Faith – Lesson 45

This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

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The framework of the discussion on religious obligation and the naturalistic fallacy
Ethical facts and religious facts as loaded facts
The absence of justification as part of the axiomatic structure
Religious education, the image of the blind and the sighted, and the experience of obligation
Duties of the Heart and gratitude as the basis of serving God
Rabbi Amital, the Holocaust, and truth in serving God
Critique of Rabbi Amital’s position and the distinction between psychology and philosophy
Logical problems in grounding serving God on gratitude, and circular reasoning
Rabbi Amital’s proposal: faith instead of gratitude, and its meaning as a loaded religious fact
Additional arguments against moral gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He
Ontic gratitude: obligation by virtue of creation and ownership
Nachmanides, ownership through creation, and copyright as an illustration
Gratitude as a legal claim and the parallel to “my property is in your possession”
Obligation to the divine command as a consequence of “He made you,” and why no further explanation is needed
Intuitive examples: parents, the Yemenite children, and embryo mix-ups
Confronting the possibility of an “evil God” and the relation to moral obligation
The Exodus from Egypt as a binding foundation, and an answer regarding its place relative to “He made you” and “He established you”

Summary

General Overview

The discussion raises the question of religious obligation after accepting the premises that there is a God, that there was revelation at Sinai, and that commandments were given, and argues that there is no simple inferential move from neutral facts to normative obligations because of the gap between “is” and “ought.” It proposes that religious and moral obligations rest on loaded facts rather than neutral ones, so that someone who truly understands the fact already understands the obligation embedded in it, while someone who asks “why obey?” or “why not murder?” is revealing a failure to understand the kind of fact involved. The lecture then critiques grounding the service of God in gratitude, especially through Rabbi Amital and the discussion of the Holocaust and truth in serving God, and proposes a distinction between moral gratitude and ontic gratitude that arises from creation itself and ownership. In the end, the claim is that the obligation to obey stems from God’s very being as the one who created and acquired the human being and the world, and that religious education develops the ability to experience this loaded religious fact, much like a moral sense or sight as opposed to blindness.

The framework of the discussion on religious obligation and the naturalistic fallacy

The claim is that even if it has been proven that there is a God and that He revealed Himself at Sinai and gave commandments, the value-question still remains: why does that obligate obedience? The move from factual-historical questions to a normative question is presented as running into the naturalistic fallacy, since values and duties cannot be derived from neutral facts. The argument is that normative obligations are grounded in another kind of fact, not neutral facts but loaded ones that carry binding force.

Ethical facts and religious facts as loaded facts

He illustrates this through morality: if someone says, “I understand that murder is immoral, but why shouldn’t I murder?” that shows he does not understand the ethical fact, because “it is forbidden to murder” is not a neutral description like “there is a lamp here,” but a fact that radiates prohibitions and obligations. He argues that the same logic applies to divine command, so that saying, “I understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, revealed Himself at Sinai, gave commandments and all that, but why should I observe them?” parallels the question about murder and expresses a failure to understand the concept of God. He attributes to Maimonides the idea that accepting God inherently includes an absolute obligation to obey, and claims that no further explanation is needed, because every explanation would itself generate a demand for another explanation until one stops at the loaded fact.

The absence of justification as part of the axiomatic structure

The claim is that the lack of an answer to the question “why” is not a problem but a necessary result of how foundational obligations work, similar to the foundation of morality. He explains that seminar discussions usually do not deal with this question, not because they missed it, but because there is no need to deal with it. He tries to conceptualize this by saying that his discussion explains why no discussion is needed. He describes how people get stuck because they cannot find an argument that moves from fact to obligation, and the solution is recognizing that the obligation is rooted in the very understanding that God is God.

Religious education, the image of the blind and the sighted, and the experience of obligation

He argues that religious education is meant to develop a religious consciousness containing the primary intuition that “if He is God and He commanded, then of course one must observe,” without any further explanation. He compares someone who does not experience obligation to the divine command to a blind person who does not understand sight, so the question seems rational to him, but is really the result of lacking that religious “sense.” He adds that one should not conclude from this that the religious person is acting irrationally; rather, the one who experiences this acts through “religious eyes” that are inaccessible to someone blind to them.

Duties of the Heart and gratitude as the basis of serving God

He presents the view of Duties of the Heart, according to which the obligation to serve the Holy One, blessed be He, is based on gratitude, and cites the verse: “Is this how you repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, your Owner? He made you and established you.” He explains that the Torah itself assumes a duty of gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He, and that not serving Him is ingratitude. This is presented as a position that makes gratitude the foundation of serving God.

Rabbi Amital, the Holocaust, and truth in serving God

He quotes Rabbi Amital from the collected book A Built and Destroyed World, Built and Destroyed, where he states that a Jew who lost his wife and children in the Holocaust, or whose job was to remove burned bodies from the ovens of Auschwitz, cannot serve God on the basis of gratitude—“absolutely not.” He analyzes two layers in Rabbi Amital’s words: a psychological layer of inability to feel gratitude, and a philosophical layer concerning whether one should feel gratitude at all, and for what. He cites the Talmudic passage in Yoma 69a about the Men of the Great Assembly and the change in wording, and Rabbi Amital’s conclusion that serving God must be built on truth and not on falsehood and flattery, so someone who does not feel that “the great, mighty, and awesome” describes the Holy One, blessed be He, refrains from saying it.

Critique of Rabbi Amital’s position and the distinction between psychology and philosophy

He says he does not fully agree with Rabbi Amital, and notes the story of Nahum of Gamzu in tractate Ta’anit, which presents an aspiration to feel gratitude even amid extreme suffering. He argues that the Talmud is not merely giving a journalistic description, but making a demand that one aspire to such a level; on the other hand, he recognizes in Rabbi Amital’s words the insistence that one cannot demand of someone to make religious declarations that are false in his eyes. He adds that in his own writing he argued that “no evil comes down from above,” and that the acts of the Holocaust were the acts of the Nazis, not of the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore he questions the force of the philosophical argument against gratitude, even though he accepts its psychological weight.

Logical problems in grounding serving God on gratitude, and circular reasoning

He argues that there is a logical problem here: if serving God is based on gratitude, one can still ask why one must feel gratitude and what the source of that obligation is, so the explanation does not really add clarity. He sharpens the point into a paradox: gratitude is a moral value, but moral obligations receive their validity only through the Holy One, blessed be He, as he argued in his discussion of the proof from morality. So we get a vicious circle in which the obligation to serve God is based on gratitude, and gratitude itself is based on the obligation to serve God. As an example, he cites the question of the Mishneh LaMelekh about the idea that “we were sworn and already stood so from Mount Sinai,” which illustrates the difficulty of grounding obligation in an oath when the obligation to keep the oath itself stems from the Torah.

Rabbi Amital’s proposal: faith instead of gratitude, and its meaning as a loaded religious fact

He quotes Rabbi Amital as saying that in our generation religious service should be based on faith rather than gratitude, and brings passages from Duties of the Heart, from the Gate of Love of God, about loving despite suffering, including: “If You burn me in fire, I will only increase my love for You and my joy in You,” and “Though He slay me, I will hope in Him,” and the rabbinic interpretation: “Even though He causes me pain and bitterness, my beloved rests between my breasts.” He argues that “faith” here is not a neutral fact, but a loaded religious fact, so the statement that He is God already includes the obligation to obey, independent of gratitude. He presents faith as an alternative that allows inner truth without “lying to yourself,” instead of demanding that a person feel gratitude.

Additional arguments against moral gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He

He raises principled difficulties: the statement “it would have been better for a person not to have been created” seems to point to a general problem with existence itself, and creation by mere speech is not the kind of invested effort that grounds gratitude in ordinary human relations. He argues that the notion of serving a higher need, and the question of for whose benefit one was created, weakens the ordinary model of gratitude. He adds that thanking for salvation seems problematic when the same agent also created the need and the distress, and likens it to someone who creates the danger and then rescues you in order to gain your thanks. He also argues that creating a person seemingly creates a basic obligation to sustain him, similar to parental responsibility.

Ontic gratitude: obligation by virtue of creation and ownership

He proposes a distinction between moral gratitude and ontic or philosophical gratitude, which arises from the very bond implied by “He made you,” and not necessarily by “He established you.” He calls this an obligation that does not depend on whether the creation was good for the person or whether the creator invested effort in him, but on the fact that he came from that creator, and therefore the creator has rights over him. He interprets the verse “your Father, your Owner; He made you and established you” as giving two reasons, and emphasizes that ownership is tied to “He made you.”

