The Meaning of the Giving of the Torah: Decision and Necessity (Column 72)

With God's help

The previous post dealt with the meaning of the Giving of the Torah. The basic claim was that the commandments did not come to tell us God's will anew, but to command us—that is, to determine what is forbidden, obligatory, and permitted. The event at Mount Sinai was the legislative act that transformed morally desirable norms into binding norms, religious and halakhic. This time I want to continue this line of thought and point to the dual character of such an event, through an analogy to ethical judgment.

Decision and Necessity in the Giving of the Torah

My point of departure will be the well-worn question about the relation between the coercion symbolized by holding the mountain over them like a barrel and נעשה ונשמע ("we shall do and we shall hear"). The description of the event at Mount Sinai in Scripture and in the words of the Sages has a dual aspect: on the one hand, Scripture itself describes the people's response as their own decision. They are asked whether they are willing to undertake the commitment, and they answer נעשה ונשמע. The Sages expand this further in their descriptions of how the Holy One, blessed be He, went around to all the nations, which did not want to receive the Torah, and only Israel answered in the affirmative. Seemingly, this is assent born of free choice. On the other hand, the Sages say that there was coercion there, with the Holy One, blessed be He, holding the mountain over us like a barrel and threatening that if we did not accept the Torah, there would be our burial place. How is this compatible with the plain sense of Scripture? Various answers have been offered on this matter, most of them homiletical and not really persuasive to me. I will try here to explain why the question itself is mistaken.

Decision and Necessity in Kantian Philosophy

A similar tension arises with respect to the Kantian conception of morality. Moralists used the verse רק אין אלוקים במקום הזה והרגוני על דבר אשתי ("surely there is no God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife") to say that there is no morality without belief in God. A world devoid of God is what Hobbes and others called "the state of nature," that is, a collection of individuals who act according to interests and impulses without a supreme and binding moral command. Against this conception, humanists have always set the moral view in which the human being stands at the center. In their view, precisely a secular humanism that sees the human being as a supreme and unconditional value, subordinate to no one, can serve as a possible basis for morality. In their view, belief in God is precisely what empties human action of value, since after all He decides about it. God decides for the person and dictates his mode of conduct. The promised reward and punishment also contribute their share to draining human actions of meaning, since decisions made under threats are not sovereign. Both of these conceptions appear together in Kant's doctrine.

On the one hand, Kant is usually cited as the father of secular humanistic morality that places the human being at the center—an antithesis to the theocentric conceptions that saw God and religious faith as the binding and necessary source of morality. And indeed, in his central writings Kant expresses a very deep humanistic conception, and not by chance his doctrine serves as the main anchor of humanistic morality. On the other hand, Kant himself adduces in several places a proof from morality for the existence of God (see in the fourth notebook here on the site). That proof assumes that there is no morality without God, apparently in total contradiction to his humanism. Many have already wrestled with this interpretive problem, and here I want to offer a simple explanation, which will also illuminate the parallel dual aspect that appears in the Giving of the Torah.

Ari Alon on the Rabbinic and the Sovereign Person

Ari Alon (the son of the late Justice Menachem Elon) is a well-known secular preacher and homilist. He is endowed with an exceptionally impressive power of expression, which, for me, always arouses suspicion. I do not mean to claim that sharp rhetorical ability is always a fig leaf hiding behind it a logical and philosophical vacuum, but sometimes that is indeed the case. When someone has impressive powers of expression, the reader and the listener are less alert to the need to examine the arguments themselves. Human beings can always talk nonsense. But people with impressive rhetorical gifts can do so without being caught. It is worth remembering this and cultivating a healthy suspicion toward gifted writers.

Alon repeats in several places a distinction he proposes between the rabbinic person (=the religious person) and the sovereign person (=the secular person). In his description, the rabbinic person is run by external authorities: God, halakhic decisors and rabbis, books of Jewish law, and the like. By contrast, the sovereign person runs his life himself and legislates his own laws. In his view, the sovereign person is the pinnacle (?) and crown of creation, whereas the rabbinic person is a human low point, anti-humanistic. He is essentially an animal in human form, led out to pasture by the many shepherds he creates for himself in order to flee from the need to decide.

A Few Questions

The ideal figure according to Alon is the atheist who legislates his own values and laws and conducts himself by them. I wonder how he would relate to a person who legislated for himself, autonomously and sovereignly, the following ethical rule: "Do all your deeds in a way that will bring you maximum financial benefit and happiness, especially if this comes at the expense of others." That person joins the mafia as a contract killer, since this blessed occupation grants him a very handsome income for minimal effort (at the price of a certain risk, of course). Another person devotes himself, in an entirely sovereign way, to abusing the helpless—human beings and animals—because this gives him supreme happiness. He too has legislated his own laws and conducts himself in a very sovereign fashion by them.

