What Is a Mitzvah? – Lesson 4

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Basically, a lot of times when we speak in everyday language, what we really mean is to smuggle in another premise—we just don’t say it, because it somehow seems obvious to us. So it’s not correct that if someone raises an argument like that, I’ve caught him—”you’re talking nonsense, go home.” What’s called the principle of charity means that when you deal with a claim, you present it in the best possible way. Because the person opposite you didn’t always formulate exactly and fully what he meant, but he does mean it. Address it substantively. What difference does it make now if he wasn’t precise in wording it? If that’s what he means, fine—we need to discuss that. I’m just saying that you always have to notice that a great many arguments are arguments… someone will argue about that, about the… fine, so now this is where the argument begins: is he right or not? I don’t care, I’m not entering that argument. By the way, fine, so that’s the argument we’re talking about. But first of all, present an argument; after that we’ll see whether I agree with it or don’t agree with it. But if you haven’t presented an argument, then what exactly are we discussing? Understand, someone who presents this argument, sometimes that’s intentional, in my opinion. Someone who presents this argument only on the basis of facts—that once women were not educated, today they are educated, therefore women should be validated for testimony—there’s an interest in presenting it that way. Because if you present it like that, who can argue with you? People don’t disagree about the facts. The arguments are always about the normative premise. That’s where the arguments are. If you don’t put it on the table, then ostensibly someone who isn’t sufficiently skilled, if he’s standing opposite you, is left helpless, as if obviously you’re right. Premises—how can you argue with them? Facts are facts. Okay? In other words, very often this additional premise is the focal point of the issue. Not only is it something that should and ought to be put on the table too—it is the focal point of the issue. Everybody agrees about the facts; that’s not the point. The argument is about this. Put it on the table so we can see what we’re arguing about. And now we can argue; that doesn’t mean we now have to accept it, but now there is an argument, and it can be discussed. I’m coming back to our topic—this was just an example. Basically, what I want to claim is that whenever you justify a norm, or a normative system, or any kind of obligation, there have to be some premises that derive their force from themselves. They aren’t based on something else—some kind of foundational assumptions. When I say that I perform an altruistic act, or I say, “I do the commandment because He said,” “because the Holy One, blessed be He, said”—is that irrational? No, it’s very rational. My foundational premise, which I have no intention of discussing because for me it is self-evident, is that what the Holy One, blessed be He, says should be done. That is the basic norm. Okay? That’s my point of departure. Now whoever disagrees with me can disagree, with complete pleasure, but that’s my view. Okay? And by the way, whoever disagrees with me should know that everything he thinks also rests on foundational assumptions, and he too won’t be able to explain them. It’s not as though someone will manage to present some alternative position that doesn’t require foundational assumptions. There were several heroic attempts like that in the history of philosophy, and they all failed. Descartes’ cogito, Anselm’s ontological argument, and also Descartes’ and Leibniz’s, and others—they are all basically arguments trying to produce a conclusion without premises, just by means of some logical trick. They all fail. It’s impossible. Completing enthymemes. Right, right—I’m not conducting that argument here, I’m giving an example. Obviously if you want to spell things out more, then spell out more points. You can say anything—fine, so he thinks differently from me. Again, when I present an argument, when I present an argument, I’m not coming to explain why you can’t argue with me. I’m presenting my position to you. So first of all, I present a position. That position has to stand up to the rules of logic; that is, I have an argument with premises, and the conclusion follows from my premises. Now you can argue with me; you can say this premise doesn’t seem right to me, that premise does seem right to me, where’s the edge, where are chief rabbis, I don’t know, all kinds of things like that. Fine—this is where the argument begins. But an argument begins after I’ve presented an argument. But someone who presents an “ought” derived from an “is” hasn’t presented an argument. I don’t need to start arguing with him, because he hasn’t presented an argument at all. He hasn’t explained himself even before I ask myself whether I agree with him or not. Okay? Good, so that’s regarding altruistic action. I spoke about the categorical imperative because the categorical imperative is basically the purest implementation or expression of altruistic action. You do it not in order to achieve any result, and surprisingly, in the end that’s the only thing that actually brings results. Yes, that’s what I spoke about with the prisoner’s dilemma last time. Now I just want to complete this matter and move on to the last part of the series. Around this issue there’s