Nachmanides, ownership through creation, and copyright as an illustration

He cites Nachmanides’ commentary on the verse: “For He brought you out of nothing, and you became something. And every existent thing has an owner,” and connects it to “Possessor of heaven and earth” and “The Lord acquired me at the beginning of His way.” He compares this to theories of copyright, distinguishing between a consequentialist approach that grants rights in order to encourage creation, and an essentialist approach that sees the creation as “yours” by virtue of its being the fruit of your spirit, including a mention of Plato in the Symposium about “children of the spirit.” He concludes that someone who creates something acquires an essential ownership over it even without effort, and in the same way the Holy One, blessed be He, acquires what He created.

Gratitude as a legal claim and the parallel to “my property is in your possession”

He suggests that the structure of moral gratitude resembles the legal claim “my property is in your possession,” where the other person has something that belongs to me. He brings halakhic examples such as theft, “it benefits me,” and the case in Hullin about the king’s officials threshing his grain, regarding the priest’s claim to terumah that ended up benefiting the liable party. He argues that a benefit creates in the recipient an “addition” that originates in the benefactor, and therefore the benefactor has a quasi-proprietary claim. From this it follows that moral gratitude is a special case of ontic gratitude.

Obligation to the divine command as a consequence of “He made you,” and why no further explanation is needed

He states that the obligation to serve God stems from His being God who created us and acquired us, and therefore He is the owner and a person is obligated to heed His voice, regardless of good or evil, the Holocaust, investment, or moral gratitude. He says this intuition exists in many people, so this is not an arbitrary scriptural decree but a formulation of an inner feeling, and the search for further justifications is misguided because moral justifications themselves draw their force from obligation to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. He presents threats and punishments as a way to enforce an existing obligation, not as the source of the obligation.

Intuitive examples: parents, the Yemenite children, and embryo mix-ups

He argues that even without parental investment there remains a feeling that a child is obligated to his parents simply because they are his source, and brings the example of the Yemenite children who were kidnapped, so the parents did not raise them, yet there is still perceived to be a binding bond. He also mentions the discussion of an embryo mix-up at Ichilov Hospital and presents it as an intuition of biological belonging that prevails even over adoptive or nurturing parents who actually invested in the child. He uses this to illustrate the concept of ontic gratitude as a basis for obligation.

Confronting the possibility of an “evil God” and the relation to moral obligation

He is asked hypothetically whether Judaism would obligate absolute evil, and he answers that in principle obligation to one’s creator exists, but there may be a conflict in which moral obligation overrides it, so a person would not obey, similar to abusive parents. He adds that in a world where God were purely evil, morality itself might have no validity, so this is a hypothetical world that is not coherent, and “an evil God” is an oxymoron. He concludes that there is no such thing as an immoral God, and that the question paints the picture of a “round triangle.”

The Exodus from Egypt as a binding foundation, and an answer regarding its place relative to “He made you” and “He established you”

He is asked about the centrality of the Exodus from Egypt in the Torah and the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) as a binding source, and answers that the verse includes not only “He made you” but also “He established you,” so there is room for the supportive and beneficent dimension as well. He adds that the Exodus also belongs to “He made you,” because according to the Maharal, the Exodus is a birth in which the Jewish people were formed and born, and therefore it is a unique dimension of national being created by the Holy One, blessed be He, and not merely a rescue from distress.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re at the last part of this whole progression. Let me just put it in context. I began with proofs for the existence of God; we talked critically about the possible kinds of proofs. After that I discussed the move from the philosophical God to the religious God, the actually Jewish God. And now the third part is basically a discussion of the question: assuming there is a God, and He revealed Himself at Sinai and gave us commandments and all that, the question still remains: why should I obey? Right? The fact that He commands is a factual question. Meaning, okay, He revealed Himself, He commanded, I reached those factual conclusions. But the question is why that also obligates me to obey, or how religious obligation is created. This is the transition from philosophical, historical, factual questions to the evaluative, normative question involved in religious obligation. And here I said there is a problem of the naturalistic fallacy, because you can’t derive values or obligations from facts. On the other hand, this problem also exists in the moral realm, and I tried to demonstrate through morality—I tried to show that at the basis of normative obligations there stand certain ethical facts. Ethical facts, unlike ordinary facts—there’s a lamp here, or I don’t know, the light is on here—those are neutral facts. They have nothing to do with normative planes, with duties, with rights, with what it is proper or improper to do. That’s the ought versus the is, and therefore it’s fallacious to move from those facts to obligations and norms. But there are facts of another kind, which are loaded facts, not neutral ones. They carry a charge. And once you recognize those facts, they also obligate you to do or not to do something. And I illustrated this through the question: if a person comes and says, look, I understand that it’s immoral to murder, but why shouldn’t I murder? Then the answer is—there is no answer to that question other than to tell him: if you’re asking that question, apparently you don’t understand that murder is forbidden. Because someone who understands that murder is forbidden understands that this is not a fact in the neutral sense, like there’s a lamp here. It’s a fact with meaning; it’s supposed to project obligations onto me—what to do or what not to do, prohibitions and obligations—and someone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t understand the fact. It’s a different kind of fact. It’s not a neutral fact like the facts Hume talked about. And therefore in the moral realm, if you tell me “I understand that murder is forbidden,” there’s no need to explain to you why murder is forbidden or why you’re not supposed to murder. That’s what it means to understand that it is morally forbidden to murder. I’m saying the same thing exists with regard to religious obligation. In religious obligation, or in God’s command, in the commandments of the Holy One, blessed be He, the logic is very similar. There too—and I tried to show this from various places—God, by the very definition of God, if I have defined Him as God, that means I have an obligation to obey Him. If someone tells me, look, I understand that the Holy One, blessed be He, is God, revealed Himself at Sinai, gave commandments and all that, but why should I observe it?—that’s the same question as “I understand that murder is forbidden, but why should I observe that?” It’s simply a lack of understanding. You don’t understand that He is God, or that He gave commandments at Sinai, because if you understood that, you wouldn’t ask this question. In other words, there is something—some acceptance of God, as we saw in Maimonides—there is something in the very concept of God, and an inherent part of it is that there is an absolute, total obligation to fulfill what He commands. That doesn’t need a further explanation. If I were supposed to give it a further explanation, someone would ask me about the principle that appears in the explanation—why is that principle true? Okay, at some point this has to stop. It stops at the point where I encounter the ethical fact. And in this case it’s the religious fact, not necessarily the ethical one—that God commanded. You ask a religious person—I think I mentioned this—why do you observe commandments? Because God commanded. What do you mean? Okay, He commanded, so what? People’s assumption is that if we proved there is a God and that He commanded, the discussion is over. That’s why all the discussions in seminaries never deal with the part I’m talking about. But why is it binding? And in my view this isn’t a miss, it isn’t a flaw. They don’t deal with it because there is no need to deal with it. I’m just trying to conceptualize it, which is why I’m discussing it. But my whole discussion only comes to explain why there’s no need to discuss it. Not that I have some different answer, but that I’m trying to explain that the fact there is no answer is not a problem at all. There isn’t supposed to be an answer. And once I reached the conclusion that the Lord is God, then His commands are binding simply by virtue of His being God. Meaning, this is not something that requires some additional explanation, exactly as in morality. In other words, the basis of religious obligation, like moral obligation, like anything else, is basically axiomatic, you could say. There’s something here such that if you understand that He is God, you’re supposed to understand this on your own. No explanation is needed. It is embedded in His being God. And many times people who don’t understand this get stuck, and rightly so, because I’ve met quite a few such people. Okay, there is a God, He revealed Himself at Sinai, everything’s fine—but why observe? And you can’t come up with any argument or rationale that transfers you from the factual plane to the plane of obligation, and that gets many people stuck. They say, okay, fine, I don’t understand why I should be obligated, and that’s that. And my answer is: true, there is no explanation—but no explanation is needed. No explanation is needed because once you understand that He is God, that means His commands are binding. I spoke about the importance of religious education in this context, because religious education is supposed to develop in you that same axiomatic understanding that if there is a God—first of all to develop the very insight that there is a God—but beyond that, that basic intuition which says that, well, if He is God and He commanded, then obviously one must observe; no further explanation is needed. Something that maybe a person who didn’t go through a religious educational path, or someone looking at it from the outside, often sees as: how are you making that leap? Because he doesn’t find it within himself. I gave the example of the blind person and the sighted person, right? It’s a kind of blindness. Someone who wasn’t helped to develop his religious consciousness, his religious obligation, really doesn’t understand. It looks irrational to him, it looks illogical. Okay, you think there’s some flying spaghetti monster in the sky. Why does that mean that what it says must be observed? But think about it—that’s exactly like a person who, say, doesn’t have the compartment in his mind or thinking that is responsible for understanding morality. He doesn’t get what it is. Now, I can try to explain to him intellectually, academically, that there are people who think that murder is immoral in a very objective and academic way. He says, okay, I understand—but why don’t they murder? Meaning, a person who doesn’t experience it, doesn’t feel it, sees it as some kind of arbitrary, irrational leap. Okay, so morality is defined this way or that way—why does that project onto what I am obligated or not obligated to do, or forbidden to do? But someone who experiences it, like someone who sees and understands that the eyes really reflect reality, doesn’t care about the blind man’s arguments—who told you, maybe your eyes deceive you? The blind person simply doesn’t experience it, so he doesn’t understand. But when I experience it, I understand that eyes reflect reality. And it’s the same thing here. Someone who doesn’t experience this obligation to the divine command is simply blind. It’s very hard to explain this to him. And on the other hand, what many religious people I’ve met conclude from this is also incorrect—that basically he’s right, I’m acting irrationally. No. If you find this within yourself, that means you have some sort of sense, religious eyes, that he doesn’t have; he is blind to this matter. And therefore he’s asking a good question from his perspective, just as the blind man asks a good question from his perspective to the sighted man. But that shouldn’t trouble someone who understands that we have this kind of eyes. So that’s basically the scheme. Now I want to show this from a slightly different angle. I think it adds something, although again, what I’ve said until now is basically my answer. But I’ll try to show it from another angle because I think it brings the matter closer to our intuition, to our understanding. I’ll begin perhaps with things written by Duties of the Heart. In several places Duties of the Heart says that the obligation to serve the Holy One, blessed be He, is based on gratitude. We need to be grateful to the Holy One, blessed be He. There is a verse: “Is this how you repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, your Owner? He made you and established you.” Meaning, the Torah itself assumes that there is some duty of gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He, and that this is basically the basis of His service. The fact that you do not serve Him is ingratitude. In other words, there is some assumption that the foundation of serving God is gratitude. And Rabbi Amital has a collected book, A Built and Destroyed World, Built and Destroyed, and he writes there as follows: Can a Jew who lost his wife and children in the Holocaust truly serve God on the basis of gratitude? Can a Jew whose job was to remove burned corpses from the furnaces of Auschwitz serve God when the consciousness underlying that service is gratitude? Absolutely not. Meaning, it’s not a question; it’s an answer. He determines: it’s impossible. Such a thing is impossible. Now in this matter there are two nuances hidden behind this paragraph. One nuance is the psychological nuance. That is, someone who went through those things is not in a psychological position where he can genuinely feel gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He. Someone who suffered greatly, someone who goes through a bad life, cannot feel gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He. He is constrained, compelled. That is the psychological problem, which is the lesser problem. The substantive problem is the philosophical one. The question is whether he should feel gratitude—not whether he can do so, but whether he should at all. Gratitude for what? After all, You gave me only—or not only, but mainly—bad things, so what exactly am I supposed to be grateful to You for? Okay, that is basically the philosophical question, and it is the more important one. He goes on there to cite the Talmud in tractate Yoma 69a: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: Why were they called the Men of the Great Assembly? Because they restored the crown to its former glory. Moses came and said, “The great, mighty, and awesome God.” Jeremiah came and said, “Foreigners are carousing in His sanctuary—where is His awesomeness?” so he did not say “awesome.” Daniel came and said, “Foreigners are enslaving His children—where is His might?” so he did not say “mighty.” Then they came and said: On the contrary, this is His might—that He restrains His impulse and gives long patience to the wicked; and these are His awesome deeds—for were it not for the fear of the Holy One, blessed be He, how could one nation survive among the nations? The Talmud asks: But how could the rabbis do such a thing and uproot the formulation that Moses established? How can they change the wording that Moses our teacher set in the Torah: “the great, mighty, and awesome God”? Rabbi Elazar said: Because they knew that the Holy One, blessed be He, is truthful, therefore they did not lie about Him. What does that mean? I’m not arguing with Moses our teacher, but you can’t expect me to say falsehoods. If in my eyes it’s false, I can’t say it. What does this have to do with Moses our teacher? He was wise, righteous; I am insignificant, my loins are smaller than his loins. Okay. Still, what do you want me to do—lie? I can’t lie. I don’t feel that He is great, mighty, and awesome, so I can’t say it. And then Rabbi Amital writes based on this Talmudic passage, he says: Serving God must be built on truth, not on falsehood and flattery toward the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore, people who did not feel that expressions like “the great, the mighty, and the awesome” describe the Holy One, blessed be He, refrained from using these expressions, even though by doing so they changed the language of the Torah and the wording established by Moses our teacher. In other words, he says this is not a question of authority, not a question of heresy, not a question of whether it is permitted or forbidden to say it—it cannot be said; it is false. If I think it isn’t true, no one in the world—not the Holy One, blessed be He, not Moses our teacher—can demand that I say it, because it is false. So it has nothing to do with righteousness or heresy and all sorts of accusations that usually get thrown at people who hold such positions—I’m speaking from personal experience. Meaning, when I talk about the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved, and therefore it is hard for me to ask Him for things or to thank Him for what He did or to see miracles where other people see miracles—now, maybe I’m wrong, but if that’s what I think, then what do you want me to do, keep saying it even though I don’t believe it? You expect me to lie. I’m not—even beyond the fact that I can’t, it has no value. It’s nonsense. Convince me that I’m wrong. If you convince me that I’m wrong, fine. But you can’t tell me, look, you’re forbidden to think this way because it’s false, because it’s heresy, because it’s—I don’t know what. What do you mean? But that’s what I think. So Rabbi Amital says, very rightly I think, that if this is his conclusion, no pious arguments and no accusations of heresy and no waving around the greatness of Moses our teacher can help in this context. In the end, this is what I think. Now I just want to make maybe one more comment.

