On the Meaning of the Giving of the Torah (Column 220)
With God's help
Because of limited time, I wrote these remarks here briefly and quickly. Most of them have already been said in different forms in the past, and the wise will grow wiser still.[1] I apologize that I have not edited or proofread this piece; at times I abbreviated, and I did not refer to parallel discussions and full sources where these matters are explained more fully. I wanted people to have time to read these remarks before the holiday.
The Ten Utterances, the Ten Commandments, and the Naturalistic Fallacy
The accepted view is that at the revelation at Mount Sinai God gave us the Torah, and through it revealed to us what is right and wrong in His eyes. In other words, this was an informative event. I think this is a very partial conception, and to a large extent a mistaken one. The Sages say in a midrash that Abraham our patriarch observed the entire Torah, even the rabbinic enactment of eruv tavshilin. This is of course not a historical description of what actually happened, but the point of the description is that one does not need the Giving of the Torah in order to know what is right. That was known, at least by the prophets, even before Sinai. The Giving of the Torah came to introduce the command. From that point onward, we not only know what is good or bad in God's eyes; we are also commanded to do it. At Sinai, Jewish law and its binding force were created anew, and perhaps obligation as such. A different and new sphere of reality came into being there.
By way of preface, the naturalistic fallacy teaches us that there is an unbridgeable gap between what is the case (the 'is') and what ought to be (the 'ought'). Facts in themselves are neutral, and one cannot derive from them norms of the permitted and the forbidden. At the Big Bang, the Ten Utterances were spoken, through which the physical world was created: the world of facts. But this is a neutral world, in which there is no forbidden and permitted, and from which no forbidden and permitted can be derived. It is a mute sphere of reality, which simply exists, and that is all. One cannot attach to it categories of good and evil, forbidden and permitted. Nor can one derive them from it, because of the naturalistic fallacy. It is therefore no wonder that many people deny their existence. They are incapable of understanding what an imperative sentence is, and what religious, and perhaps also moral, obligation means. Hence they are forced to give utilitarian explanations for moral and religious duties, since concepts of obligation do not exist within their physical-material world. At Mount Sinai another kind of Big Bang occurred, in which the normative sphere was created: the forbidden and the permitted. This happened through the Ten Commandments (corresponding to the Ten Utterances). Whoever was there and experienced it can understand what it means to be commanded, and what it means to be obligated by a command. To others this sounds like bizarre and meaningless discourse, and from their standpoint perhaps rightly so, for these concepts cannot be derived in any way from facts and from the physical world familiar to us. It is a shadow-world that hovers over the familiar world, but without it the physical world has no meaning or value. In many ways this is the 'color' of the physical world, without which it does not truly exist. It is no accident that in chapter 1, mishnah 4 of Sefer Yetzirah we read:
Ten sefirot of nothingness: their measure is ten, which have no end— the depth of beginning and the depth of end, the depth of good and the depth of evil, the depth of height and the depth of below, the depth of east and the depth of west, the depth of north and the depth of south. And the One Master, God, faithful King, rules over all of them, from His holy dwelling to eternity upon eternity:
The first eight 'depths' (the four axes) are the axes of physics: the axis of time and the three spatial axes. But here another axis is added: value (spirit, the soul). In later Kabbalah this structure is called the triad of world, year, and soul. Without this additional axis, physics, represented by the first four axes, has no meaning.
Maimonides' Introduction to the Eighth Principle[2]
In the eighth principle, Maimonides discusses the fact that one does not count a negation of obligation together with the prohibitions:
The eighth principle: that one should not count the negation of obligation together with a prohibition.
But before he enters into his topic, he offers a general introduction whose place here is not at all obvious:
Know that prohibition is one of the two parts of command. For you command the commanded person either to do a certain thing or not to do it. Thus, you may command him to eat and say to him, “Eat,” or command him to refrain from eating and say to him, “Do not eat.” In Arabic there is no single term that includes both these meanings together. The logicians have already mentioned this and said as follows: “Command and prohibition have no single term in Arabic that encompasses them both, and so we have had to designate both by the name of one of them, namely, command.” It is thus clear to you that prohibition belongs to the category of command. The well-known Arabic term designated for prohibition is la. And this same phenomenon undoubtedly exists in every language—that is, you command the person addressed either to do something or not to do something. It is therefore clear that positive commandments and negative commandments are both full-fledged commands: things we were commanded to do and things we were warned not to do. The former are called positive commandments, and the latter negative commandments. The term that includes them both in Hebrew is gezerah (“decree”). Thus the Sages called every commandment, whether positive or negative, “the King’s decree.”
One must remember that this text was originally written in Arabic. Maimonides explains here that 'commandment' is an expression that speaks of positive commandments, whereas with respect to prohibitions the proper expression is 'warning' or 'prohibition.' He says that in Arabic there is no common term covering both a commandment and a prohibition, and therefore they use the term 'commandment' by extension even for prohibitions. In Hebrew, both are called 'decrees,' and under that general category there are two subcategories: positive commandments and prohibitions.
He then goes on to explain what a negation of obligation is and why it should not be counted among the commandments:
The negation of obligation, however, is a different matter: it is when you negate a predicate of a subject, and it has nothing at all to do with command. For example: “So-and-so did not eat yesterday,” “So-and-so did not drink the wine,” “Reuven is not Shimon’s father,” and the like. All of these are negations of fact; there is no trace of command in them. The word ordinarily used for negation in Arabic is ma. Negation is also expressed by la and laysa. In Hebrew, however, most negation is expressed precisely by the word lo, the same word by which one issues a prohibition. Negation is also expressed by ein and its pronominal forms, such as eino, einam, and einekhem, and the like. Negation in Hebrew by lo appears in such verses as: “No prophet again arose in Israel like Moses” (end of Berakhah), “God is not a man, that He should lie” (Balak 23), “Trouble shall not arise a second time” (Nahum 1), “No man stood [with him]” (Vayigash 45), “He arose not, nor moved for him” (Esther 5), and many others like these. Negation by ein appears in such verses as “and there was no man” (Genesis 2), “the dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9), and many others. Thus the distinction between prohibition and negation has become clear to you. For prohibition belongs to the realm of command and exists only in verbal forms of command; that is, just as command always concerns the future, so too does prohibition. Language does not permit command in the past tense, and likewise prohibition cannot be in the past. Nor can command be inserted into narrative, because narrative requires a predicate and subject, whereas command is a complete utterance, as has been explained in the books devoted to this. Prohibition likewise cannot enter into narrative. Negation is not so, for negation can enter into narrative and can negate in the past, the future, and the present. All this is self-evident to anyone who reflects on it.
Up to this point everything seems trivial. No one would think of counting the verse God is not a man, that He should lie as a prohibition. The consequence that follows is less trivial:
And when this is so, it is in no way proper to count prohibitions that are merely negations among the negative commandments. This is a demonstrative matter that needs no proof beyond what we have mentioned regarding understanding the meanings of words so as to distinguish between a prohibition and a negation. This matter escaped others, to the point that one of them counted “She shall not go out as the slaves go out” (at the beginning of Mishpatim), not realizing that this is a negation, not a prohibition. I will explain this as follows. The Torah already ruled regarding one who strikes his Canaanite slave, male or female, and in the course of the blow causes the loss of one of the extremities of the limbs, that the slave goes free. We might then have thought that if this is so for a Canaanite slave, then all the more so for a Hebrew maidservant, that if she loses one of her limbs she should go free. Scripture negated this rule in her case by saying, “She shall not go out as the slaves go out,” as if to say: she is not entitled to go free through the loss of one of her limbs. This is the negation of a legal rule in her case, not a prohibition. And so the transmitters of the tradition explained it, saying in the Mekhilta: “‘She shall not go out as the slaves go out’—she does not go out through the loss of limbs as the Canaanite slaves do.” It has thus become clear to you that this is the negation of a particular rule that is denied in her case, not that we were warned against doing something. There is no difference between “She shall not go out as the slaves go out” and “The priest shall not inspect the yellow hair; it is impure” (Leviticus 13), for that too is merely a negation, not a prohibition. It simply tells us that with this sign quarantine is unnecessary, and there is no uncertainty about it, for it is impure.
