. This does not mean that this logic is accessible to us. Obeying this is not fundamentalism. When it contradicts logic (anti-logical, and not just illogical) then obedience is fundamentalism. Also because if it contradicts logic, then God did not say it.
Discover more from הרב מיכאל אברהם
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Leave a Reply
Please login or Register to submit your answer