[Speaker B] Rabbi, Rabbi, what’s interesting here is that the ethical and religious facts the Rabbi has been talking about suddenly disappear. After all, Nahum of Gamzu sits there in tractate Ta’anit with his hands cut off and his legs cut off, and they say, “Woe to us that we see you like this,” and he says, “Fortunate are you that you see me like this.” Meaning, if you want, it can happen—so suddenly here the ethical and religious facts disappear? I don’t agree with Rabbi Amital. I understand him, but I don’t think I agree with him.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I haven’t yet gotten to the issue of ethical and religious facts. I’ll get to that in a moment.

[Speaker B] No, no, I mean the Rabbi says that Rabbi Amital says it’s impossible to feel gratitude because it’s impossible—what do you want from me?—so there’s no point in saying it. I’m not sure that’s true. I’m not saying it’s possible, but Nahum of Gamzu definitely says to his students, “Fortunate are you that you see me like this,” and that’s a demand on them—to aspire to reach his level and to be grateful even when your hands and feet are cut off and you’re lying in bed covered in boils.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, okay, if someone feels gratitude in such a situation, let him feel gratitude—no problem. But Rabbi Amital doesn’t feel it. His conclusion is that it isn’t true.

[Speaker B] Obviously, but the Talmud tells us this not as a journalistic description. It tells us this so that we too should aspire—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —and one day maybe reach—

[Speaker B] —to be like that as well.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s a journalistic description of many people. What do you mean, not a journalistic description? A great many people have these feelings, and Rabbi Amital is speaking for them here. He says: you cannot demand of us that we feel gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He, because we do not feel it.

[Speaker B] Then why did Nahum of Gamzu say to his students, “Fortunate are you that you see me like this”? That means: I want you too to learn something from me.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He wants that, okay, he wants that. I want that too. But so what? He doesn’t agree with Rabbi Amital. You want it—fine. But Rabbi Amital says: the fact that you want it doesn’t interest me. I’m not grateful, because in my eyes it’s false. Now if Nahum of Gamzu did feel gratitude, that’s his business, good for him. But if Rabbi Amital, like many millions of others, feels this way, you can’t come to them with a demand—be grateful. No. There’s nothing to be grateful for.