That is, the verse She shall not go out as the slaves go out, which deals with Jewish law and therefore might have been thought to be a prohibition, is also, according to Maimonides, merely a negation of obligation and should not be counted as a commandment. I will not go into the meaning of these claims here. What matters for our purposes is the meaning of the preface Maimonides offers to this principle. Why is his linguistic and essential distinction between positive commandments and prohibitions not found at the beginning of the entire Sefer HaMitzvot? Why is it placed specifically here?
A Preface on Linguistic Constraints
To understand this better, let me preface with a common claim made by anthropologists and scholars of culture. Linguistic constraints affect our perceptions. The Eskimos use about thirty different expressions for snow, because from their standpoint each type of snow is something fundamentally different. We, by contrast, do not see any difference among the various kinds of snow. They all seem to us to be simply 'snow,' and that is all. But we also have an advantage over the Eskimos. For them it is harder to see that those thirty phenomena are different species of one genus: snow. For us, of course, that is easier to understand. Language expresses conceptual richness, but it also enables or blocks it. Let me briefly bring two further examples of this.
- The Mirror Paradox[3]
When a person stands before a mirror, it reverses right and left, and vice versa. Thus, if I wear a watch on my right hand, the person facing me, that is, my reflection, has the watch on his left hand. The mirror reverses right and left. By contrast, it does not reverse up and down. Both heads, mine and that of my reversed counterpart, are on top, and both our feet are below. This raises no simple difficulty. The mirror is symmetric not only with respect to right and left but also with respect to up and down. So why does it reverse the right-left axis (the X axis), but not the up-down axis (the Y axis)?
The obvious suggestion is that from the standpoint of the mirror there is indeed no difference between the X axis and the Y axis, but from the standpoint of the person standing before it there is. I am symmetric along the right-left axis, but not along the up-down axis. According to this suggestion, the symmetry-breaking comes from the object facing the mirror, not from the mirror itself. But this suggestion is incorrect. To see this, think of a circle standing before the mirror, with a red dot on its left side and a green dot on its upper side. The circle in the mirror will have the red dot on its right side, but the green one will still be on top. The mirror reverses right and left, but not up and down, and this time the object too is symmetric between X and Y. Now there is no longer any excuse to say that the object before the mirror is a human being, symmetric with respect to X but not with respect to Y.
To move forward, note that if I stand next to a closet with the hand wearing the watch close to it, the mirror will reflect my image with the watch on the other hand, but that hand will still be close to the closet. In other words, the mirror reverses right and left, but it does not break the spatial relation of proximity to the closet. In the mirror image too, the hand with the watch remains close to the closet.
This means that the mirror preserves spatial relations, while breaking the relation of right and left. The conclusion is that right-left is not an ordinary spatial relation, whereas up-down is. The expressions 'up' and 'down' describe proximity to the earth, that is, a simple spatial relation, just like the proximity to the closet in the example above. But right and left are a much more complex relation. Every parent knows the phenomenon that one cannot really teach children what right and left are. When we teach them concepts like up and down, west or east, this can be done by a simple explanation (what is closer to the earth, the direction of sunset or sunrise), but the only way to teach them the concepts of right and left is by tying a string to the right hand and accustoming them to the fact that this is right. Why? Because the concepts 'right' and 'left' do not describe spatial relations. They derive in some way from the symmetry of our body. Without it, it is very doubtful whether we would be able to grasp them at all. Round creatures, or point-like ones, probably could not understand what right and left are in any way I can think of.
The solution to the mirror puzzle is that although the reversal along the X axis and the preservation along the Y axis stem neither from any asymmetry of the mirror itself, for it is symmetric between the two axes, nor from the symmetry of the object standing before it, for this happens even with a circular object, they do stem from a third factor, one so easy to ignore that we hardly notice it at all: us. The observer who analyzes and describes the phenomenon of a circle standing before a mirror is also a component of the situation. That observer is a human being, and he has an asymmetry between the X axis, with respect to which he is symmetric, and the Y axis, with respect to which he is not. If so, the reason for the mirror's strange behavior is we, the observers. In short, it is not the mirror but us, or our perception of the mirror, the phenomenon.
At first glance, this would seem to mean that the concepts of right and left are subjective. We created them, and therefore only we can use them. But that cannot be correct, because physics itself distinguishes between right-handed and left-handed properties, mainly in concepts such as angular momentum, spin, and various other 'charges' of particles in field and particle theory. So the distinction between right and left describes something in the objective world. It is not merely our subjective invention.
And yet it is our bodily structure that enables us to perceive these properties. Without it, we would have no concepts like right and left in our language, and no understanding of the difference between them. It may therefore be that we would also be unable to perceive these components of physical reality, because we would suffer from a linguistic, and therefore also conceptual, lack.[4]
- One-Two-Many[5]
Another example of such a linguistic-conceptual deficiency is the phenomenon anthropologists call counting in a one-two-many system. Researchers who studied the Pirahã tribe in Brazil found that their language contains only three numerical terms: one, two, and many. They did not distinguish between different numbers of objects beyond three. True, when they were presented with a comparison between a pile of twenty batteries and a pile of five, they knew how to say that twenty was a larger pile, but a comparison between five and seven was already beyond them. An interesting discussion developed there regarding the effect of the limitations of language on thought.[6] A linguistic deficiency or linguistic constraint affects our ability to think and understand situations.
Back to Maimonides
It seems to me that what Maimonides is trying to say is that if we really think about the concepts of positive commandments and prohibitions, we may reach the conclusion that they are two concepts with no connection between them. We are used to calling both of them 'commandments,' but in truth these are two different phenomena: obligation and prohibition. In Arabic there is no term that connects the two, and one might therefore think that Arabic speakers would be altogether unable to understand that there is any relation between them, just as in the snow example above. We, as Hebrew speakers, are accustomed to it, and our language makes it clear to us that these are indeed two different phenomena, but that there is also a connection between them. But as Maimonides writes, it turns out that Arabic speakers understand this as well. Because of the linguistic lack, they were forced to use the term 'commandment' metaphorically even for prohibitions.
The meaning of this description is that at first we need to try to free ourselves from the constraints of language and habit, and understand that these are in fact two different phenomena. But on second thought we can understand that they nevertheless have something in common. What is that shared component? What is the category, the general kind, of which these two are different species? One can say that this category is command. As opposed to descriptive claims of fact, claims of obligation or prohibition are prescriptive claims. They establish norms of what is permitted, obligatory, and forbidden, and thereby move us to action. Positive commandments and prohibitions both belong to this category, not to the factual one.
This is why Maimonides places this distinction as a preface to the principle that determines that negations of obligation are not to be counted. Negations of obligation are descriptive claims. For example: emancipation through the loss of extremities does not apply to a Hebrew maidservant; or more generally, such-and-such norm does not apply to such-and-such situation. This is a description and not a command, since it imposes upon us neither obligation nor prohibition, and therefore there is no prohibition here. This is so even though the verse She shall not go out as the slaves go out belongs to the legal section of the Torah, unlike No prophet again arose in Israel like Moses, which is clearly a trivial negation of obligation, and yet it still should not be seen as a prohibition. This is Maimonides' innovation, and it certainly requires conceptual preliminaries. Without them, it is very hard to understand his principled claim. Without understanding the prescriptive sphere, that is, the normative sphere as opposed to the factual one, it would be hard to understand and accept the distinction he is making here.
Prescription, Description, and the Naturalistic Fallacy
Whereas with respect to factual claims there is a naturalistic fallacy, meaning that practical directives and value judgments cannot be derived from them, with respect to prescriptive claims that fallacy does not exist. A person cannot say: I understand that stealing is immoral, but why should I not steal? If he is still asking why he should not steal, that is a clear sign that he has not understood that stealing is immoral. He may have understood that people think stealing is immoral, and that indeed is a descriptive claim, since it describes what people think, and that is a fact like any other. But the claim 'It is forbidden to steal' is a prescriptive claim, and its meaning includes the directive to act or not to act. That is part of the meaning of the claim itself, and there is no naturalistic fallacy here.