I assume Alon would not hold up these figures as his models. Why? After all, these are people who legislated their own laws and values for themselves and conduct themselves very impressively in accordance with them. They act against the current and are willing to pay a not insignificant price (to hide and to live in fear) in order to realize their values. So what is wrong with that? Seemingly, this is the sovereign person in all his glory, is it not?

An Answer to These Questions

What is wrong here is that sovereignty is not enough. True, these people act sovereignly and legislate their own laws and values for themselves, but those laws and values are evil. To become the sovereign ideal of which Alon speaks, it is not enough for a person to legislate laws for himself and live by them. In addition, these are supposed to be good laws.

But now the question arises: what is the criterion by which those laws are judged good or bad? If the only measure by which laws can be examined is their autonomous and sovereign genesis, then every system of laws created autonomously is good by definition. The distinction between good and bad autonomous laws requires a standard, a criterion, that does not derive from the human being and does not depend on him. This is a standard imposed upon him, and certainly not something that emerges from his own legislation. Even if our sovereign person legislates for himself a thousand times over a murderous way of life, that will not make murder permissible or good. Murder is evil, whether he likes it or not. That is imposed upon him and does not depend on him. What he can do is legislate for himself a way of life committed to the good and refraining from evil, but the definition of what is good and what is evil is not in his hands. The distinction between good and evil, and the definition of acts as good or evil, does not depend on him. This is a framework imposed upon him with the mountain hanging over his head like a barrel. A good person and a bad person can both choose their path sovereignly. The good person differs from the bad one in whether he is sovereignly committed to a good life, not in his sovereignty as such.

The Dual Character of Moral Conduct

The conclusion is that the description of a sovereign person as someone who legislates his own laws and determines his own values is correct, but partial. It ignores another necessary dimension that does not depend on the human being: the distinction between good and evil, indeed the very definition of good and evil. The conclusion is that in order for us to judge someone as a good person, two conditions must be met: 1. He decides sovereignly about his way of life and accepts his decisions autonomously. 2. Those decisions are directed toward the good. He legislates for himself a commitment to what is good and moral, and to avoiding evil. For some reason, though he does so with great grace, Alon chooses to focus on the first part and ignore the second.

Now it is very easy to see that Alon's distinction is fundamentally mistaken. Both the religious person and the secular person can be sovereign or not. The difference between a religious sovereign and a secular sovereign is not essential. The difference lies only in the system of values to which he is committed. In both cases he is not his own legislator. Rather, in the case of the sovereign religious person there is an external legislator (God) and people authorized to interpret and legislate further (the Sages, the Sanhedrin), whereas in the case of the sovereign secular person there is another external legislator. It is not God but the source of morality, whatever that may be.

A Note on the External Factor

As we have seen, the source of morality cannot be the human being himself, and therefore even in the secular context I speak of some external factor. In the fourth notebook I argued that there is really no possibility of morality without some external factor. From this it clearly follows that in a materialist world devoid of God there is no possibility of valid morality. The moralists who determine that without belief in God there is no moral behavior are mistaken. In my view, in a non-religious society behavior is no less moral than in a religious society. But there is another interpretation, similar yet different, of the verse רק אין אלוקים במקום הזה והרגוני ("surely there is no God in this place, and they will kill me"), and it is correct: a sovereign materialist who legislates his own moral laws is inconsistent. There are quite a few such people (to my delight), but their doctrine suffers from inconsistency. Good behavior is possible without God, but morality and a valid moral theory are not possible without God. I will not elaborate on this here, and the reader is referred to the fourth notebook. I will only add that this reminds me of a favorite remark of Richard Dawkins. He once wrote that in every society there are good people who do good deeds and bad people who do bad deeds. But only in a religious society are there good people who do bad deeds. By the same token, I can say here that in every society there are intelligent people who act sensibly and unintelligent people who act illogically. But only in an atheistic society are there intelligent people who act illogically (or, actually more accurately: foolish people who act correctly).

Decision and Necessity

It seems to me that this dual aspect is the solution to the contradiction in Kant's doctrine. Indeed, God is needed in order to ground a valid distinction between good and evil. Without Him, such a distinction is impossible. On the other hand, the human being is supposed to decide on his own, autonomously and sovereignly, to commit himself to this system of good and evil. Without such a sovereign decision, his actions have no meaning. A person who does so by rote, under social influence, or simply because it is convenient for him, gives his actions little value.