[Speaker B] Our whole Judaism is exactly this. Our whole Judaism is this. How can you say that? Our whole Judaism—we are persecuted and crushed and pursued, and we still go on saying thanks. So to say that it’s strange to demand this of us—that’s anti-, the whole basis of Judaism is this.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Well, look, first of all, maybe that’s your Judaism, but don’t speak for all of us. That’s one thing. Second, I’m about to get to that. This is precisely the question I’m raising. If serving God is founded on gratitude, then Rabbi Amital says: wait a minute, something here doesn’t add up. This gratitude is false. So then what is it based on? Okay, that’s the question, and I’m going to address it. I just want to add one remark. We talked a bit—not here, I think, not in this series—but in earlier series I talked, and also in my book and on the website, about the idea that no evil comes down from above. Meaning, what you suffered in the Holocaust came from the Nazis, not from the Holy One, blessed be He. Therefore I’m not sure how far Rabbi Amital’s claim really works on the philosophical plane—not the psychological one. Psychologically I’m not judging anyone; I wasn’t in that situation. But philosophically I’m not sure he is right, because the evil we absorbed in the Holocaust, or that they absorbed in the Holocaust, was the work of the Nazis, not of the Holy One, blessed be He. One can argue against Him: why didn’t You intervene? Fine. But He was not the one who caused us that evil. That was one of the later columns I wrote on the website; I won’t get into it here. So I’m not sure I agree with Rabbi Amital’s claim as such, but I bring it because it’s a good point of departure for what I want to say. This thesis of gratitude as the basis of serving God also has a logical problem. Because in the end, when I say I am grateful, I serve the Holy One, blessed be He, because I ought to—I owe Him gratitude. Now I can keep asking: and why should I feel gratitude? Where does the obligation of gratitude come from? Why doesn’t that need an explanation, while the obligation to observe commandments does need an explanation? Why doesn’t the obligation of gratitude need an explanation? So what would its explanation be? Not clear. Some moral intuition or other, I don’t know exactly what. There is one. Now—is that stronger than the obligation to serve God? Why does gratitude add anything for me as an explanation, as a justification for my religious obligation? Is it stronger? More self-evident? It seems that at least for religious people, or for people who received a religious education, that is not necessarily the case. They have the same intuition that one should serve God because God said so, exactly like the intuition that one should be grateful to someone who did one a kindness. So I don’t see why the explanation of gratitude adds anything to the obligation to serve God. Unless for some reason you don’t have the intuition that one should observe His commandments, but you do have the intuition of gratitude. But I can formulate this even more sharply, and then it becomes a logical paradox. Because gratitude is a moral value, right? It’s a moral obligation. But moral obligations themselves have no validity if they do not come from the Holy One, blessed be He, from God. That’s what I discussed when I talked about the proof from morality; I won’t repeat it here, but for now I’ll assume it, because I explained and justified it there. If so, then we’re really in a vicious circle here. Why? Because the obligation to serve God is based on gratitude, but gratitude itself is based on the obligation to serve God. So now the problem is a logical one, not just a question of what use it is. It can’t even serve as a justification, because it’s like—I think I spoke one of the last times—about the question of the Mishneh LaMelekh regarding the idea that we were “sworn and standing from Mount Sinai.” The Talmud says that we were sworn and standing from Mount Sinai to observe commandments. So the Mishneh LaMelekh asks: what good does it do that we were sworn at Sinai, if the whole obligation to keep oaths itself comes from the Torah that we received at Sinai? Meaning, how can you base the obligation to the Torah on the fact that we swore, when the obligation to keep what we swore is itself rooted in the Torah? So there is some problem here that I think goes to the foundations. I’m trying to show here that there cannot be a justification for why one should serve God. Not only that we haven’t found one and have to live with that—but there cannot be such a justification. Since any such justification cannot be factual, because of the naturalistic gap, and it cannot be anchored in a moral value, because then we have the loop—the moral value itself derives from the obligation to serve God. So what comes out is that we are standing at a point that cannot have an answer. Not that by chance we haven’t found an answer because we aren’t smart enough. This is a proof that there cannot be an answer. That’s much stronger.

[Speaker B] But this whole vicious circle is only there because the Rabbi separates the two concepts. If the Rabbi did accept that it’s the same thing—to say that the obligation of gratitude and serving God, obligation to the Holy One, blessed be He, is because of the moral issue—then it’s not a vicious circle, because it’s just a point. It’s the point. It’s the tip, the summit. There’s nothing beyond that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] You can say whatever you want, but it’s not true. What do you mean? If one person says that the obligation to serve God is based on gratitude, someone else could give a different explanation. You want to identify them? I don’t see the explanation, but I don’t understand the—

[Speaker B] No, the Rabbi is asking logically that there’s a vicious circle here: you’re obligated to gratitude because of your obligation to God, and you’re obligated to God because of gratitude, so that’s a vicious circle. But if it’s not a circle but a point, then you’ve solved—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —the problem—

[Speaker B] —and that’s also true.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I haven’t solved the problem, I’ve sharpened it. You’ve shown that there cannot be—

[Speaker B] —an answer. You just turned the question mark into an exclamation mark. I never said there was an answer. I never said there was an answer to why. I completely believe in the naturalistic gap, but I think we have no other option besides this thing. Our conscience tells us to serve God, so we have no answer to why. This is our very essence as human beings.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Listen, if we have no other option besides this thing, and this thing doesn’t hold water, then we have no answer.

[Speaker C] So why doesn’t it hold water?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Every value that we hold—

[Speaker C] —rather, there is no—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —we have no explanation for why we hold it, but we have no other option. Fine, but if we have no other option, and the only thing we have doesn’t hold water, then what have we accomplished? But why doesn’t it hold water?

[Speaker C] Moral obligation doesn’t hold water?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Wait, you’re going back again to what I’m saying. I’m trying to show this point, but you’re stopping me at the question stage. At the question stage, it means that if you’re looking for a justification, there is no justification. That’s the claim. Now, I talked about this in the previous lecture, that a justification isn’t needed either. I said I’m now coming back to it from a different angle. What I’m trying to show is that there cannot be a justification. Okay, so what’s the conclusion? Maybe it’s just not true? No, the conclusion is that a justification isn’t needed; I’ll get to that in a moment. But first you have to understand the difficulty, and then arrive at the explanations. So the claim, basically, is that not only is there no solution here, but there cannot be a solution; there cannot be an explanation. Now, Rabbi Amital himself, when he tries to offer his answer to this question—if it’s not gratitude, then what is it?—he says something very, very strange. He says this answer: worship has to be based on faith, not on gratitude. In our generation it’s based on faith and not on gratitude. What does that mean? As was said about one of the pious men, who would rise at night—it comes from Sha’ar Ahavat Hashem in Duties of the Heart—”As was said about one of the pious men, who would rise at night and say: My God, You have made me hungry and left me naked, and seated me in the darkness of night, and yet You have shown me Your might and Your greatness. If You burn me in fire, I will only increase my love for You and my joy in You.” Similar to what Job said: “Though He slay me, I will still hope in Him.” And the sage alluded to this idea when he said, “My beloved is to me a bundle of myrrh that lies between my breasts,” and our Sages said homiletically: “Even though He causes me pain and bitterness, my beloved lies between my breasts.” Okay? Meaning, the claim is basically worship out of faith. What does “out of faith” mean? On the face of it, that statement—worship out of faith—is very strange. Faith is, supposedly, knowledge that God exists. Now, that’s a fact. How can obligation be derived from a fact? Again we’re returning to the same point that keeps accompanying us all along: the is-ought fallacy. It seems to me, once again, that we’re going back to it. Since I’ve already given the answer, I keep inserting it again, but really I should have made this move without saying it at the beginning. I think what Rabbi Amital means is exactly the point I made earlier. Faith is not a fact in the sense of a physical fact; it’s a religious fact, like an ethical fact, right? It’s a value-laden fact, not a neutral fact. If you believe in the Holy One, blessed be He, that He is God—not only that He exists, but that He is God—then if you say that He is God, that is not a neutral description. It means that what He says must be fulfilled, without gratitude. It has nothing to do with gratitude; rather, His very being God obligates us to fulfill it. You don’t feel gratitude? Then don’t feel gratitude; don’t falsify your inner self. That’s all true. The obligation does not depend on gratitude. He is offering an alternative here; this is not identifying gratitude with faith, but rather, instead of gratitude—which at least in this generation is not open to us—faith is actually the point that is open. That’s Rabbi Amital’s claim. By the way, this idea that gratitude is not open to us—I don’t think that’s a personal matter. Once I’m speaking not about the psychological question but about the philosophical question, then that means it’s not open to anyone. That is, if gratitude is not justified, I don’t have to go through the Holocaust in order not to feel gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He. Because if He brought about the Holocaust, then I don’t owe Him gratitude for the world He created and that I live in, even if I myself didn’t go through the Holocaust. Because on the philosophical level—as opposed to the psychological level, where of course it would make a difference whether I was there or not—the claim is that it would have been better for a person not to have been created, right? Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel counted and concluded: it would have been better for a person not to have been created. So basically there’s a principled claim here, and the Holocaust is only an extreme illustration of it, that really He doesn’t deserve gratitude. And therefore this isn’t a question of this generation or another generation. Yes, Rabbi Amital, I think, somewhat blurs the line here between the psychological question and the philosophical question. I think it’s important to distinguish between them. In any case, for our purposes, what does this mean? Let me maybe add one more point before I continue. What Rabbi Amital is effectively saying—what emerges from Rabbi Amital’s words—is not only that it’s impossible to base the worship of God on gratitude, but that it’s impossible to feel gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He. Leave aside the fact that you’ve found another basis for the worship of God—faith. But is it possible to feel gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He? Fine, so that won’t be the basis of my worship of God; I have another basis. But is even that impossible? Rabbi Amital isn’t attacking the basis for the worship of God; he’s attacking gratitude itself. He says: no, I can’t feel gratitude. But here we already have something like, “Is this how you repay the Lord, O vile and unwise people? Is He not your Father, your Master? He made you and established you.” Meaning, there is a demand on us to feel gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, even if I don’t see that as the basis for the worship of God. Now, that too I can’t fulfill, basically. That’s the claim, beyond the question of whether I’ve found an alternative that grounds religious obligation. So I’m saying again: this claim, yes, this claim that you can’t feel gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, because of the Holocaust—I don’t agree with it, and I think Rabbi Amital also doesn’t fully agree with it. I think, in my view, he probably means the psychological question rather than the philosophical one, because philosophically he himself answered it. That is, I think in that same book there even appears a conversation that took place between him and Abba Kovner, yes, the political commissar. So they had a discussion: Abba Kovner said that he lost his faith because of the Holocaust—he was a partisan, as is well known, and so on—he lost his faith in God because of the Holocaust. So Rabbi Amital told him that he had lost his faith in man because of the Holocaust. Meaning, Abba Kovner the atheist blamed the Holocaust on God, while Rabbi Amital, the believer, blamed the Holocaust on man—on human beings. And that’s a very interesting point, because basically what he’s saying is: the Holy One, blessed be He, did not perpetrate the Holocaust; the Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust. I would lose my faith in human beings, not in God. Again, there is the question of why He didn’t intervene, but the question is who did this horrible thing. It wasn’t the Holy One, blessed be He; it was the Nazis. And therefore here there is, seemingly, some kind of answer to the question Rabbi Amital raises. Because what do you want? Gratitude—the Holy One, blessed be He, gave you a wonderful world, life, everything excellent. You human beings sinned with what He gave you and decided to commit these horrors against one another, and now you’re coming with complaints against Him because of that? That’s your crime. The gratitude for what He did, you still owe Him. And it’s somewhat similar to the Haredi assumption that says we don’t recite Hallel on Independence Day because this is a secular state that is run improperly and so forth, so we don’t say thank you to the Holy One, blessed be He, for this state. Now that, of course, is completely absurd, because assuming the Holy One, blessed be He, gave us this state, and that is

