The Meaning of the Giving of the Torah: Decision and Necessity (Column 72)
Why the tension between we shall do and we shall hear and coercion at Sinai is a mistaken question
The essay continues the claim from the previous piece: the giving of the Torah did not come to reveal God’s will at the level of value, but to legislate obligation. Norms that may have been morally desirable became binding in the religious and halakhic sense. That is why the famous question arises: if Israel accepted the Torah willingly, what can coercion under the mountain mean? The rabbi suggests that the question itself wrongly assumes that binding legislation and free choice are opposites, when in fact both are necessary.
The critique of Ari Elon’s sovereign human: autonomy alone does not make a person moral
To clarify this, the essay turns to ethics and criticizes Ari Elon’s distinction between the rabbinic human, subject to external authorities, and the sovereign human, who legislates his own values. The rabbi sharpens the point: if autonomy itself is the only criterion, then a contract killer or a person who abuses others out of consistent and sovereign choice would also have to count as a human ideal. Since that is absurd, it becomes clear that it is not enough for a person to choose his own laws; the content of those laws must also be good.
The standard of good is not legislated by the human being but imposed upon him
From here comes the main claim: the distinction between good and evil is not a product of human sovereignty. A person can choose whether to commit himself to good or to evil, but he does not create the distinction itself. That is why both the religious person and the secular person need an external moral framework; the difference between them is not whether they are sovereign, but to which system they are committed. The rabbi adds an important nuance: moral behavior can certainly exist without belief in God, but without a valid external source there can be no valid moral theory. So atheism can produce good people, in his view, but it struggles to ground a coherent morality.
Reading Kant: morality requires both a binding source and autonomous choice
Against this background, the essay offers a simple resolution to Kant’s dual aspect. On the one hand, God is needed to give binding force to the distinction between good and evil; on the other hand, a moral act has value only when the person chooses it himself, rather than acting like a robot, from habit, from social pressure, or from self-interest. So there is no contradiction between the claim that without God there is no morality and the claim that morality is grounded in human autonomy: coercion establishes the framework, and free choice gives the act its moral worth.
The elections parable: empty freedom and meaningful freedom
The parable of elections illustrates the point. In North Korea there is supposedly a choice, but only one option, so there is no real freedom. In metaphorical Switzerland there are several options, but no real problems to decide about, so freedom has no significance. In England there are both several options and real problems, so sovereign choice becomes meaningful. In Israel, according to the essay’s satirical exaggeration, there is apparently a choice, but in practice all the candidates behave the same way, so freedom is emptied out again. The conclusion is that freedom has meaning only within a given reality that does not depend on us.
Sinai as the big bang of halakha
From there the essay returns to the giving of the Torah: before Sinai there was universal moral good and evil, expressed for example in the seven Noahide laws. At Sinai, the halakhic sphere was added, meaning the framework of halakhic good and evil. That is why Maimonides can say that even commandments given earlier become binding only by force of the Sinai revelation. This is the legislative act that creates obligation, and that is why Sinai is the big bang of halakha. Precisely the coercive element in that event is what makes true human sovereignty possible: not the person who invents values for himself, but the person who freely chooses to bind himself to a framework he did not invent.
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 we shall do and we shall hear ("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 we shall do and we shall hear. 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 surely there is no God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife ("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 surely there is no God in this place, and they will kill me ("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 we shall do and we shall hear. 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, we shall do and we shall hear 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: Slaves of time are slaves of slaves; the servant of God alone is free ("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.
Discussion
Precisely because this is not a proof, it is clear that this is not what Kant meant, since he did in fact see this as a proof.
See the fourth notebook, where I brought evidence that Kant speaks of a proof from morality for the existence of God, and therefore it is clear that he does not see God merely as a guarantor for the existence of morality (in the sense of the moralists’ reading of “Surely there is no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me”). He sees Him, and rightly so, as the source of the validity of the norms. Without Him they have no validity. Only on the assumption that there is valid morality can one investigate and arrive, through human reflection, at the categorical imperative (= the content of morality). But the validity of the imperative, which is the starting point for this inquiry, comes from God.
Regarding Ari Elon:
You present his words here inaccurately, and that is a pity. His precise definition of the sovereign person and the rabbinic person is:
“A sovereign person is sovereign over himself. He has no sovereign in his world, and he is not sovereign in the world of others. A rabbinic person is not sovereign over himself. He appoints a rabbi for himself. The rabbi becomes his God.”
That is, the distinction Elon makes is not between someone whose source of authority is himself and someone whose source of authority is the divine command, but between someone whose source of authority is himself and someone who allows another person to be the source of authority for him. One can challenge the atheist premise on which he relies in these remarks, but that is another matter.