Prescriptive claims are a different kind of claim, a category distinct from the factual one. They do not describe; they command. Someone who understands a prescriptive claim should not ask himself what normative dimension it has and what follows from it. The naturalistic fallacy is nothing other than the gap between description and prescription.
Is there truth and falsity with respect to such claims? Many think not, and think that these are subjective claims, mere descriptions of feelings, in which case they are really descriptions after all. The reason is that we have no systematic way to determine the truth or falsity of such a claim. A factual claim is tested by correspondence to a state of affairs in the world. When I hear the claim 'There is a tree outside the window,' all I need to do is look outside and ascertain whether the claim is true or not. I compare the content of the claim with the state of affairs in the world that it describes. But a normative, that is, prescriptive, claim cannot be judged in that way. There is nothing at which I can look in order to decide whether stealing is truly forbidden or permitted.
For this reason, many believe that such claims have no truth values, and in effect adopt a conception of moral relativism. In the terms I presented above, they do not accept the existence of a prescriptive sphere. For them, only descriptive claims are meaningful and can be judged. The others merely describe subjective feelings and experiences.
Applying This to Religious Claims: Commandments
With respect to commandments, the situation is even more difficult. Many people possess a moral intuition, and therefore people who are not philosophically inclined usually do not ask themselves what exactly this feeling means, and whether moral claims can be true or false. But with respect to religious norms, many do raise the question: why observe them at all? The answer is: because God commanded them. And then they ask: so what? Is there not still a naturalistic fallacy here? The fact that He commanded is a fact, but how does obligation follow from it? Again, this question expresses a lack of understanding. Someone who understands that God commanded, and understands the meaning of a divine command, cannot ask why it should be observed. That is the essence of a divine command. In fact, that is the definition of God: a being whose commands must be obeyed by virtue of the fact that He commanded them, which is why judges in the Torah are called 'elohim' (see, for example, Sanhedrin 2b-3b and elsewhere).
I have already explained here several times that this is the foundation underlying Maimonides' words in Hilkhot Avodah Zarah 3:6:
One who worships idolatry out of love—for example, he is drawn to a particular image because its craftsmanship is exceptionally beautiful—or who worships it out of fear of it, lest it harm him, as its worshippers imagine that it can benefit and harm: if he accepted it upon himself as a god, he is liable to stoning. But if he worshipped it in its usual manner, or by one of the four forms of worship, out of love or out of fear, he is exempt. One who embraces an idol, kisses it, honors it, sweeps before it, washes it, anoints it, dresses it, shoes it, or performs anything similar among these acts of honor, transgresses a negative commandment, as it is said, “You shall not worship them”; these acts are included within worship. Even so, he is not flogged for any of them, because they are not stated explicitly. But if one of these acts was its normal mode of worship and he did it in order to worship it, he is liable.
The other medieval authorities (Rishonim), such as Rashi on the Sanhedrin passage that is the source of this law, Rivash, and others, disagree with Maimonides. Thus, for example, the Raavad writes in his gloss here:
[…] and we interpret it as motivated by love of a person and fear of a person, and not by love of idolatry nor by fear of it.
Worship out of love or fear is ideal religious worship. How can it be that someone who directs those powers toward some idol would not be considered an idol worshiper? Therefore he explains that the intention is love and fear of some person, not of the idol itself.
But Maimonides does not explain it that way. For him, the love and fear are directed toward the idol, and one who worships it out of love or fear for it has not committed idolatry in the strict sense. Religious worship, whether worship of God or of some idol, is only worship that is done through accepting it as a god. Worship out of love or fear, and certainly out of any side consideration other than unconditional obligation, is not religious worship. If this is done toward an idol, it is not the transgression of idolatry; and if it is done toward God, it is not worship of God.
This is exactly what I have said here: God, by definition, is a being whose commands must be fulfilled simply because He commanded them. No other reason is needed to ground our obligation to obey them.
The Meaning of the Revelation at Sinai
At the revelation at Sinai there was a Big Bang in which the religious-legal sphere was created. Divine commands were given to us, and whoever was present at that event experienced the fact that such a command inherently carries with it an obligation to obey. He had a direct encounter with God, and apparently after such an encounter the religious duty to observe His commands appears as self-evident as the moral duty feels to most of us. Anyone who did not experience this lives in a materialist world in which there are only facts, and therefore his language contains only factual descriptions, that is, descriptive claims. He lives in a world of only Ten Utterances. The revelation at Sinai created a new sphere, or a new conceptual and linguistic category: the normative sphere and prescriptive claims.
Before the revelation at Sinai, one could know what was fitting and unfitting in God's eyes. But there was no command. Even if someone had then observed all the commandments, he would have performed positive acts, but he would not have fulfilled commandments. The normative sphere had not yet been created. That happened only at Sinai.
And this is indeed how Maimonides explains matters in his commentary on the Mishnah in tractate Hullin. The Mishnah there, at the end of chapter 7, brings a tannaitic dispute about the prohibition of the sciatic nerve in a non-kosher animal:
It applies to a kosher animal and does not apply to a non-kosher animal. Rabbi Judah says: it applies even to a non-kosher animal. Rabbi Judah said: But was not the sciatic nerve forbidden already from the time of the sons of Jacob, while non-kosher animals were still permitted to them? They said to him: It was stated at Sinai, but merely written in its place.
At first glance, the Sages are giving Rabbi Judah a historical answer: the verses about the sciatic nerve were not really said in the time of Jacob our patriarch, but at Sinai. But Maimonides, in his commentary to the Mishnah there, writes:
According to Rabbi Judah, one who eats an olive-sized amount of the sciatic nerve of a non-kosher animal is liable to two sets of lashes: one because it is a non-kosher animal and one because of the sciatic nerve. But the Jewish law does not follow Rabbi Judah. And note well this great principle brought in this Mishnah, namely their statement, “It was forbidden at Sinai.” This means that you must know that everything from which we refrain today, or that we do today, we do only because of God's command through Moses, not because God commanded it to the prophets who preceded him. For example: we do not eat flesh taken from a living animal because God prohibited it to the descendants of Noah, but because Moses prohibited flesh taken from a living animal to us through what he was commanded at Sinai, namely that it remain forbidden. Likewise, we do not circumcise because Abraham circumcised himself and the members of his household, but because God commanded us through Moses to circumcise, as Abraham—peace be upon him—circumcised. And similarly, regarding the sciatic nerve, we do not follow the prohibition from Jacob our forefather, but the command of Moses our teacher. Do you not see that they said: 613 commandments were stated to Moses at Sinai, and all these are included among the commandments.
That is, even if we had known all the information beforehand, even through prophets, so that the information was trustworthy and correct, it would still have been description alone. There was as yet no obligation, and therefore fulfillment of a commandment was not yet defined. This was created only at Sinai. And that is exactly our point.
At the end of chapter 8 of Hilkhot Melakhim, Maimonides likewise writes something similar:[7]
Anyone who accepts the seven commandments and is careful to observe them is among the pious of the nations of the world and has a share in the World to Come—provided that he accepts them and performs them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses our teacher that the descendants of Noah had previously been commanded regarding them. But if he observes them because of rational conviction, he is not a resident alien and is not among the pious of the nations of the world, but among their wise men.
Again, there is value in observing commandments only if this is done out of obligation to the command given at Sinai. Without that, what we have is a fine act, and perhaps a moral one, wisdom, but not a commandment, piety. The concept of commandment was created at Sinai, and it exists only for one who observes these things out of obligation to what was given there.[8]
[1] Generally speaking, I refer here to the third part of the fourth booklet on my website. Many of these ideas appear there in different contexts.
[2] See our essay on the eighth principle in the book Yishlach Sharashav (there is a link on the site).
[3] This problem was presented in the newspaper Haaretz quite a few years ago, and I heard that it stumped quite a few faculty members in mathematics and physics departments around the country. I assume some readers will not understand what the problem is at all and will treat it as mere hair-splitting by mathematicians. That is simply a misunderstanding. It is a real and beautiful problem, but I do not have the space here to elaborate further. I discussed it in my book Et Asher Yeshno Ve'asher Einenu. A beautiful mathematical solution to the problem is presented on Gadi Alexandrovich's blog, Lo Meduyak. What I explain here does not contradict his remarks; it only explains them in terms of human perception. I explain why the solution he describes is so difficult for us to grasp, and what it means.