[Speaker B] an interesting question in itself, but assuming the Holy One, blessed be He

[Speaker G] gave

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] gave us this state, and the Haredim certainly believe that what is happening here is by the power of the Holy One, blessed be He. So because we are sinners and do not keep the commandments and run it in an improper way, does that mean we’re not supposed to thank Him? If someone gave me a hundred shekels and I took them and threw them into the sea, don’t I owe him thanks for giving me a hundred shekels? Why? Because I’m a sinner and didn’t use it properly, he doesn’t deserve thanks for the gift he gave me? What kind of argument is that? What, the secular people represent the Holy One, blessed be He, and the religious people do not? The Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the secular people who built a secular state here, so why should I acknowledge Him with thanks? The religiosity is me; the secularity is the Holy One, blessed be He. A completely absurd argument. I don’t understand—it’s repeated all the time by smart people, but it’s simply absurd. This is somewhat the dispute—people say it’s a dispute, I’m not sure it is at all—between Maimonides and Nachmanides regarding Hanukkah. “And sovereignty returned to Israel for more than two hundred years,” Maimonides writes, implying that this is a reason to rejoice. And Nachmanides says: this was a kingship taken from the house of David, given to the priests, a kingship of Hellenizers, and so on; it was a very, very problematic kingship. There’s no contradiction. I owe thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He, for giving me the possibility, the sovereignty, the kingship, everything. What I did with it—if I sinned with it and handled it improperly, then I’m a sinner. Does that mean I don’t need to acknowledge the Holy One, blessed be He, for what He gave me? Therefore I think Rabbi Amital’s philosophical question is fairly weak. The psychological question is another discussion, but as for psychology—let him take a pill and get over it. In any case, for our purposes, I want to raise further difficulties that really do exist. First, if indeed it is better for a person not to have been created than to have been created, then it seems there is some principled determination here. It’s not just that by chance some Nazis got up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to commit atrocities. There is a world here in which, basically, for the reasonable person, it would have been better not to have been created. Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel both counted and concluded that. Beyond that, the Holy One, blessed be He, did not really expend energy in giving us the world, life, and everything in it; from His perspective, it was created by speech. Usually, when I acknowledge someone’s kindness, it is because he invested energy on my behalf—time, effort, money, I don’t know exactly what; he invested in me. If he invested in me, then he deserves my gratitude. But does someone who did not invest in me deserve gratitude? It cost Him nothing from His perspective. Especially since we are talking about service for a higher need, yes? He created me, essentially, for His own sake; He needed me. So of course that sharpens the difficulty even more. It’s true that in Hazal we find gratitude toward the Nile, yes, that Moses our teacher—or Aaron—struck the Nile because Moses our teacher owed the Nile gratitude. But all right, usually we understand that as some kind of educational parable, not that there is an actual obligation of gratitude toward a river. Why not? The Nile did not decide to invest in me, and did not invest in me, so what is gratitude here? Just because I was helped by it—so what? Do I need to feel gratitude toward a hammer that I use? I built the hammer and I use it, that’s all. So in that sense it’s not exactly the same thing, but in a similar sense, the Holy One, blessed be He, also did not really invest in us, and therefore the question is to what extent He really deserves gratitude from us. Another point: many times when people thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for some salvation or help He gave us—livelihood, healing, and the like—that begins with a need or distress that He Himself created in us. He created us in such a way that we need to eat, so He also gives us food. He created the accident that almost… killed me, and He also saved me. So for the rescue I need to thank Him, but for the accident that doesn’t go on His account—it was somebody else? Why? Either He causes everything that happens here or He doesn’t. And if He causes everything that happens here, then He caused the troubles and also saved me—or whoever He saved, in the places where He saved. But why thank someone—it reminds me of all those movies about a guy interested in a girl; he pays two people to beat her up, and then comes and saves her, right, the knight on the white horse, comes to save her so that she’ll feel gratitude toward him, appreciate him, and go out with him. You created the problem and you also solved it; don’t create the problem and don’t solve it. In other words, there are several serious difficulties with this comparison we make between gratitude toward someone who has done me good and gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He. I would say even more than that: if the Holy One, blessed be He, created us, then it seems to me that He also has a basic obligation to sustain us. Like parents and their children: with all due respect to children’s gratitude toward their parents, the parents brought the children into the world. If you brought a child into the world, you have an obligation to support them. You can’t bring a child into the world and leave him here to die of hunger—certainly if you are the one who created the evil inclination in him, since the Holy One, blessed be He, is the senior partner among the three, yes, “there are three partners in a person.” He also created this entire story. Therefore the claim about gratitude is a very difficult claim; that is, its application to the Holy One, blessed be He—or the comparison between the Holy One, blessed be He, and a human being who has done me good—is a very problematic comparison. What I want to argue is the following. I basically want to say, like Rabbi Amital as I interpreted him above, that the obligation to serve God is because of faith / belief, not because of gratitude. And what is faith / belief? The religious fact that He is God. Now, the fact that He is God is not a neutral description; it is a loaded fact. That is, the fact that He is God obligates me to obey Him, to do what He says and not do what He forbids, and so on. What I now want to claim is that this is the concept of gratitude. I’m getting to your earlier point, Shmuel—this is the concept of gratitude. But first I need to preface that there are, I think, two kinds of gratitude. Moral gratitude is what I have assumed until now: moral gratitude means someone has done me good, invested in me, and so on, and therefore deserves gratitude from me. Yes, Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner even writes that this is some kind of servitude I have toward him; it’s not my obligation toward him, it’s his right over me, almost in a legal sense, and he even has proof for this, but we won’t get into that here. So that is moral, ethical gratitude, yes? Someone has done me good, invested in me, given me of his own; he deserves gratitude from me. But there is another kind of gratitude that is not connected to that at all. I call it ontic gratitude. Ontology is the doctrine of being, yes? Ontic gratitude means gratitude by virtue of the very bond between me and him. If he created me, then I have an obligation to acknowledge him with gratitude—not gratitude in the sense that he is a benevolent being, he did me good and therefore deserves that I repay him in return. No. I am obligated to him by virtue of the fact that I was created from him or created by him. There is such an obligation, and it is a completely different obligation from the moral gratitude I have been discussing until now. There is an obligation toward the one who created me. If he created me, then in some sense I belong to him, yes? I owe him because I came into being through him; I cannot deviate from what he basically dictates to me. I can—I have free choice—but I may not. And I call this philosophical gratitude, or ontic gratitude. Let’s look at the verse itself, which is the foundational verse regarding gratitude. What does the verse say? “Is He not your Father, your Owner? He made you and established you.” What is the difference between “made you” and “established you”? “Made you” means He made you; “established you” means He sustains you, meaning He constantly holds you up, essentially enables you to eat, to have health, whatever it is that you need. So there is “made you” and there is “established you.” The obligation of gratitude—“Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, your Owner? He made you and established you”—there are two reasons. One reason is that He made you; the second reason is that He establishes you, that He helps you, supports you all the time. There are two reasons for gratitude. Now, these things also appear in the commentators. For example, Nachmanides—Nachmanides on this verse. On this verse Nachmanides writes: “Is He not your Father”—yes, here, here—“Is He not your Father, for He begot you and raised you, and He is your Owner, for He made you His possession, since He brought you out of non-being and you became being. And every being has an owner, as in the verse ‘The Lord acquired me at the beginning of His way’ in Proverbs, and likewise ‘Owner of heaven and earth,’ as I explained. And He made you and established you,” in the sense of “He formed him in one womb.” What does that mean? He says: one who makes me has ownership over me. I belong to him. And he says this on this verse: “Is He not your Father, your Owner, who made you and established you?” “Your Father, your Owner”—by the way, the ownership in “your Father, your Owner” belongs to “He made you,” not to “He established you.” If He made me, then I am acquired by Him, I am His. I must do what He says. This is the claim that every being has an owner. By the way, regarding copyright, for example, there are two accepted approaches in legal literature about copyright. There is the purposive approach. This is an approach that says it is worthwhile to give the creator a right over his creation because it will encourage people to create. If you don’t give them rights over what they created, what motivation is there to create? Basically, it’s important to give him recompense—to preserve his name on the work, to pay him for the work—in other words, a moral right, a property right over intellectual property, because it is worthwhile. The assumption of that approach is that it doesn’t really belong to you. Society has an interest in giving you a right over your creation because it will encourage you to create. That is a purposive, consequentialist justification. Okay? But there is also an essential justification. An essential justification says that if you created this—the idea, this insight—then it is yours. It is yours ontically, because it was created from you. Plato, in the Symposium, calls a person’s creations “the children of his spirit.” They are the children of his spirit. Just as I have physical children, I have children of my spirit. And intellectual property stems from the fact that these are the children of my spirit. Even if I didn’t work hard on this creation, didn’t invest energy, it just popped into my head by chance, purely accidentally—it’s mine. The moment it popped into my head, it’s mine. And others who use it are infringing on the ownership I have in the matter. In other words, there is a certain conception here that says that if I created something, that something is a possession. Exactly what Nachmanides writes here. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, created us, the world—“Owner of heaven and earth”—what does “Owner of heaven and earth” mean? Creator of heaven and earth. If He created heaven and earth, He thereby acquired them. They are His possession; it is His. “The Lord acquired me at the beginning of His way.” And He also created me, so He acquired me. Meaning that the conception we see here is that beyond moral gratitude, there is another concept. It may seem somewhat similar at first glance, but it is a completely different concept. It doesn’t belong to the moral sphere at all. In other words, my claim is that the fact that I must do what He says, or that I am His possession, is a legal claim, not a moral claim. Morally, I can choose not to obey Him. No one will say that I’m a bad person because of it—a bad person in the sense of morally bad, yes? It is not a moral value. You can call it a legal value, or a fact, a religious fact—I don’t even know exactly what to call it. It is something completely different. And this, I claim, is not conditioned by everything we said earlier. You do not need to invest in me and work hard for this, and it doesn’t even require that things be good for me, for example. It doesn’t require that things be good for me. I am not repaying you because things are good for me, because you did me good, but because you made me. It doesn’t matter even if things are bad for me. Therefore my claim is that gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He, belongs even to people who understand that it would have been better for a person not to have been created, and who went through the Holocaust and everything, and even if all the previous objections are correct. True, He did not do me good, assuming I accept all of those arguments. But the gratitude of “He made you” still exists. “He established you” perhaps not, but “He made you” still exists. And again, a person may come and say: yes, but I didn’t want to be. Why should I feel gratitude to Him for the fact that I exist, that He created me? I’m not happy that He created me; I don’t care. Because I am not asking you for ethical gratitude—because life is good for you, therefore acknowledge Him with gratitude. My claim is that there is some kind of quasi-legal rule here. When someone created you, he has rights over you. That’s it. It makes no difference whether you enjoy the fact that he created you or not. This reminds me of the… Rabbi, by the same reasoning should one also give thanks for evil? What? I can’t hear. By the same reasoning should one also give thanks for evil? Yes, but I wouldn’t call it giving thanks for evil. Rather, I would call it giving thanks for existence despite the evil. Giving thanks for evil is something else. I don’t see why one should give thanks for evil. One should give thanks for existence despite the fact that there is evil, all right? Because existence as such really does come from Him. Whether there is evil or not is an additional discussion. That is already a question about moral gratitude. But ontic, philosophical gratitude is not dependent on the question of whether things are bad for me or good for me. But you’re saying—you’re really using the word gratitude, yes? What does “good” mean? “Good” means only that it’s good for me, in the words… No, so I’m saying: then don’t call it gratitude. The terminology isn’t important here. “Do you thus repay the Lord, O foolish and unwise people?” Yes, the obligation is not to be vile. So I claim there is a moral vile person and a philosophical vile person. Okay? Whether we call it gratitude or not—that’s a question. I think—I’ll tell you why I do choose to call it gratitude. First of all, because that terminology appears in various places. But beyond that, I think moral gratitude is a particular case of this. Why am I obligated to moral gratitude toward someone who has done me good? In the Talmud itself, in Jewish law, they distinguish between several kinds of claims. There is a claim of the type “my property is in your possession.” Suppose I damaged someone. Why does he claim money from me? He doesn’t have money of his with me; he wants me to compensate him for the damage I caused. But if I robbed him, then when he claims the money from me, that isn’t compensation for what I did. He is claiming his money that is in my possession. Give it back—it’s his. That’s not compensation. Even though robbery is one of the principal categories of damages in the baraitot there at the beginning of Bava Kamma, still… I think that is only robbery when the stolen object no longer exists. Because when the stolen object still exists, it doesn’t belong to the category of damages at all. It is a claim that “my property is in your possession.” What does that mean? It means that many times—for example, “as one who became enriched through me.” There is a passage in Hullin. The Talmud discusses “the men of the king’s house seized his threshing floor.” Meaning, a person has a threshing floor full of grain, and the king comes and takes the grain. Suppose I owed the king a thousand shekels in taxes, and the king comes and confiscates my grain worth a thousand shekels. Now that grain was tevel. If I had wanted to use it, I would have had to set aside terumah. One out of fifty, say, so the value of twenty shekels. A thousand shekels’ worth of grain, twenty shekels of that is terumah that I would have had to set aside. So it turns out that the king took from me a thousand shekels, of which only nine hundred and eighty are mine and twenty belong to the priest. Because I would have had to give him twenty shekels in order to use the remaining nine hundred and eighty. So can the priest claim those twenty shekels from me? Because I used his twenty shekels, and therefore I paid only nine hundred and eighty and took twenty shekels from him to pay the king. So the Talmud says yes; this is called “I became enriched through him.” What does that mean? If you calculate my property, you’ll see that my property increased by twenty shekels thanks to the priest. We view those twenty shekels that are with me as essentially the priest’s money that is in my possession. This is a claim of “my property is in your possession.” As distinct from that, later authorities distinguish this from payment for benefit, for example. Someone who lived in another person’s courtyard without his knowledge has to pay me for the use. That is not a claim of “my property is in your possession.” But “I became enriched through him” is such a claim. You have twenty shekels of mine; return them. It’s not compensation for what you did; just give me the money—it’s mine. My money is with you. My claim is that when I do good to someone else, that benefit basically made his condition better. That addition to his condition in fact came from me. Something of mine is with him. Therefore the obligation of gratitude is some kind of claim of “my property is in your possession.” Something of mine is with you; you owe me that. Even if you can’t give me back that exact thing, then pay me money instead, fine—but the foundation of the claim is that “my property is in your possession.” You have something that came from me, that is mine. I basically created you—in this case not all of you, but the part that was added to you through the benefit I conferred upon you. All right, but with respect to that part, I created it, so you owe me gratitude for it. Now if you understand, if you accept what I am saying here, then moral gratitude is a particular case of philosophical and ontic gratitude. It is not accidental that I use the same term. I claim that the legal foundation is the more general and fundamental one, and the moral foundation is merely a particular case of it. It is only a particular case of someone who did not create me but created only something in me, or part of me. But no matter—regarding that part I owe him. Okay? So the claim—if this is really so—then it means that our obligation toward the Holy One, blessed be He, essentially derives from the fact that He created us. The moment He created us, then… all the questions fall away, because the fact that He created us, the whole world—not getting into that right now—all the claims I made earlier are irrelevant. They are relevant to moral gratitude; they are not relevant to ontic and philosophical gratitude. Now what does it mean that if He created us, we owe Him? It is that same acceptance of the divine that I keep talking about. This acceptance of the divine that I keep talking about, that point you mentioned earlier, or the lack of need to give explanations—if He is God and He commanded, then I must fulfill. Right? That’s how I opened the previous lesson and the beginning of this lesson. Why? It is this concept I am talking about here. Because if He is God, that means we all exist by His power, because of Him; He created us, the world and us. So He is the Master of the house. We are obligated to heed what He says—not because it’s good for us, not because of gratitude, not because He invested in us, not because we didn’t go through the Holocaust, none of that. It has nothing to do with any of that. Rather, because we came from Him. That’s all. The moment we came from Him. Now, this intuition—it may look like some kind of inscrutable decree. Someone who doesn’t accept it doesn’t accept it. I have no way to prove it. What I am trying to show is that this intuition exists—not sure if in everyone, I think so, but certainly in most of us. This is not something absurd that I am inventing now. If you pay attention and examine it, you’ll see that I am articulating feelings that exist within you as well. Therefore I don’t need to convince you; I only need to point out that you can also find this within yourselves. For example, think about children born to parents—the Yemenite children. Their parents gave birth to them and the children were snatched away; that’s it, from the day they left the hospital the children were gone. The parents didn’t invest a penny in them. No time, no effort, no care, nothing. The parents invested nothing in them. But not through their own fault—I’m not talking about abusive parents or neglectful parents, but not through their own fault: their child was kidnapped from them. Does the child owe them honoring parents? I’m not talking about the halakhic question now, I’m talking apart from Jewish law. I think if you asked a normal person on the street, he would tell you yes. Yes—they are his parents. And it’s not their fault that he was taken from them. Again, I’m saying: if they are abusive, then someone may say they lost their right to filial honor because they abused me. Fine. But I am speaking now about non-abusive parents, parents who simply invested nothing at all. Like the Holy One, blessed be He, who in fact invested nothing at all; He just did it like that. Does the child owe gratitude to his parents? I think the answer—the intuition—is yes. Just take the whole controversy over the switched embryos not long ago at Ichilov. What does that mean? It means parents have a right over their child. And that child, if it is their child, then it is their child regardless of who raises it and regardless of anything else. It is biologically their child. They invested nothing in it, but biologically it is their child. Meaning, I think the intuition of all people, or of most people, is that a child’s obligation to parents is not only because they invested so much in him and therefore deserve gratitude in the ordinary, moral sense. That’s true too. But not only that. There is something beyond that: the very fact that you came from them. I’m trying to show you from various angles that this intuition of philosophical gratitude is not some invention, some inscrutable decree. I think everyone can find this intuition within himself. Therefore it’s not—someone can always play dumb and say, who says so? You’re just inventing things here, making up decrees; I don’t accept it. You want me, on that basis, to serve the Holy One, blessed be He? I have no way to persuade him. I would only ask him: aren’t you fooling me? Don’t you also understand, within yourself, that there is such an obligation? Because it is very easy to entrench yourself in a basic assumption and say, I don’t agree with it, end of story. Even if I do agree with it, I can always say I don’t agree with it, because first principles cannot be proven, cannot be justified. But if in truth I do agree with it, then it’s simply an intellectually dishonest argument. In other words, if we all find within ourselves that there is such an obligation, that we intuitively understand that one who was created by someone else is indebted to him, is his possession, belongs to him, is obligated to do what he says—then that is a basis. Even if the parents demand unreasonable things? Fine, that is already another question. But that is exactly the body of the question, because the same is true here. What did we begin with? We began with the idea that we need to keep the commandments because it’s built in, and not because of the claim that these are manufacturer’s instructions. Because we used to say that these are manufacturer’s instructions: if He is the manufacturer and you don’t behave as the instructions say, it simply won’t work; the friction will kill you, I don’t know what. And the proof is that He also announces that whoever does not keep the commandments will suffer such-and-such. So what? So I say there is an element here like what I called manufacturer’s instructions, but not something the Rabbi explains as self-evident. I claim this has nothing to do with manufacturer’s instructions. Leave manufacturer’s instructions to me. If I want to break down, then I’ll break down. What claim do you have against me that I am ruining myself? But that’s reality. The fact