another side to the coin. This is the problem called in philosophy weakness of the will. And this problem basically goes like this. Let me present it in a certain form—Donald Davidson presents it this way; he’s an American analytic philosopher, and there is extensive literature on this. He says the simple assumption is that a person wants to do what he thinks is right. You ask a person, what do you want? Regardless of what he does—what do you want? He says: if I think X is right, then that’s what I want to do. Right, I mean in every respect, not דווקא morality; right in a general sense after all considerations. Okay? Second assumption: what I want to do, if there is no impediment, that’s also what I will do. Right? Unless something prevents it, fine, but if nothing prevents it, then what I want to do is what I’ll do. Right? The third assumption is that there are such actions as ones expressing weak will, weakness of the will. What does that mean? There are situations in which I act in a way that I myself think is not right. These are called actions of weak will. What does that mean? My will was weak. Yes, we all know that feeling—I wasn’t strong enough, I failed. I know it’s not right; it’s not that I thought it was right, but my will was weak. My impulse overcame me. What can I do? “The yeast in the dough hinders”—okay? The evil inclination. Now the assumption is that there is such a thing. These three assumptions together form a contradictory system. The three of them don’t fit together. Right? Because if everything I think is right is what I want, and everything I want, in the absence of an impediment, I also do—then how can it be that I did something I don’t think is right? What? No—if there’s an impediment, then it’s not that I did something I think is not right, but rather I was coerced. The impediment caused me to do it; it has nothing to do with me. Weak will, an action of weak will, is not an action due to an impediment. An action of weak will is an action for which I am to blame. After all, we repent for the fact that we weren’t strong enough, that we failed, right? Now if we were coerced, if something overpowered us, an irresistible impulse, I don’t know exactly what—there’s nothing to repent for, I was coerced. By definition, an action of weak will is not an action due to an external impediment. It is an action for which I bear responsibility. I have explanations, but not justifications, as I said earlier. I have explanations for why—the evil inclination was strong—but that’s not a justification. Because if it were also a justification, then it would mean I was coerced; the evil inclination simply dictated the matter to me—what do you want from me? Like in court, when there’s an irresistible impulse, a person has no criminal responsibility for it. They may hospitalize him, send him for treatment, I don’t know, protect themselves from him because he’s dangerous—but he has no criminal responsibility, right? He isn’t responsible for his actions. Okay? When we speak about a person who sinned—what are called actions of weakness of the will, sin, what in Jewish law or in the Torah is called a sin or a transgression—that is basically an action of weak will. Okay? Now what is called there a sin is basically an action in which—notice what has to be true—I did something I knew was not right. Even at the time I did it. Because if at the time I didn’t know it was wrong and only now I think it was wrong, then again I have nothing to repent for. I did what I thought was right then. Today I think differently; today I would behave differently. What is there to repent for regarding what happened then? Rather, already then I knew it was not right. We all know this; it happens, right? And nevertheless we fail, and that is what is called sin. Not under coercion, but I have explanations and not justifications. Okay? Mitigating circumstances, if you like—explanations but not justifications. As in the evolutionary context, the evolutionary context gives me arguments for coercion, yes, for why I do it, but it is not a justification for why I ought to do it in the positive sense. So basically Donald Davidson says: these three assumptions, each one of them sounds very reasonable to us, but all three together don’t fit. Again, I’ll repeat the three. What I think is right is what I want to do. What I want to do, in the absence of an impediment, is what I’ll do—that’s the second assumption. The third assumption: there are situations in which I do something I do not think is right. Actions of weak will exist. There are transgressions in the world, in short, yes? An existential statement: there are transgressions in the world. Meaning there is something I cannot withstand. It doesn’t matter whether it’s internal or external. It can be someone with a gun; it can be an internal impulse. That doesn’t matter. As long as it isn’t in my hands, it’s not my decision but something forced upon me—what can I do. It can be a situation where I have some impulse, or someone with a gun, or something, and I do something I didn’t mean to do. “The Persians forced him to eat matzah”—we talked about that in the morning topics / passage, or “they hanged him until he sold”; I spoke about the connection between those two things. Those are situations in which someone forces me to do something I perhaps don’t want to do. Fine, but he’s forcing me. So that’s not a transgression for which I would repent. A transgression for which I repent is a transgression rooted