[4] I am not entering here into the question of what is cause and what is effect. The relation between them is complex and many-sided. An exercise for the reader: does the mirror paradox exist from the standpoint of a round or point-like creature, say if we ourselves had point-like bodies?
[5] See about this in the following thread that I once conducted on the forum Stop Here, We Think.
[6] And again, as I noted in that thread, in my opinion the main influence runs from thought to language, not the other way around. But here too it is more accurate to say that the relation is complex and works in both directions.
[7] Although in the fourth booklet (and also in my book Ruach HaMishpat) I explained that these are actually different claims. The passage in Hilkhot Melakhim addresses the person and instructs him from what motivation he should observe the commandments, what his intention should be. There Maimonides is speaking about meta-halakhic theory: on what basis are we expected to obey. I explained there that in a secular legal system the first aspect is irrelevant. No one there is interested in what a person's intention was when he obeyed the law, so long as he obeyed. But the second part is important there as well: on what basis do we, as a governing system, demand that he obey?
[8] For far-reaching implications regarding the commandments and transgressions of an atheist, see my article here.
Discussion
That is exactly the mathematical solution, as Gadi Alexandrovitz explains. I referred to him in a note and commented on how it relates to what I wrote.
Just a note. The cross product itself is not defined without the distinction between right and left. The order of multiplication will reverse the direction of the result.
Pleasing to the eye and good for food (like cheesecake on the festival of Atzeret).
Whenever you write that you don’t have time, somehow it turns into a long article. It reminds me of responsa books where, when the author prefaces his answer by saying he is confined to bed and laid up on his couch, you know he’s about to deliver an especially long responsum.
According to what you say, one can answer the well-known difficulty about the nations refusing to accept the Torah because they were unable to observe the commandments they found especially difficult (do not steal, do not commit adultery, etc.). For if they had accepted the Torah, they would have been able to observe it, since “I created the evil inclination, and I created the Torah as its antidote.” According to what you say, it works out nicely: they were willing to keep the Torah by virtue of the logic in it, but not by virtue of the command. So we have also discharged our obligation regarding words of Aggadah, even though we were not commanded about that.
I hope to finish reading the article in full (including its mathematical parts) by next Shavuot.
Happy festival of receiving the commandments of the Torah.
It is not precise to say that physics uses right and left and therefore they are natural concepts. It borrows the concepts of right and left for convenience of explanation, just as it borrows positive and negative for the purpose of defining electrical laws, and that does not mean that an electron has a negative charge in the same sense that, say, you have a minus balance in the bank.
So where does the moral obligation of the gentiles come from, since they were not at Mount Sinai?
The question is where our moral obligation comes from.
The ringing contradiction between this post and the previous one is abyssal.
It looks as though there are two Michael Abrahams in the marketplace.
On the one hand, there is the one who probes deeply and explains the meaning of the giving of the Torah, and does not settle for a superficial explanation of an event in which we were simply given an informative description of 613 commandments.
And on the other hand (the previous post), Michael Abraham who disparages halakhah and sees the whole area of monetary law as something irrelevant and unsuited to our times, so that there is no choice but to adopt state law.
I am weary of trying to reconcile how two such contradictory agendas live peacefully within you: one to elevate and glorify Judaism on the conceptual-philosophical plane, and the opposite one to cast halakhah, its eternity, and its representatives (yes… the great Torah sages of all generations) down to the dust.
Dear Ben Torah,
I did not understand what deep meaning you found in this post. On the contrary, it comes to reduce the whole meaning of Torah to the single leg of command; this is entirely a Torah without the soul we usually know in it.
In my humble opinion, the posts actually complement each other perfectly.
The conceptual meaning that philosophically clarifies the notion of “command” as opposed to other layers of reality, the integration of moral obligation (= to a command) with religious obligation, etc.—these are no trivial matters, even if you do not see in them deep significance. It seems to me these are matters that touch the furnace of creation itself.
And when those same things are heard from the mouth of a person who denies the eternity of halakhah, disparages Torah scholars (not only of our own generation), thinks there are errors in the Gemara, denies the authority to command belief regarding factual claims (the coming of the Messiah, particular/general providence, reward and punishment, etc.)
and on the other hand shows royal honor to jurists and Reform female rabbis, that is a conflict that gives much food for thought.
To Ben Torah,
Regarding the first part, I do not see where I disagree with you. Indeed, from the standpoint of philosophical meaning there is depth here.
Regarding the second part, I have a deep disagreement with you, but this is neither the place nor the time, for I am between the oven and the stove, and I will write briefly.
I did not know the rabbi denies the eternity of the Torah. Perhaps for you, adapting halakhah to reality is a denial of the Torah’s eternity, but if so, that is nonsense.
As for disparaging Torah scholars, my feelings are mixed. The feeling is (at times) uncomfortable, but it is much more comfortable for me than the masses of Torah scholars who perhaps do not disparage Torah scholars, but there are none like them for disparaging the Torah itself (in the spirit of “a Torah scholar without understanding is worse than a carcass”).
As for errors in the Gemara, you have stumbled into common ignorance. Already the Rishonim (headed by Maimonides) wrote countless times that the Gemara errs. And, surprisingly, it is explicit in the Gemara itself (Pesachim 94) that the sages of Israel retracted and conceded to the sages of the nations of the world. In my modest experience, even if all the sages of the Gemara rose from their graves and cried out at the top of their lungs that they had erred, it still would not help; the people have already decided they do not make mistakes.
As for the authority to command belief, although this is an uncommon opinion, common sense is with the rabbi. (Incidentally, Nahmanides said that one is not obligated to accept the Aggadot of Hazal, and as is well known most matters of belief are explained in the Aggadot of Hazal.)
As for “royal honor,” it seems to me easier to picture Rabbi Michael clean-shaven than to picture him according royal honor to a mortal.
To conclude, a thought exercise: who broke more conventions relative to the faith of the sages of his generation—Maimonides or Rabbi Michael? Allow me to think it was Maimonides.
Apparently once every few generations the Holy One, blessed be He (in particular providence), sends someone to throw accumulated nonsense into the trash, and in my opinion Rabbi Michael is not doing a bad job of that.
It is important to me to clarify that what I have said does not imply total agreement with everything that comes out of the mouth of the great priest, but his words are certainly worthy of thought, and in my humble opinion in most cases also of internalization.
Happy holiday.
My comment was mistakenly posted above.
Here is a short video about the mirror problem that seems to me to offer an explanation in a different direction:
A fine article. More fitting for the “early Michi,” who delves into Judaism and brings forth produce from within it itself…
I didn’t understand. The two spin states are directly related to right and left, not as a metaphor or borrowed usage. And so too with the screw rules in electromagnetism (the right-hand rule).
In Maimonides it seems that they are supposed to receive this from us.
Chayota, I didn’t understand the comment.
That is not accurate, not regarding spin either, which is also borrowed terminology for the sake of convenience of understanding, and not actual rotation around an axis, but some sort of statistical property of it. Our imagining the electron as some kind of sphere with an axis and spin is not real. Likewise, the right-hand rule is connected to the fact that we decided that current goes from low potential to high, that we decided the xyz coordinate system is built in one direction rather than another, and many other assumptions related to our ability to imagine an electromagnetic “field” (which is of course spatial, something not expressed in the two-dimensional right-hand rule). All these are not real things, but rules we established in order to make understanding easier, to use mathematical tools familiar to us, etc.
If we go by your argument, then the use of Fourier transforms proves that imaginary numbers exist and that the square root of minus 1 is real.
Is our moral obligation something given to us as a command at Sinai alongside Torah and mitzvot, or does it not come from there at all, but rather was it (moral awareness, and with it obligation) stamped into us at our creation?
What you are writing is simply incorrect. It does not matter how you define current; bottom line, there is no right-left symmetry. If you defined current in the opposite way, there would still be asymmetry, only in the opposite direction. That does not change the principal claim.