is that… No, no—reality doesn’t interest me. What interests me is what I am obligated to do, not what reality is. Like in morality—I spoke about this in the moral context as well—there are evolutionary explanations for why we behave altruistically. Because it helps our survival. But those explanations cannot give validity to morality. They explain the fact of why we behave morally, not the validity of the moral principle. I am speaking here about validity, not about reality, not about actual behavior. So if there is validity, then why do we need to be threatened with all kinds of punishments if we don’t fulfill? Another question; you have objections. But I’m saying: there is an obligation by virtue of the fact that He created us. That is my claim, and that is the basic obligation, because He made us. That is the basic obligation. Afterward one can ask all kinds of questions about why threats are needed—that’s no problem. Just as parents need to threaten a child so that he will comply, even though he is obligated to them. The fact that we are obligated does not yet mean that we will also fulfill that obligation. We need to be threatened so that we fulfill it, but the obligation does not derive from the threats. On the contrary, the threats are justified because there is an obligation even without them. The threats come in order to make sure that we do our duty. That’s all. But I’m asking why there is an obligation. So the obligation is because we came from Him. And I’m saying we see this in copyright. We see it in children whose parents invested nothing in them. In every other context, it seems to me that most people in the world would agree as a simple matter that one who comes from parents is their son. It doesn’t matter that they invested nothing in him, and he also owes them—again, owes them not in the moral sense because they invested in him. He owes them because he came from them; he is their child. They have rights; the child must be returned to them. If it turns out that the embryo was switched, the child must be returned to the parents. Why? After all, the adoptive parents are the ones who invested in the child—it was a girl there, I think. They are the ones who invested in the girl, so after a year you discover that the girl belongs to these parents—return her. Why? They invested nothing in her, and these ones did. Because she is theirs, because biologically she came from them. So we see that in every other context, I think most reasonable human beings would agree that there is such a thing as ontic or philosophical gratitude. So I want to say that with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, it is the same. Religious education in this case does not create an inscrutable decree. It merely helps us understand something that exists in every person. A person who does not come from a religious education may find it easier to deny this intuition, or not apply it with respect to God but only with respect to parents, intellectual property, and the like. But it exists. It is a principle that I think is a basic principle that most people accept, and therefore, from my point of view, that is the good point. Because I have managed to ground the obligation to serve God on some principle accepted by every reasonable person. And therefore—and again, what does it mean to ground? Simply to show you that you also understand that one must serve Him. It’s not an explanation. Now I’m getting back to that point of Shmuel’s from earlier, what you said. The claim really is that there is no explanation and there cannot be an explanation. But there doesn’t need to be an explanation either. Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, commands, then I need to fulfill, because I came from Him. The moment I came from Him, I am obligated to do what He says. That’s the point. And it doesn’t matter whether things are bad for me or good for me or whatever else. Therefore explanations aren’t needed; not that I offered an explanation here. I merely tried to clarify why no explanation is needed. Why this is a principle that everyone understands, and therefore there is no reason at all to look for explanations. And so if someone feels this—someone who doesn’t feel this needs to be convinced that it’s true, if possible. Someone who does feel it has no reason to abandon it just because it seems illogical, because we have no explanation. No—we have no explanation because we don’t need one. This is a basic first assumption that has no need for explanation, and on the contrary, from that assumption all the other explanations emerge. Now I can also understand why I have a moral obligation. I can understand why I have a halakhic obligation, because everything is an obligation to the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. He commanded morality, He commanded Jewish law, and all these things. And from that I can also understand why it is forbidden to murder, and why one needs to give charity, and why one must redeem a firstborn donkey, and why one may not eat pork. Everything comes out of there. But the initial point from which everything comes is that we received it from the Holy One, blessed be He. Everything comes from there, and without that there is nothing. Therefore to demand an explanation for this in terms of moral principles is simply to turn the whole thing upside down. Moral principles are not grounded unless you accept this. So you ask me: what is the moral principle that grounds my obligation to the will of God? That is absurd. Moral principles derive their force from the obligation to the will of God. Without that they have no validity. Therefore this whole line of argument is crooked. Okay. Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi—but I asked already last time too, empirically, let’s leave philosophy aside, empirically, the Rabbi specifically: if, God forbid, our Judaism had been a Judaism in which the entire Torah was the doctrine of the wickedness of Sodom and Gomorrah—murder, commit adultery, abuse, exploit—even worse, our greatest Torah sages were Hitler, Stalin, Ivan the Terrible; our canons were Mein Kampf and so on, God forbid. If that were our Judaism—simply a pure Judaism of wickedness—and now I’m asking the Rabbi specifically: would the Rabbi want to fulfill the service of God of such a God? Since you already asked that, I’ll give you the answer I already gave you. And what I said was that the obligation toward the one who created us exists regardless of what happens and regardless of what He says. But if He tells us wicked things, it may be that because of the conflict I would choose not to obey Him—not because there is no obligation to obey Him, but because my moral obligation would override the obligation to obey Him. That is like what I said earlier about abusive parents. With respect to abusive parents, I have an obligation to my parents even if they are abusive. But if they are abusive, I also have a good reason that overrides the obligation to my parents, and therefore in the end perhaps I will not honor them. But not because their being parents does not grant them the right to honor—it does grant it. It’s just that there are additional considerations that can clash with it. That doesn’t contradict the principled determination that if you came from someone, you are obligated to him. Now that does not mean that automatically everything he says, in every form whatsoever, you will also fulfill. That is another discussion. All right? Now we have to see how bad it is, to what extent, and it may be that there are considerations that would create a conflict for me. By the way, in the case of the Holy One, blessed be He, it is even more problematic, since the morality by virtue of which I would not want to obey Him also comes from Him. So if you depict for me a different kind of God, I am not sure that in such a world morality would have any validity at all, because I cannot derive moral obligation from such a wicked God. So in any case I also cannot, by virtue of moral obligation, refuse to obey Him, because moral obligation in such a world would be devoid of validity. Rabbi, that is why I asked the Rabbi at the empirical level: whether the Rabbi would fulfill even one of the 613 commandments, one of them, out of obligation for its own sake, for the sake of serving God, if God, God forbid, were pure evil from beginning to end. I understand—that’s what you asked. So I said, that question is not empirical; it is a hypothetical question. Why? But I asked it empirically. And I’m answering you that you cannot ask it empirically, because there is no such world. Since in a world in which God is wicked—“a wicked God” is an oxymoron. Exactly, exactly. Rabbi, so we agree then—that is exactly what the Rabbi is saying. So that is the point. It is exactly the only metaphysical distinction: God as the ultimate good, and therefore to say “a wicked God” is like saying “a triangle with four sides.” Period, that’s the whole story. No, that’s not the whole story; it’s not connected to the story at all. Because you are asking me a different question. I’m saying: a God who created me—I am obligated to Him. Now you said: yes, but what if He is wicked? So I said: if He is wicked, it may be that I would still be obligated to Him, but my obligation not to cooperate with wickedness would override my obligation toward Him. That is what I said earlier. And now I added another layer. I said: but a world of that kind cannot really be described. It is a world like a square triangle. There is no such thing. And in such a world you cannot speak to me about moral obligation, because there is no moral obligation that came from a wicked God. That does not mean there is no obligation to do what He said. On the contrary. It means that in such a world you would certainly have to do everything He said, including murdering everyone He said to murder. Why? Because the opposite side of the equation—that I am unwilling to cooperate with moral injustice—would not exist there. Because when there is a wicked God in such a hypothetical world, there are no moral norms. Therefore this is a hypothetical world that cannot exist. It is like asking me what I would do if there were square triangles. There is no such thing. It is a world in which there is no moral obligation, and I also showed on the website that in fact God too is subject to morality. Meaning, there is no such thing as an immoral God; that is an oxymoron. On that I completely agree with the Rabbi. Okay, if we agree, that’s good. Okay, friends, have a peaceful Sabbath. Can I ask? Yes, yes. Regarding all the motives we discussed concerning gratitude: in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), both in the Torah and in the Hebrew Bible generally, the foundation of the Exodus from Egypt appears many times. Not as a specific rationale for commandments—that’s not what I’m talking about right now, say, as in the commandment of fringes—but for example in the Ten Commandments, or in Ezekiel, where the Holy One, blessed be He, found us like a little child and then raised and cared for us. So what’s the question? So it seems there is some additional component here that the Hebrew Bible does refer to as some kind of binding force for observing the commandments. My answer has two parts. First, the verse says, “He made you and established you.” There is also the “established you”; I am not claiming it does not exist. There is the “He made you” and the “He established you,” two reasons. I’m saying that even in a place where there is no “He established you,” the “He made you” still remains. I didn’t say it replaces it. That’s one point. Second, the Exodus from Egypt belongs both to “He made you” and to “He established you.” The Maharal famously says that the Exodus from Egypt is like a fetus—yes, the rabbinic midrash that it is like a fetus that is born. The Jewish people were born in the Exodus from Egypt and were created there. When the Holy One, blessed be He, took us out of Egypt, that was the stage at which the Jewish people were created. So the claim is that the Jewish people were created by the Holy One, blessed be He, and therefore there is here also the dimension of “He made you,” not only “He established you.” Not because He did good things for us, because He brought calamities on Egypt and saved us from their troubles. And that is some dimension that maybe is not universal, basically. It is—yes, unique to the Jewish people, נכון, because we were created from Him. Okay, thank you. I wanted to hear the Rabbi’s response to that component. Okay. Well, we’re already getting close to the end of this whole series. It has already taken, what, about two years it seems to me. There are still—there’ll be one more time or two more times, I assume, so it’ll still take a bit more, but it’s already getting close. All right, have a peaceful Sabbath. Peaceful Sabbath, and happy Purim. Happy Purim, thank you very much.