in weak will. I did it because my impulse was strong and I didn’t manage to cope with it. What does “I didn’t manage” mean? I didn’t manage because I was coerced? Then there’s no need to repent. I didn’t manage because I wasn’t strong enough, but I could have? Well then why didn’t you do it? After all, you didn’t want it? So what is it? You did want it—don’t talk nonsense. That is basically what Donald Davidson says. What? So I’m saying, if he can’t cope, then he’s coerced. If he can cope, then that’s what he wanted. Same thing. So if he could, then that’s what he wanted. Let’s take the example of dieting, okay? Dieting—something close to all of us, beyond drugs and all the extreme examples. A person decides to go on a diet, and then, naturally, a proper whipped-cream cake appears before him—or carrot cake, for anyone who doesn’t want to drool—and he doesn’t withstand the test and he eats. Okay, now he says to himself, wow, I was weak, I should have overcome it. There are always regrets afterward. In retrospect we’re always heroes and always know what was right, but at that moment it’s a bit less strong. Yes, at that moment it’s a bit less strong, but at the moment when we ate, it’s not that we didn’t think it was wrong. It was clear to us even while doing it that it was wrong to eat. We play manipulations on ourselves, never mind, but it was clear. So then afterward we have—well, “the yeast in the dough hinders,” it was strong. In short, what does Donald Davidson say? He says: look, what are you telling me? You’re telling me that you ate it because you really wanted to eat it, and that overpowered your desire to diet. Fine. That’s a sign you wanted to eat it. What do you mean you didn’t want to? You wanted to eat it, because dieting is only one component of your desire; you also have a desire to enjoy yourself. Now in the bottom line, what you want to do is the total weighting of all desires together. I said not only the proper in the moral or religious sense or something—take all the considerations. In the very end, if you did it, then that’s what you wanted. Don’t tell me you did something you didn’t want. Okay? If you wanted, then what’s the problem? What am I repenting for? If now I don’t want, then now I don’t want—but then I did want. What? There’s something here that at first glance may sound like a kind of hair-splitting, but this is a very hard question. A very hard question. I don’t know a convincing answer to it, and this question fills shelves in philosophy. I’ll tell you what I think might be an answer—and I’ll stop halfway and say already: I’m not completely settled on this. I think the claim is the following. You mentioned addiction to drugs, or any addiction, addiction to anything, addiction to sugar. When a person sins and does something he does not think is right, and perhaps also does not want… to do it, this usually doesn’t happen in a frontal collision. It’s not: I don’t want to do it and nevertheless I decided to do it, right? It never happens like that. Rather, it seems to us like some kind of surrender. My will was weak, it wasn’t strong enough, I fell. Okay, and afterward I regret it, but even during it I understand that it isn’t right, I don’t want to do it, but I fell. On the one hand. On the other hand, it can’t be that this is deterministic, that it’s forced on me, because then it isn’t a transgression. I have nothing to repent for in such a case; it was forced on me, right? Meaning, I had the possibility of standing firm, but I didn’t. Then Donald Davidson asks: if you had the possibility, then why didn’t you stand firm? Because you didn’t want to. So in practice you did what you wanted. Don’t deceive yourself or me. Okay. Now the claim I want to make is that as a matter of fact, human beings are complex creatures. As a matter of fact, people sometimes enter a mode in which they do not make decisions, they do not choose. They switch off the choice switch. And then they are basically pulled along by urges, or whatever, such-and-such drives. Think of it as a coachman driving horses. Usually he directs them, signals to them where to go and where not to go. At some stage he decides to fall asleep, and the horses take him wherever they decide. If in the end he arrives and runs someone over, is he guilty? The horses took him there—what do you want from him? Yes, but why did you fall asleep? “Why are you sleeping? Arise, call upon your God.” You are guilty for having fallen asleep. If you had simply fallen asleep and nothing happened, fine. But if you fell asleep and afterward something happened, then true, what happened was not your fault directly, but the falling asleep imposes responsibility on you for what happened afterward. Now I use this parable to define the concept of sin in general. When we sin, many times we find for ourselves a lot of explanations for why it’s really right to do it. And deep down inside we understand that it isn’t right. But we find all kinds of explanations for ourselves. And those explanations, in a certain sense, say: okay, so I know it isn’t right; after all, deep down inside I push inward, deep deep down, the fact that I know it isn’t right—and I fall asleep. I let the business take me. The business, of course, is my urges, not necessarily things from outside. The horses are the parable for what is happening inside me. And they take me. Then I run someone over—I do something I didn’t want to do. But when I do it, I’m not really doing something I don’t want. The