Chayota,
I explained this in the fourth notebook. Obligation was planted within us, but its validity depends on verses like “And you shall do what is upright and good.” Without an external commanding factor, it has no force. Incidentally, no enumerator of the commandments includes this verse in the count of mitzvot, because it is not part of halakhah. Beyond that, the contents of moral obligation (what is moral and what is not) are drawn from what is planted in us, as in every person, Jew or gentile (who may perhaps in the past have been influenced by the Bible, but by now that is no longer relevant to this).
Science could have chosen to define right and left, or up and down, or black and white, or good and evil, or inside and outside.
The fact that this is science and it chose to represent various phenomena in terms of right and left still does not make right and left natural concepts.
The right and left that we use, say, for giving directions, or play around with in the mirror dilemma, are still relative and in the eye of the beholder.
Just as in the mirror one has to define right as “closer to the wall,” for example, so too in science the terms were defined arbitrarily in a certain direction, so that scientists around the world could speak the same language and understand one another.
It is not because there exists in the world, or in the atom’s nucleus, a true right and a true left.
I seem to recall you saying in the past that even without there being a command about morality (“and you shall do what is upright and good”), it is still binding by reason alone. Just as Cain was punished for murdering Abel, and Noah’s generation was punished for robbery (and that was before Mount Sinai, which commanded morality). Perhaps your intention is that there are two levels of obligation: an obligation by reason (a lower degree of obligation), and an obligation by command (a higher degree of obligation).
Seemingly, even if we intuitively feel that a certain act is moral / immoral, or if we received that knowledge through a prophet, it is still a normative fact. Just as we discovered gravity, so we discovered the normative truth “it is forbidden to murder.” I do not understand why, in your opinion, there is no obligation to keep such things without a direct command, and likewise I do not understand what the command contributed (other than revealing such truths in general).
There is a difference between moral obligation and halakhic obligation. Put differently: with respect to moral obligation there is no command (in the sense we find in halakhah), but rather there is a conferring of validity upon the obligation (in the sense explained in part 3 of the fourth notebook). In the halakhic context, we are not dealing with moral obligations, and therefore without the command they have no binding force.
“And you shall do what is upright and good” is not a command (which is why it is not included in the count of mitzvot). It reveals to us a normative fact, namely that there is an obligation to act morally. See my response to Haggai B below.
“Who brought you out of the land of Egypt,” and therefore “you shall not have.”
Naturalistic through and through.
Definitely not. It is like when people casually say, “It is forbidden to hit because it hurts.” Seemingly, that too is naturalistic through and through. But in fact the intention is to say that it is forbidden to hit because: 1. Hitting causes pain. 2. It is forbidden to cause pain—except that they omit the assumption that it is forbidden to cause pain because of its obviousness. In everyday language people often omit an assumption that seems obvious, but it is actually present in the background of the argument. Incidentally, this is a common mistake in formalizing everyday texts: translating them literally rather than analyzing them so as to expose hidden assumptions.
One must remember that a moral prohibition is always grounded in a fact. The naturalistic fallacy only says that the fact alone is not enough to establish a prohibition (not that there is no connection between norm and fact); the claim is that an additional premise is needed that links the fact with the norm in order to derive the norm.
With God’s help, 8 Sivan 5779
There is no separation between religion and morality, neither before the giving of the Torah nor after it. The seven Noahide commandments include matters of “religion,” such as the prohibition of idolatry and blasphemy, and matters of “morality,” such as the prohibitions of theft, adultery, and murder, along with the commandment of “laws”; both these and those are imposed on man as divine commandments, with reward and punishment attached.
Abraham, who called in the name of the Lord, made Him known as one in the world, and faithfully kept God’s commandments even when he did not understand them—he is the one who commands his children to keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice; and he is the one who performs kindness toward people with self-sacrifice, and even asks the Lord for mercy on the people of Sodom. Love of the Creator is bound up with love of His creatures.
And so too Joseph: in refusing Potiphar’s wife he uses the moral argument of not betraying the trust his master had placed in him, and also the “religious” argument: “How then can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” Human fidelity and faith in God strengthen one another.
And so it is at the giving of the Torah: the two tablets parallel one another. The people of Israel are required both to believe in God and sanctify the Sabbath as a sign of creation and the exodus from Egypt, and to avoid idolatry and taking the Name in vain; and also to observe moral commands: honoring father and mother, and the prohibitions of murder, adultery, theft, and false testimony.
The height of the novelty of the Ten Commandments is “You shall not covet,” in which a person is commanded not to aspire to evil even in his heart, a lofty moral demand that can only be demanded of one who believes with all his heart that there is “a Master of the palace,” and therefore “no person touches what is prepared for another by so much as a hairbreadth,” as Ibn Ezra explained the possibility of the command “You shall not covet”: one who believes in God knows that what his Creator forbade him is outside the bounds of reality in his world, just as the king’s daughter is “out of bounds” for the villager.
Faith and morality complement one another. Morality moves a person to serve his Creator also out of a feeling of gratitude and loyalty to the “master of the house”; and faith moves a person to keep the ways of morality also as the Creator’s commandments, as the Creator intended regarding Mount Sinai: “that His fear may be before you, so that you do not sin.”
Regards, S.Z.
The unity of religion and morality also finds expression in the moral rationale and guidance for commandments between man and God. Thus in the commandment of the Sabbath the moral element is also present: “so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your maidservant and the stranger may be refreshed.”
And similarly, for example, in the ways of serving God, the moral aspect also stands out. When the Torah forbids making “gods of silver and gods of gold,” it commands building the altar from simple materials—earth and stones; and even among those, it disqualifies stones over which a man has brandished his sword, and commands: “Neither shall you go up by steps to My altar, that your nakedness be not uncovered upon it.” The altar of God calls man to simplicity, modesty, and love of peace.
The novelty of the revelation at Mount Sinai does not lie in creating the religious-moral command, but in deepening it and making it present in the world.
Following the revelation at Mount Sinai, an entire nation comes into being that heard the voice of God so that it would forever believe in the prophecy of Moses and his disciples—a nation that received the destiny of being “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” and would aspire to pass on its faith and values to all humanity.
And unlike the seven Noahide commandments, which gave the world only the general values and left each nation to formulate the particulars as it saw fit within the framework of the “commandment of laws,” the people of Israel receive, immediately after the Ten Commandments, the sections “You have seen” and “These are the ordinances that you shall set before them,” in which the Ten Commandments are elaborated into detailed and highly detailed commandments “between man and God” and “between man and his fellow,” which would create a society with lofty moral and social demands, fitting for “the vanguard of humanity.”
And as the jurist Prof. Daniel Friedman pointed out (in his article “And you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt,” on the Da’at website), the uniqueness of biblical law over the other legal systems of the ancient Near East lies in the fact that biblical law imposed aid to the weak as a full-fledged legal obligation.
He also notes in that same article the uniqueness of biblical literature, in that it also knows how to criticize and recount the weaknesses of its heroes, prophets, and kings.
One may say, following Prof. Friedman’s words, that biblical literature builds a people who are “modest, merciful, and doers of kindness,” devoted to the mission of the prophet Micah: “He has told you, O man, what is good and what the Lord requires of you: only to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.”
Regards, S.Z.
Exactly so. It’s just that none of this has even the faintest connection to my claim.
And in short:
Contrary to the post author’s words, “the normative sphere, the religious-halakhic one,” already existed before the giving of the Torah, in the “seven Noahide commandments”; rather, it was developed, expanded, and deepened at the giving of the Torah.
To Israel, as the “vanguard” of humanity, unique commandments were added numbering 606, and all the other nations too were made subject to the Torah of Moses and its bearers, who would teach them and explain to them the seven commandments imposed on them from ancient times. And as Isaiah and Micah prophesied, they are destined to stream to the mountain of the Lord and to the house of the God of Jacob so that they may learn to walk in His ways and keep His paths.
Regards, S.Z.
What is good or bad in God’s eyes must ultimately be the same as what is good or bad in our eyes, otherwise you are justifying worship of a cruel god (for example, if from the god’s perspective suffering is good).