Therefore there is no contradiction whatsoever between the Kantian claim that without God there is no morality and the claim that the foundation of morality lies in the sovereign decision of the human being. A robot that obeys the laws for which it was programmed is not a moral creature, because it did not choose. But by the same token, a chaotic creature that behaves arbitrarily, without any laws imposed upon it from outside, is also not a moral creature. It does choose, but it chooses an arbitrary system of laws. A moral creature is a person who acts out of his own free and autonomous decision, committed to the system of laws that define the good and that God imposes upon him with the mountain held over him like a barrel.

This is also the meaning of the tension between holding the mountain over them like a barrel and נעשה ונשמע. The people decide autonomously to commit themselves to a system of laws that was imposed upon them with the mountain held over them like a barrel. There is no contradiction between the two. On the contrary, without one of them the other has no meaning. Without a system of laws that determines good and evil, the autonomous choice of the human being has no meaning. And by the same token, the system of laws has no meaning unless someone chooses it autonomously.

The Parable of Democratic Elections

I have probably already mentioned here once my favorite parable of democratic elections. One can think of four patterns of voting:

• The elections in North Korea. A person enters the polling booth and chooses, completely freely, the only ballot slip placed there, and drops it into the ballot box. When the votes are counted, the one who won the majority is appointed president of North Korea. This is illusory freedom, of course. In fact, this is complete determinism, even if the person does not feel that anyone is forcing him to do anything—the circumstances are doing it.
• The elections in Switzerland. A person enters the polling booth and freely chooses one of several different ballot slips placed there. Each person drops his choice into the ballot box, and whoever wins the majority of votes is appointed president of Switzerland. Seemingly, democracy at its finest. Except that in (metaphorical) Switzerland there are no problems with which one must contend. In a situation where there are no such problems, democracy and freedom of choice have no meaning whatsoever. There is no right and wrong here, there are no costs to the different choices, and therefore such freedom has no value. Let them draw lots; in any case it makes no difference. Free and autonomous decision loses its value if it is not made within a framework that is imposed upon us and does not depend on us.
• The elections in England. A person enters the polling booth and freely chooses one of several different ballot slips placed there. Whoever wins the majority vote is elected British prime minister. Britain faces quite a few problems, and therefore freedom of choice has meaning there. Problems too have meaning only when the people decide, sovereignly and freely, how to deal with them. The costs do not depend on them, but the decision about how to confront the situation is theirs.

Just for the sake of completeness, I will add the fourth model:

• The elections in Israel. A person enters the polling booth and freely decides on some candidate from among several possibilities and drops the slip into the ballot box. The majority determines who will be prime minister. But here there is another problem: all the candidates who are elected behave in exactly the same way. It does not really matter whom we chose. The perceptive reader certainly understands that here too freedom has little value, and in fact this is a variation on the North Korean model.

This parable illustrates well why the very framework within which the sovereign person acts, and which does not depend on him, is what gives meaning to his free and sovereign conduct.

The Sinai Event as the Foundation of the Sovereign Person

The Sinai event established the framework of halakhic good and evil that is imposed upon us with the mountain held over us like a barrel. This is the meaning of the Giving of the Torah. Of course, נעשה ונשמע completes the picture, and without it this coercion has no meaning—just as without the coercion, the free decision has no meaning.

Until the Sinai event there was moral good and evil. The seven Noahide commandments express the universal commitment to the laws of morality, and therefore they are incumbent upon all human beings and not specifically upon Jews. But at the Sinai event the halakhic sphere was introduced anew. There the framework of halakhic good and evil was established,[1] and it was the command imposed upon us (not our decision) that gave it validity. It is no accident that Maimonides rules in the sources cited in the previous column that the obligation to observe the commandments was created at the Sinai event, and that even commands given earlier bind only by virtue of this event. Sinai was the Big Bang of Jewish law. If the world was created through ten utterances, then at Sinai the Ten Commandments were given to the world. The utterances established the natural framework, physics, and the commandments established the normative framework, Jewish law.

Perhaps this is what Rabbi Yehuda Halevi meant in his well-known epigram: עבדי הזמן עבדי עבדים, עבד ה' הוא לבדו חופשי ("Slaves of time are slaves of slaves; the servant of God alone is free"). Contrary to Ari Alon's claim, the sovereign person can exist only within a framework that is dictated to him and imposed upon him from outside. Without it, he may indeed have freedom, but his freedom has no meaning. Sovereignty is not freedom but an independent decision to commit oneself to a framework that is dictated and imposed upon one. This became possible only thanks to the Sinai event and the coercion that took place there.

[1] On the relation between it and moral good and evil, see Column 15.