ones doing it are my urges. Otherwise, if I were doing it, I wouldn’t be doing something I don’t want, according to the first two assumptions, right? Rather, I decided to fall asleep, and I know that this thing will impose some kind of responsibility on me. It’s a device by which I manage to fool myself in some way. So I let go of the reins, and whoosh—I suddenly find myself doing something. Oy, why did I let go of the reins, what a mistake, and my impulse overcame me, and so on. But your impulse overcame you not in the sense that it made you do something you don’t want. A person does not do something he doesn’t want. A person can, by sophistication, trick himself, cause himself to do something he knows is not right indirectly. He says, okay, I’m falling asleep, I know it may be that the horses will take me to do all sorts of things. I’m falling asleep; I don’t know what happens, we’ll see afterward. And afterward we see. Okay. What? Yes, exactly something like that. To put himself into a state where he knows he may do the transgression, but he sort of lives with a feeling that he isn’t responsible for the matter. Fine, that’s already the next step. I’m talking first of all about how to define an action of weak will. I think an action of weak will is always an action in which, while you are doing it, deep inside you understand that it isn’t okay, that it isn’t what you want to do. But you are not in a state in which you do what you understand. You simply switch off the control between what you understand and what you do. So what is the responsibility? The responsibility is for the switching off. For the fact that you did not choose. Fine, but he is still responsible in some sense for the fact that he is in that state. Like a person who got drunk and afterward drove a car and ran someone over. Is he guilty? He was drunk. He is guilty for putting himself into a state of drunkenness. You know you’re going to drive—don’t get drunk. Okay. But when he was driving, you ask yourself: what, you ran him over? After all, you know it’s not right to run someone over. Even when he ran him over he knew it wasn’t right to run someone over. Fine, but he was not in control in a way that enabled him to direct what he was doing according to what he thought was proper. So his responsibility is for the fact that he let go of the reins of control, that he stopped being a chooser. That is the point. Or in other words: sin—the meaning of sin—is basically when you do not do things under the control of what you decided to do, when your action is not autonomous. When your action is not autonomous, that is sin—even if you are doing a commandment. Because basically, the one who did the commandment wasn’t you. The one who did the commandment was the urges, the interests, the automatic mechanism, the horses. It just so happened that in this case the horses took you to give charity. Okay, so what? But the horses gave charity, not you. Meaning in the final analysis, charity is your act only if you do it while in control, when you decide what you’re doing. And therefore, in a certain sense, an altruistic action can be done only in a state in which I am in an altruistic mode—that is, in a mode where my choice directs or determines what I do. And sometimes I switch off that mode, even though I know indirectly that this may lead to actions I do not want to do. But I will not enter a state where I do an action I do not want to do—that doesn’t happen. Even the Nazis, yes, in the stories they always say they got drunk before they shot people. Why? Because they had some inner feeling that it wasn’t okay; they couldn’t live with it. So they put themselves into a state in which they would manage to go along with the whole thing without letting their inner understanding manage them. Okay? And why go as far as the Nazis? We have new Nazis. We have, yes, the people of October 7—they were full of drugs. They took drugs. Why did they take drugs? Because if they hadn’t taken drugs, I assume—and this is judging them favorably—if they hadn’t taken drugs, it would also have been hard for them to do what they did. Fine, that doesn’t remove responsibility from them. You shouldn’t have taken drugs. Meaning, it doesn’t remove their responsibility. But even they, in the end, were in a state where they did not do something they didn’t want. About that you can argue. Is there someone who says that all the… So I’m saying: if you think that all the values we advocate, believe in, and are committed to are things that are overall just imprinted in us for various reasons, then fine—you’re a determinist. But if you believe in altruistic action, then you say no, values are something I decide to act by. Decide where you stand, what your position is. I’m talking about an altruistic position. Okay. I didn’t say you can decide everything. But there is a window—what Rabbi Dessler calls, yes, the window of choice—or there is a certain margin within which you can maneuver. And there you can fall or not fall. Usually when you fall, you are actually closing the shutters. You don’t really fall there, but closing the shutters is forbidden. Meaning, you know you can fall. Okay, so I think that… Now, why do I say this isn’t an answer I’m fully satisfied with? Because someone can come and ask the question of weakness of the will about the very decision to switch off the switch itself. Why did you decide to switch off the switch? Because you wanted to. Ah, so switching off the switch is now the