Even in a neutral world or a “mute sphere of reality,” values of good and bad can be attached. One simply has to understand how. It seems obvious to me that people define suffering (all kinds of suffering—you suffer when you are sad, when you are despairing, when you are betrayed, when you are in pain, etc.) as bad, and good is everything that reduces suffering (suffering is the reference point). There are certain things that cause us suffering because we evolved from some life form and are stable to a certain extent. That is, our genes dictate suffering from certain things in order that they remain “stable.” For example, a gene in a man that dictates joy, or at least indifference, when his wife cheats on him and bears a child by another man—will not survive. A gene that dictates indifference toward family members (which lowers the chances of the gene’s survival in a hunter-gatherer society)—will not survive. The way for the gene to remain stable is by dictating suffering if you turn to “unstable” ways. If we had evolved from a life form in which everyone raises everyone else’s children (as among several bird species), and this were a stable state so that no one cared about infidelity, then it is very possible that the commandment “Do not commit adultery” would not exist, since no suffering is involved here. If we had evolved from a life form in which a positive relationship with family members was not a criterion of stability, it is very possible that the commandment “Honor…” would not exist. And so on. (Today we know that psychologically a good relationship with one’s family is an important criterion for happiness in life.) The Ten Commandments are ten principles for preventing human suffering, and in that sense they are good. And all the other commandments derive from them (clearly they are the root of all the commandments, as Saadia Gaon, Philo of Alexandria, and Rashi say, and there are several proofs for this). The whole justification for obeying God’s command is that it is good (which is why the overwhelming majority of religious people are incapable of imagining a command whose purpose is suffering. But they can imagine a command whose purpose is joy). And your attempt to justify obedience to God because you define Him as “something that one must obey” is strange and completely detaches God from reality. And if God is detached from reality (in the sense that obedience to His commandments is not justified by their consequences in reality), then anything that suits my conservative instincts I will define as “God’s command” and do it. In fact, anything I feel like doing I will define as God’s command and do it.
And why is one obligated not to cause suffering? (The naturalistic fallacy.) Indeed, you are subject to no law that prevents you from causing suffering. You are invited to decide between good and evil (as it says, “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life, that you and your seed may live”). Here and in many other verses one can see that the justification for keeping the commandments is “that you may live,” not “because God said so.” And do not be surprised if you suffer when you choose evil. But it seems that to people it is obvious that one should distance oneself from suffering (it is in our genes). And if you choose the good, there are specific acts that will bring it to expression in reality. Other acts will bring evil, and therefore you will refrain from doing them.
And what is a value? When a person says that he sees value in something, he means something very specific: “If this happens, it will be good.” Therefore a person who sees value in “equality” cannot simultaneously hold that equality causes suffering. As can be understood, there is a direct connection between facts and values. There is also a direct connection between facts and morality. The fact of suffering, which everyone believes in—without it there would be no Torah and no morality. And the Jewish Torah is an attempt at a system of laws by which a human society can be happy. (And as can be seen from reality—we failed.)
It is clear that a person must adopt the approach you take in order to remain within the bounds of Orthodoxy (which keeps moving farther from the ways of good in reality). But staying within the bounds of Orthodoxy is not important. The Hazon Ish is dear, and the Hatam Sofer is dear, but the truth is dearer than all.
As expected, I very much disagree.
The fact that the Torah says there is reward does not mean observance is for the sake of reward. As in the introduction to Eglaei Tal, that learning with enjoyment does not mean one learns for the sake of enjoyment.
In any case, a naturalistic identification of the good with the products of evolution drains the good of all content. Quite apart from the Hatam Sofer and the Hazon Ish.
Indeed, as expected… but I would be glad to know what content there is in your concept of the good that is absent from my “drained” concept of the good. A summary of my concept of the good: good is the opposite of evil, and evil is suffering. That is, suffering is the reference point. Evidence for this can be seen in the words of Hillel the Elder when he was asked to summarize the entire Torah while standing on one foot. He did not say “obey God’s command because He is God,” and he did not say “for the sake of some concept of good that we do not fully grasp.” He said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” (and not “what is beloved to you, do to your fellow,” which indicates that for him too the reference point was evil and not good).
Correction* “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow,” or in the original version: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary—go and learn.”
With God’s help, 9 Sivan 5779
Suffering is not always bad. Sometimes suffering brings a person to develop lofty powers and overcome it, and thereby shows many people the possibility of overcoming the limitation.
Thus the Torah was given דווקא through Moses, who was slow of speech and slow of tongue; every act of speaking surely cost him labor and great effort, and when he taught the Torah publicly he showed many people that the effort is worthwhile.
And thus the screenwriter David Seidler succeeded in overcoming his stutter by taking an example from King George VI, who through great effort succeeded in overcoming his stutter and giving the nation a confident speech that strengthened it during World War II (as Seidler portrayed in his film The King’s Speech).
Hillel too built himself up by overcoming hardship and suffering. Even when he was prevented from entering the study hall, he climbed onto the roof on a freezing snowy day so as not to lose a day of study, and his devotion to Torah study and to attending on the sages brought him to become the leader of the generation.
And Hillel interpreted his saying “What is hateful to you—do not do to your fellow” as meaning: “Just as you did not despair of yourself and did not give up on yourself, so do not despair of others and do not give up on them.” He was willing to accept converts whose drawing near seemed impossible because of their obstinacy, and through trust and faith he managed to crack their stubbornness.
And this is the whole Torah on one foot, whose beginning is: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage”—for although Israel was sunk in the forty-nine gates of physical and spiritual bondage to Egypt, full of despair and hopelessness, nevertheless He did not despair of them until He redeemed them.
That is the whole Torah on one foot, and the rest is commentary—go and learn!
Regards, S.Z.
To S.Z.
A. Seidler is my family name, not a nickname. And in fact I checked, and unfortunately I am not related to David.
B. What you said amounts to: “Sometimes suffering is good because ultimately something good comes out of it.” That is obvious, and I do not dispute it. For example, open-heart surgery is an event of great suffering both for the patient and for his family, and nevertheless one does it in order to stop the even greater suffering the patient would have if left untreated, and to try to improve his condition. But what I am talking about is “suffering for the sake of suffering”—that is, suffering from which nothing good comes and no positive result in any way. Can you imagine a commandment that causes suffering for the sake of causing suffering? I assume not.
But regarding suffering from which good ultimately comes—even I can imagine a commandment that causes suffering for the sake of a positive result in the end (that is, for the sake of reducing suffering in the future). But that is not what is being discussed here.
What is missing is good intention and the decision to do good. When it is ingrained in me by nature, I am like a sheep. And a sheep that benefits its surroundings is not good.
Even if the ability to understand what is good is imprinted in you (a sheep does not “understand” what is good for it; it simply acts in a certain way), that does not mean you do not choose to do it. You choose to do good despite the temptation to do evil and to yield to impulses or stupidity that will lead to increased suffering in the world. And that is the meaning of “We will do and we will hear”—until now we were like sheep and did not fully manage to understand what is good; it was simply that when we acted in a certain way things went better for us. Now we will hear the laws by which we are to go. (Jordan Peterson also says this idea when he speaks about the Ten Commandments.)
I completely agree. So what exactly is the dispute about?
The dispute:
1) You draw a distinction between facts and values, whereas for me a fact (the fact of suffering) dictates values.
2) I hold that a normative prohibition against causing suffering is self-evident (and that is the only thing I need), whereas you assume that obedience to God is also self-evident.
3) You assume that there is an “essential” good and morality, whereas I explain good and morality through evolutionary processes.
4) You assume that we received Torah from God, whereas I explain that Torah can arise from human understanding and still be called Torah in the sense that it is the proper path by which a society should go in order to reduce suffering within it.
5) You assume that we need something called “command” in order to justify serving a good God.
6) You are obligated to God because you define Him as something one must obey. And yet you say He is necessarily good and not cruel (if He were cruel, you would still be obligated to Him according to your approach; but on your view you would say, “we are lucky He isn’t…”), whereas for me the obligation to God derives from the fact that I define Him as good—or more precisely, the concept of good in my intellect is what is called “God.”
7) And the main practical difference is that in the end, for me the commandments are not the acts themselves but their good results in reality. And when reality changes greatly, the acts that need to be done in order to bring about those good results change accordingly. And clearly the current halakhah is not suited in any way to current reality, and my approach justifies a sweeping change in almost all halakhah and the cancellation of wide sections of it.