In any case, the quotation is from 1986, and it appears in a book published in 1990. In any case, in things he wrote in recent years with respect to this very definition he says:
“Many years ago I hated the word ‘secular’ and did everything so that no one would define me that way. During the 1970s I lectured in Zionist seminars in various frameworks of state (‘secular’) education. The unfortunate term ‘formerly religious’ did not yet exist then, and I refused to describe myself as formerly religious who had become secular. In the ‘religious’ world from which I came, the word ‘secular’ had an extremely negative image of emptiness, despair, lack of values, drugs, and sex, whereas the word ‘religious’ contained within it all the light, beauty, warmth, magic, happiness, purity, truth, stability, rightness, loyalty, integrity, love, niceness, pleasantness, acceptance, clarity, and radiance. Against the background of my refusal to be called ‘secular,’ I found myself lecturing in dozens of Zionist seminars and telling all my listeners that I am a sovereign Jew who had been a rabbinic Jew and had gone free. Time and again I repeated my entire sovereign doctrine on one foot:
“A sovereign person is sovereign over himself. He has no sovereign in his world, and he is not sovereign in the world of others. A rabbinic person is not sovereign over himself. He appoints a rabbi for himself. The rabbi becomes his God.”
To my ‘religious’ friends who were hurt by the fact that I was pushing them into a non-sovereign corner, I clarified that this move was mainly tactical. ‘Instead of defending myself before you and arguing that I too am a believing person even though I am “secular,” I managed to make you defend yourselves before me and say that you too are sovereign even though you are “rabbinic”…’
Full disclosure: Ari Elon’s book Alma Di influenced me quite a bit, and in the past year I have worked with Ari in the same workplace, and have learned much from him and with him.
Hello Avshalom.
I did not understand your correction to what I wrote. You repeat what I wrote and then say that it is something different.
If he does not believe in God and does not see any other person as an authority, then what remains is that he himself is his own authority. That is what I wrote. If he intends to contrast the rabbinic person with someone who sees the Holy One, blessed be He, as an authority, only without the mediation of other human beings, then he should have set opposite the rabbinic person a sovereign believer (who is not his own authority but God, who of course was not revealed to him in any way) and not an atheist. He did not do that.
As for accusing religious people of lacking sovereignty, you are indeed offering a slight correction to what I wrote, but in my opinion it is irrelevant to the discussion. The fact that someone writes things for tactical reasons does not interest me at all. I examine what is written, not the purpose for which it was written. If he writes that the religious person is not sovereign, he is mistaken, and the excuses that he writes this tactically as self-therapy really do not seem relevant to me. Next time he should write above the article/book: please do not relate to these words; they were written only for the author and his own needs.
Therefore it seems to me that your remarks actually show that I described his position with complete precision (although in truth I read these things a long time ago).
Can it be understood that the creation of man is also revelation on an earlier plane? On the one hand, faith in God was implanted in him (as a foundational assumption), and on the other hand, the rules of morality were also given to him in the form of the seven Noahide commandments.
Many other things were implanted in us as well. Also the basic assumptions of our logic and thinking. I recall a book by Shalom Rosenberg (something with heaven in the title. Maybe Torah from Heaven?) that discusses the model of an ongoing giving of the Torah through our culture and our nature. The Holy One, blessed be He, gives us Torah through what we think.
But it is important to add that even if something was implanted in me, that does not necessarily make it true. In principle I am supposed to critique even what was implanted in me (and indeed the critique is carried out with those very tools themselves. There is a philosophical and logical difficulty here). The desire to speak slander or to steal was also implanted in me, but I am supposed to decide not to do so (it is true that the understanding was implanted in me that although I have such an impulse, it is not proper).
So we have God, who is the source of morality being absolute, and we have man, who decides whether to obey the laws of morality.
But what is the relation to the source of the laws of morality—that is, what is the relation between the divine command and human moral reflection?
For example, the prohibition “You shall not murder” from the Ten Commandments in relation to moral reflection (Kantian, for example) that leads to the prohibition of murder.
I did not understand the question. Human reflection reveals to us the content of the divine command. The validity of this moral imperative derives from God.
I meant human reflection on human morality, not human reflection on the Torah. After all, one can arrive at morality in two ways: by reading the words of God and by rational reflection (for example, as Kant does). What is the relation between the two ways?
These are not two ways but the very same way. Reflection on the Torah only clarifies your moral outlook. Usually no one derives from the Torah a moral principle that contradicts his moral reasoning. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I do not find much value in studying the non-halakhic parts of the Torah and the Bible. In the end you will not derive from there any moral principle that contradicts your outlook. If there is a contradiction, you will interpret creatively so that it fits (otherwise it just won’t do: could it be that the Torah would teach us something immoral?). As the Beit Yosef wrote in Yoreh De’ah, it is preferable to strain the language than the reasoning.
If we take, for example, the commandment to wipe out Amalek, I do not think there is any interpretation or forced reading that would produce a moral law that fits moral intuitions arising from rational reflection alone. For example, even the most liberal interpretation of wiping out Amalek, which would claim that the commandment can never be practical, would produce a moral law without practical implications, but still a moral law that contradicts moral reasoning.
My impression is that the Torah nevertheless does create a moral framework that one is forced to take into account despite all the forced readings and interpretations.