action you performed even though you didn’t want to—and then the question returns: so how will you explain switching off the switch? I switched off another switch because of which now I can switch off this switch without control. Meaning, it goes into an infinite loop. Okay. Now if that’s the point, then the discussion doesn’t begin at all. Then nobody has any choice; everyone dies as he was born and acts that way, whatever. So I’m talking about this narrowing. Whoever is in the window where you can choose—I don’t care—then in every culture, in your culture, when you are inside the window in which in your culture you have choice, the question is whether you can fall there. And I claim yes. The question is how, after all, there is no weakness of will? Through this mechanism. This can vary from person to person, between different cultures, that’s all fine, it’s unrelated, that’s another discussion. So in the end, if I return to our subject, essentially what we discover is that the definition of the concept of commandment, from which I began, is actually something very fundamental—not only in the sense of the object, but also in the sense of the person. What is demanded of us? Where do we fall, and how can we succeed? We fall when we switch off the… let go of the reins, switch off the switch. How can we succeed? Keep the switch on. Don’t allow ourselves to switch off the switch. As long as we are in control, we will usually do what we want to do, what we believe in. This is a condition for observing the commandments; it is not the reason for the commandments. I don’t know—there are people who observe commandments and still also commit transgressions. I know one or two such people. Maybe yes, maybe no, never mind, but in principle a person can sin even if he trains the muscle. When they are in a situation where they have one that can’t be reversed

[Speaker C] Backward, that’s already something…

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, a person can get himself into all kinds of situations; sometimes it’s… So the point, what I want to say, and this already really brings us into something current, and then I’ll come back to finish the series—but it brings us into current matters, current meaning Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, not the real current events, okay. So the claim I actually want to make is that Rosh Hashanah is the coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He. Right? That’s the meaning of… You don’t do repentance on Rosh Hashanah; Rosh Hashanah is the coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He. What does it mean, the coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He? The Holy One, blessed be He, is King—what does it mean that He is King? Or God, in other language, King of the universe—it means that you have to do what He says. What He says, I do, right? That’s called the coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He. The coronation of the Holy One, blessed be He, really means creating this unconditional commitment that whatever He says, I do. That is the condition for your being someone who observes commandments; meaning, if you don’t do that, if you’re not in that “mode,” then you have no commandments. Even if you did them, it’s not a commandment. You performed an act, but that act is not a commandment in the person. Okay? In the object it’s a commandment, but in the person there is no fulfillment of a commandment here. Therefore I think Rosh Hashanah can open the Ten Days of Repentance. During the Ten Days of Repentance we’re supposed to repent. What does it mean to repent? To repent means to return to being a chooser. Right? If sins mean that I turned off the switch of choice, then to repent means to make sure the switch stays on and to try not to turn it off afterward. Therefore the Ten Days of Repentance begin on Rosh Hashanah. On Rosh Hashanah, when you say, okay, really the whole basis for all of this is my being in control. My being in control means that I do what I think. What do I think? That what the Holy One, blessed be He, said should be done, because He is King, okay? Or God—acceptance of God, what we called it in previous classes. Okay? That is supposed to be built on Rosh Hashanah. From there onward, the Ten Days of Repentance are supposed to build the implementation. Okay, so now I build myself as a choosing person, and then I know that if the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, and I am a choosing person, then that is also what will happen. Okay? This is really a process that builds itself, and everything starts from the question: what is a commandment? A commandment is really responding to a command. Responding to a command is an altruistic act. An altruistic act means an act done by the power of choice—that is, I am in a state where I do what I think is right. Okay? That’s the chain. Now I build that what I think is right—this is on Rosh Hashanah—is that what the Holy One, blessed be He, said should be done. During the Ten Days of Repentance I’m supposed to build that what I think is right is also what I will do, because I’m supposed to return to being a chooser. That is called repenting, meaning not getting into a situation where the horses carry me away, stopping the dimming of choice, and then I can come out of the Ten Days of Repentance properly. That is really the meaning of the Ten Days of Repentance; that’s the, let’s call it, current comment from this whole move—but only in parentheses.