Some of these things did not come up here, but I will address them one by one:
1) I have already explained more than once that for me too a fact (such as the fact of suffering) dictates values. Logically it is impossible to derive values from the fact, but of course moral judgments deal with facts. The argument “so-and-so suffers from doing X, therefore it is forbidden to do X” is invalid. For it to be valid one must add the (non-factual) premise that it is forbidden to cause suffering. But of course a moral obligation deals with facts (such as suffering). Who could disagree with that?
2) I hold that a normative prohibition against causing suffering (the premise that if an act causes suffering, it is forbidden to do it) is self-evident. Likewise, the obligation to obey God’s command is self-evident.
3) I did not understand the claim. On its face this is simply nonsense. What evolution creates is a fact, and therefore by itself it does not create obligations or prohibitions.
4) If you think the purpose of the Torah is to reduce suffering—then indeed we have a serious dispute, but it is a dispute about facts. I do not see how not eating pork, separating tithes, purity from corpse impurity or creeping things, and the like reduce suffering. If you can derive all that from your reason—more power to you. I do not know anyone with such prodigious talent as yours (though Saadia Gaon too claimed in his introduction that the Torah’s commands can be derived from reason. Good luck).
5) I do not assume that we need something called “command” in order to justify serving God. I argue that once a command has been given, that is the essence of His service. We could have been obligated to morality even without an explicit command (by virtue of the assumption that He implanted it in us—perhaps by means of evolution).
6) This is not a matter of luck. A perfect being cannot be evil. If He were evil, He would not be perfect. If you define the good as God, then from your standpoint God is not an entity, and I do not see whom you worship. You are simply playing with words and calling moral behavior “service of God” (without there being a God). And of course the parts of halakhah not connected to morality presumably do not bind you. So you do not worship God in the accepted sense, but are simply a moral person playing with words and calling morality the service of God.
7) See my remarks in sections 4 and 6. If you support changing halakhah in order to adapt it to morality, then you simply are not dealing with halakhah but juggling words. You are dealing with morality, period. Eating pork or purity from corpse impurity never contributed to morality, so on your view not only should they be changed, it is unclear why they were ever obligations to begin with.
In short, we have no specific disagreement except that you are an atheist and I am a believer. I do not understand why we should get into all these confusing verbal acrobatics that obscure the essence of the dispute.
I am not sure one can call me an “atheist.” I still need the assumption that a Creator God exists in order to justify the existence of the world. But as for “Torah from Heaven”—indeed I have no need of that hypothesis. And I see no good reason to assume it; there is no obstacle to saying that the same Creator God gave us the tools to understand on our own what we call “Torah” through intellectual inquiry and an understanding of good and evil.
From my standpoint that is atheism (deism is not theism). In any case, I see no point in arguing over specific points when the basic starting points are so different.
According to your assumption that the prohibition against causing suffering is a supreme value, why do we take antibiotics to save a patient and thereby cause the mass destruction of millions of innocent bacteria? Is it moral to harm the many in order to save the life of one individual? Is the blood of the pithecoid “Homo sapiens” redder than the blood of the bacterium?
Regards, Mik Rov
Answer to Mik Rov
One cannot compare the suffering of creatures with second-order consciousness (human beings are aware of the fact that they are aware, and are more intensely aware of the fact that we suffer and experience suffering) to the suffering of creatures with first-order consciousness or less than that (bacteria apparently have no consciousness at all). I doubt whether one can even call this “suffering” in the classical sense. (And even if one can, it is a lesser degree of suffering that we call “suffering” only by equivocation; and see Maimonides on the comparison between man and animals—Eight Chapters, chapter 1.) And perhaps for that reason the Tannaim and Amoraim disputed whether the suffering of living creatures is a Torah prohibition or rabbinic (they disputed whether and to what degree there is even a “category of suffering” here). Let the learned reader investigate.
How do you know that a bacterium has no consciousness? Perhaps you simply do not understand its language?
Regards, Donald-Chai Dak
The name “Chai” was added to me for healing after I swallowed an overdose of antibiotics, by means of which some Homo sapienses with no awareness of my delicate feelings tried to exterminate me, had not the Lord been my help and saved me from their hand 🙂
To Donald-Chai Dak
A. Even regarding other human beings I have no way of knowing whether they have consciousness. I know that I do, but who says you do?! In the end, from communication with living creatures I try to infer whether I am now encountering a conscious creature or not, and if so at what level of consciousness; and there are various proposed criteria in the scientific community, etc.
B. Theoretically, if it turned out to us that, for example, chickens in battery cages have consciousness at exactly the same level as human beings, and all the time they are thinking, “Oy gevalt, why are they doing this to me” (to illustrate—just imagine that you were the chicken), then you too would agree that we should very much stop abusing and killing them as soon as possible. So what exactly is the dispute about?
C. One may note that only human beings consciously commit suicide in order to stop the suffering they experience in life. That is evidence for the approach presented in the previous message.
I’m wondering whether I am currently violating the prohibition against feeding trolls of a low order of consciousness…
And the next stage, R. Seidler: someone whom you think suffers from low consciousness—even if he is a human being—is it less forbidden to cause him suffering?
I fear that giving up the Torah as a moral compass creates not insignificant moral stumbling blocks.
Regards, S.Z. Levinger
To S.Z.
We’ve moved to another thread… From your question it seems I was not properly understood. I define a human being as a creature with a certain level of consciousness. If he is not at that level, he is not a human being. If I put a dog’s brain in a human head and a human brain in a dog’s head—what would their status be? Clearly, the physical form the body takes does not matter. Maybe it would be “unpleasant” to treat a creature that looks like a human being in such an ugly way (and perhaps, for the moral self-discipline of the person doing the treating, it would indeed be better not to treat creatures that look like human beings that way—but fundamentally it is clear that this is not a human being), but in the end we are dealing here with a dog.
[Of course, the treatment of the dog-form should be full of compassion… pity the human being trapped in that body.]
And regarding the statement, “giving up the Torah as a moral compass creates not insignificant moral stumbling blocks.”
The plain meaning of the Torah tells you to kill an Amalekite baby. That is what is called a moral stumbling block.
With God’s help, 10 Sivan 5779
Dear Mr. Seidler,
I fear you were understood perfectly. According to the approach you presented, when so-and-so comes to kill so-and-so, he will define him as “a dog in human form,” and everything is fine. We have found an excellent method for neutralizing morality: simply define the other person as “a dog in human form,” and everything becomes permitted. I assume that you yourself understand the absurdity of the approach you raised during the debate…
By contrast, when one is subject to the Torah, we will not define the Amalekite, on the basis of our own reasoning, as “a dog in human form.” The Amalekite is a human being, and we would never dream of harming him except as “compelled by the divine word,” while setting aside our own understanding before the commandments of our Creator, who certainly made the optimal moral calculation, and for whom too the loss of the innocent Amalekite is difficult, except that He has no choice.
Perhaps it is revealed before Him that in this case there is no avoiding harm to innocents in order to deter that nation, which had reached the heights of wickedness in its attempt to destroy the people of Israel without any provocation on their part—similar to what the Allied powers decided, to wipe out entire cities with all their inhabitants in order to eradicate the Amalekites of our generation, the Nazis and their collaborators.
At all events, even while trying to understand the unusual commandment of blotting out Amalek, it seems that only the Sovereign of the world, before whom all is revealed, can arrive at such an exceptional conclusion—not we, on our own initiative.
At all events, from Samuel’s words in explaining the command to Saul—“Go and proscribe the sinners, Amalek”—it follows that an Amalekite who abandoned the ideology of evil is no longer included among the “sinners,” and from here there is a solid source for Maimonides’ statement that an Amalekite who accepted the seven Noahide commandments is accepted. And our sages already taught us that “from the descendants of Haman’s descendants taught Torah to schoolchildren,” and they listed Rav Shmuel bar Shilat (Sanhedrin 97, according to R. Aharon Hyman’s version in Toldot Tannaim ve-Amoraim).
Even concerning the seven Canaanite nations it is said, “They shall not dwell in your land, lest they cause you to sin,” and from here there is a solid basis for Maimonides’ statement that if they accepted the seven Noahide commandments and abandoned the ideology of evil, they are accepted. Thus David accepted Araunah the Jebusite, and “from the descendants of Sisera’s descendants taught Torah in Jerusalem, and they listed Rabbi Akiva” (Sanhedrin 97, according to R. A. Hyman’s version).