Absolutely not. From wiping out Amalek one learns no principle whatsoever. It is a specific command to kill this people alone. What moral principle would you learn from here? Where would you apply it (beyond Amalek, which is explicitly stated)? On the contrary, all the commentators will tell you that morally one may not kill innocents unless they are Amalekites. This is the halakhic exception that does not fit the rules of morality. And again morality remains as we understand it. See more on this in Post 15.
A response to Michi
I understand that Elon does indeed set opposite the rabbinic person not the atheist, but the sovereign believer.
When I read the passage, I really did not understand it that way. If you are right, then at the very least his terminology is very unsuccessful. A rabbinic person can be completely sovereign. I am a rabbinic person and I feel that I am completely sovereign. But as I said, as far as I remember, the content of the remarks also indicates that this is not his intention. Beyond that, when one publishes the essay in Sdot, it probably is not aimed at sovereign believers, because there are not many of those there.
Peace and blessings to the Rabbi.
It is certainly true that the principle you wrote in the post—that the values among which a person chooses do not receive moral validity from the person’s own choice but from outside him, and that they are a dictated system—is correct; but in my opinion, your interpretation too is nothing more than a forced dressing-up of the midrash about the coercion of the mountain, and it does not resolve the midrashic contradiction between coercion and willing acceptance.
A. How would you explain: “If you accept the Torah, good; but if not, there shall be your burial place!” This implies that it is not only the presentation of the framework of good and bad values as such, but putting a gun to the temple and coercing what to choose! (and not only ‘coercion’ of the framework of values).
B. What is the great protest against the Torah according to your view? And what was corrected by “They upheld and accepted it in the days of Ahasuerus”?
A. If there is no morality, the world returns to chaos.
B. Indeed, this requires further study. Perhaps Hazal really did not interpret it this way, but for the verses this is a possible interpretation.
“The Sinai revelation is the legislative act that turned desirable norms (morally) into binding norms (religiously and halakhically).”
A. What does “desirable norms” mean? I did not understand the level of “obligation” before the Sinai revelation; was there not a divine rationale against transgressions, for example?
B. Was the prohibition that Adam and Eve transgressed a moral prohibition? “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it”—after all, that sounds like some kind of revelational commandment (to use Maimonides’ terminology) straight from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He.
C. What does “if there is no morality, the world returns to chaos” mean? Was it only with the creation of man on the sixth day that the world ceased to be chaos (according to the language of the second verse in the Torah)?
A. There is a difference between the Holy One’s expectations and commandments. A human legislator also wants people to save one another, even if there is no law of “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” But that is a norm that is not a binding law. That was the situation before the giving of the Torah.
B. They received a command from the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore it was a command and not a moral principle. But it was a one-time command and not for future generations, and it is not counted among the commandments (see Maimonides on the third root).
C. Give me the context.
A. I did not understand exactly what the difference is. The formality? Why is the expectation not enough, and there also has to be a command, if God judges us in any case?
B. The prohibition on Adam and Eve was for a limited time? If they had not eaten from the tree, would it at some point have become permitted to eat from it?
C. See your reply in the very comment above my previous-to-last one (15 Sivan 5777 – 09/06/2017 at 14:49)
D. You say that Torah and morality are separate systems, but that “there is no morality and no valid moral doctrine without God.” So from where do we get the knowledge that the morality we hold is indeed divine, if not from the Torah/prophecy?
A. As far as I remember, these things were explained in the post. Before the prohibition against running a red light was legislated, it was sensible, but not a legal-juridical offense.
B. It was only for Adam and Eve while they were in the Garden of Eden. I referred you to the third root. See there and in my article on this root in the book Yishlach Sharashav (it is here).
D. From the fact that it is implanted in us. Beyond that, the Torah says, “And you shall do what is right and good.” This of course is not counted as a commandment, since it is an expectation and not a command.
A. I read the article and still it is not clear to me why the halakhic command is what constitutes the sovereign person. The expectation of the Creator is also imposed on us (and not our own decision), so there is already validity even without an explicit command; the command simply adds another dimension (formal-legal) that perhaps gives me a bit more certainty, but it feels as though the Sinai revelation is apparently a quantitative difference and not a qualitative one, so that the person was sovereign before as well.
D. From the fact that it is implanted, do you understand that it is divine, or from the fact that the Torah says it is implanted do you understand that it is
divine? And “in us” means humanity in general, not only the Jew, right?
A. I do not know how to explain it better, but I do not understand what is unclear here. It is obvious as an egg. I brought the example of running a red light, and that is enough.
B. From both. Indeed, there is no such thing as Jewish morality. Morality is universal by definition.
Regarding Kant.
It seems to me that in his view the moral decision of good and evil comes from human reason and not from God. His categorical imperative, in his view, obligates all rational beings by virtue of reason itself, and that is the source. But we need an external factor that will obligate us to carry out these decisions and help us overcome the non-rational decisions we want to make (out of desires, emotions, etc.).
Of course, as a Christian Kant would claim that the source of reason is God, but that is of course not a proof of God’s existence.