Faith – Lesson 45

Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The framework of the discussion on religious obligation and the naturalistic fallacy

Ethical facts and religious facts as loaded facts

The absence of justification as part of the axiomatic structure

Religious education, the image of the blind and the sighted, and the experience of obligation

Duties of the Heart and gratitude as the basis of serving God

Rabbi Amital, the Holocaust, and truth in serving God

Critique of Rabbi Amital’s position and the distinction between psychology and philosophy

Logical problems in grounding serving God on gratitude, and circular reasoning

Rabbi Amital’s proposal: faith instead of gratitude, and its meaning as a loaded religious fact

Additional arguments against moral gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He

Ontic gratitude: obligation by virtue of creation and ownership

Nachmanides, ownership through creation, and copyright as an illustration

Gratitude as a legal claim and the parallel to “my property is in your possession”

Obligation to the divine command as a consequence of “He made you,” and why no further explanation is needed

Intuitive examples: parents, the Yemenite children, and embryo mix-ups

Confronting the possibility of an “evil God” and the relation to moral obligation

The Exodus from Egypt as a binding foundation, and an answer regarding its place relative to “He made you” and “He established you”

Full Transcript

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Table of Contents

Summary

General Overview

The framework of the discussion on religious obligation and the naturalistic fallacy

Ethical facts and religious facts as loaded facts

The absence of justification as part of the axiomatic structure

Religious education, the image of the blind and the sighted, and the experience of obligation

Duties of the Heart and gratitude as the basis of serving God

Rabbi Amital, the Holocaust, and truth in serving God

Critique of Rabbi Amital’s position and the distinction between psychology and philosophy

Logical problems in grounding serving God on gratitude, and circular reasoning

Rabbi Amital’s proposal: faith instead of gratitude, and its meaning as a loaded religious fact

Additional arguments against moral gratitude toward the Holy One, blessed be He

Ontic gratitude: obligation by virtue of creation and ownership

Nachmanides, ownership through creation, and copyright as an illustration

Gratitude as a legal claim and the parallel to “my property is in your possession”

Obligation to the divine command as a consequence of “He made you,” and why no further explanation is needed

Intuitive examples: parents, the Yemenite children, and embryo mix-ups

Confronting the possibility of an “evil God” and the relation to moral obligation

The Exodus from Egypt as a binding foundation, and an answer regarding its place relative to “He made you” and “He established you”

Full Transcript

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