In short: when there is the guidance of the written and transmitted Torah, there is no situation of “every man shall do what is right in his own eyes.”
Regards, S.Z.
Paragraph 5, line 3
…that an Amalekite who accepted upon himself…
To S.Z.
A strange claim. Obviously I cannot say whatever I want about reality. If I say that a human being can jump a hundred meters, that does not make it true; and likewise if I say that a certain person has a dog’s consciousness rather than a human’s, that does not make it true. I defined a human being as possessing second-order consciousness, and I also say that in reality there exist people with second-order consciousness. I cannot decide whenever it suits me whether the person in front of me has consciousness or not, according to what is convenient for me. That is obvious, and there is no need for demagoguery.
Incidentally, unfortunately among us too there exists the phenomenon of people or rabbis defining other people as Amalek, and thus we have entered the very same problem that you yourself raised.
“This is the definition of God: an entity whose commands one is obligated to obey simply because it commanded”—isn’t that begging the question? Suppose we know there is a Creator of the world and He commanded—how does one derive from that the knowledge that this Creator meets the above definition?
Suppose I proved that there is a triangle. How does it follow from that that it has three sides?
My claim is that if there is a factor that created us and the world, then there is an obligation to obey its commands simply because it commanded. See my article on philosophical gratitude.
It is worthwhile to see my article In Praise of Begging the Question in order to realize that every valid logical argument begs the question. At the same time, note that here I am not begging the question, because I did not make a logical argument.
With God’s help, 15 Sivan 5779
Rashi explained Hillel’s saying, in which he explained to the convert “the whole Torah on one foot” through the rule “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow” (Shabbat 31a), in two ways.
According to one approach, “your fellow literally, such as robbery, theft, adultery, and most of the commandments.” According to this, the rule concerns commandments between man and his fellow, which are “most of the commandments,” whereby the Torah gives detailed guidance on how to maintain proper social order in which harm and exploitation of the other are prevented. Similarly, the Sefer Ha-Chinukh, commandment 219, writes: “for many commandments in the Torah depend on this, for one who loves his fellow as himself will not steal his money, nor commit adultery with his wife, nor wrong him in money or words… and likewise several other commandments depend on this.”
The second approach suggested by Rashi is that “your fellow” also means the Holy One, blessed be He, as they expounded: “‘Do not forsake your friend and your father’s friend’ (Proverbs 27)—this refers to the Holy One, blessed be He. Do not transgress His words, for it is hateful to you that your fellow should transgress your words.” The moral obligation of gratitude to the Creator and respect for the property of the “master of the house” of the world moves a person also to fulfill his obligation toward his Creator.
Similarly, the Jerusalem Talmud says that love of God leads to care for His honor: “One who loves the King does not swear falsely in His name” (Jerusalem Talmud Berakhot 1:1, cited in Rabbi A. Y. Bromberg’s book, Commentaries of the Rishonim to the Aggadot of Hazal, Shabbat 31a, p. 76).
Rabbi David Dov Lavanon, in his lesson “And you shall love your fellow as yourself—a great principle in the Torah,” adds that there is mutual dependence between moral obligation toward one’s fellow and faith-obligation toward the Creator. One who trains himself to love his fellow as himself, and thus leaves his egocentrism and develops awareness of the other, is the one who will also develop awareness of his Creator.
And conversely, awareness of the Creator of the world brings a person to love His creatures as well, and he cites the Jerusalem Talmud’s words that a person will refrain from taking revenge on his fellow out of the awareness that he and his fellow are parts of one organism, just as it makes no sense for one hand to “take revenge” on the other.
Similarly, Rabbi Kook writes in Ein Ayah, Shabbat 31, sec. 142, that natural human moral feeling is not enough, for in order that the feeling of good encompass all creatures and all generations, the natural feeling must be connected to “the treasury of the good of God’s kindness and His goodness over all His works,” and then the aspiration to do good to all rises beyond what natural feeling alone would bring.
Regards, S.Z.
Why did Hillel phrase it in the way of negating evil, and not in the language of the Torah, “And you shall love your fellow as yourself,” as Rabbi Akiva did when he said, “This is a great principle in the Torah”?
Maharsha, in his novellae to the Aggadot (Shabbat 31), explained that equality with the other can be adopted only with regard to “turn from evil,” for with regard to “do good,” the rule is “your life takes precedence.”
Rabbi Yaakov Reischer (author of Shevut Yaakov), in his book Iyun Yaakov (ad loc.), explained that the gentile who is about to convert has not yet reached the level of Israel, who are by nature “modest, merciful, and doers of kindness,” and therefore raising the demand that he do kindness to his fellow as to himself would have deterred the prospective convert, so Hillel adopted the more natural and easier demand of “live and let live.”
By contrast, Rabbi Kook explains in Ein Ayah (ibid.) that refraining from harm expresses a deeper degree of identification with the other, for “deep-rooted implantation is always revealed through the negative side of preventing harm. For regarding positive acts, a person may arouse his soul at certain times to do good, even though the nature of his soul has not yet attained that level. But to guard oneself from the stumbling block of doing evil—this is constant, for the negation must always be present. This is impossible except through a profound implantation of transforming one’s nature for the good.”
Similarly, the Hazon Ish wrote in Faith and Trust that “turn from evil,” being constant and not always visible or publicized, is much harder than “do good,” and therefore “turn from evil” is what testifies that the quality of goodness has truly been internalized in a person.
Regards, S.Z.
The words of the Hazon Ish (that correction of character traits is discerned specifically through “turn from evil”) are in Faith and Trust, ch. 1, sec. 13:
“The root of correcting character traits is ‘turn from evil,’ and it is easier for a person to fulfill ‘do good,’ but it is difficult to fulfill ‘turn from evil.’ There are people who stand ready to devote the remnant of their strength to the benefit of others, individually and collectively,” but on the other hand “they are exceedingly irritable, and when someone offends them with even a slight remark they become furiously angry without restraint… and woe to whoever has offended them.”
And the Hazon Ish continues:
“It is impossible to feel respect, praise, and admiration for such a person engaged in communal needs, since this man did not labor in correcting his character traits, and his activism is natural to him, because he loves the product accomplished through him, and for the most part the admiration fixed in the heart of all who know him is pleasant to him… But a man should conduct himself by his intellect; and this is the reward of the wise man who has labored in mastering his soul over the tendencies of his natural temperament. A man should not glorify himself in his natural impulses.”
One of the effective ways to attain “mastery of the soul over the tendencies of his natural temperament” is, according to the Hazon Ish (ibid., ch. 3, sec. 8), habituation to exactness in halakhah. Then, even “when he becomes entangled with his fellow, when all his character traits are strained against the other and he sees no fault in himself,” here the habit of “spending nights as days investigating the law and balancing judgment in the books of the commentators and decisors, who mapped out for us the broad path of the Oral Torah, wider than the sea,” will stand by him.
And when a person habituates himself to “investigating the law and balancing judgment,” “this toil is a shield in his hand against human rivalry and the love of violence, and it bequeaths to its possessor love of justice and the precious quality of righteousness dearer to him than all wealth and silver,” and thus he will withstand the test and “his heart will submit to recognize the true judgment and to see himself as liable” (Faith and Trust, ch. 3, sec. 8).
One may therefore say that all parts of the Torah, when one becomes accustomed to observing them with “exactness of law,” pave the way for a person truly to fulfill “What is hateful to you—do not do to your fellow,” while overcoming biases and ulterior motives.
Regards, S.Z.
Regarding the mirror,
Only this week again I found myself convincing people with my answer, which goes in the same direction but is, I think, a bit more well formulated.
In order to define right and left, you first have to define front and back, and up and down.
Round objects have no up and down, but a locomotive that can both push and pull also has no front and back. Neither has right and left.
You can define the rightward direction as the cross product of front and up, and therefore when the mirror reverses front, right is reversed too.
Front/back and up/down are vectors, whereas right/left is a pseudovector, which changes sign under reflection.