Maybe I’ll finish the parentheses with one more point. Maimonides in the Laws of Repentance devotes two chapters, chapters 5 and 6, to the matter of choice. Choice is a great principle, and choice, knowledge and choice, and all his discussions in those two chapters. Why isn’t this in the Laws of Grace after Meals? Or I don’t know, the Laws of Honoring Parents? The Laws of Sabbath observance? Everywhere a person needs to choose to do the good, right? So what… why is his discussion of choice specifically in the Laws of Repentance? And the answer to that is—the answer to that is, the answer, not the…—that in every other halakhic context, choice is the infrastructure that enables me to fulfill the commandment or not to transgress the prohibition, on the Sabbath or with forbidden foods, honoring parents, and the like. In repentance, sorry, choice is not the infrastructure that enables me to repent. To repent means to be a chooser. That is what it means to repent; there is nothing there besides that. To repent is to be… meaning the concept of choice is not some side concept in the Laws of Repentance; it is the Laws of Repentance. The Laws of Repentance mean returning to being a chooser—that’s what the Laws of Repentance are. Therefore it is located here. Obviously you also need to choose to recite Grace after Meals, or observe the Sabbath, or honor parents, so of course choice is required as infrastructure, as a condition, in all the other commandments and prohibitions too. But here it’s not infrastructure; here it’s the thing itself. To repent is to return to being a chooser. Being a chooser is called the complete state that we want to reach through repentance. Right.

But these are topics I spoke about in previous years; you can look. If you want, I’ll send it to you; I also have an article about this in writing, on two moves of repentance, small repentance and great repentance. What? No, first of all, being a chooser. Stage two usually. At the stage where you are already choosing, you choose the good. Usually when you choose evil, that’s a state where you’re not really choosing; you let go of the reins. That’s exactly the point. And obviously you need to choose the good. But your failure usually isn’t in your conception of what is good. You know what is good. That’s not the point. That’s not what you need to repent for. The failure is in the question whether you do what you think is good—weakness of will. And if someone thought it was good to murder, then they chose to murder? No, they chose the good in their view, but they were choosers. They were people who choose. You said they were choosers. If not, then not. You told me, no, they chose it because in their opinion that was what was good. Fine; if you say they chose, then so too they really were choosers. If they didn’t choose, fine, that’s a different story; then they didn’t choose, that’s deterioration. Anyone who chooses what he thinks—that is positive. First of all he is a choosing person. If he thinks mistaken things or evil things, that’s a problem; you should try to persuade him.

You know, I also talked about this in one of the previous years: when today we speak in our language about someone “becoming religious,” that is not the penitent of the Sages. It’s more or less the opposite of the penitent of the Sages. Someone “becoming religious” today is someone who changes his worldview. He was secular and he became religious; he thought he didn’t need to keep commandments and now he thinks he does. The penitent of the Sages is exactly the opposite—not the opposite, but someone who, when he committed the transgression, knew it was forbidden. He “returns,” meaning he returns to being a chooser. That is the original penitent. What today is called “becoming religious” is someone who changes his worldview. He does not need to repent for anything he did in the past. Because what he did in the past he did because that really was what he thought. And it’s simply not the same thing, okay?

That has all sorts of implications. For example, if I’m educating a student or a child or something like that, and he goes off in a way I thought was not correct—he abandoned commitment to Torah and commandments, for example. Okay? Usually we see that as a failure. In a certain sense that may also be true. But there’s also an aspect of it that is a success. It’s a success because he doesn’t continue in the groove we put him into automatically, but rather makes decisions himself, assuming that’s the result of a decision. Sometimes you just turn off the switch. But if it’s a decision—he came to the conclusion that he doesn’t think it’s correct. Fine, so he goes down that path. I think he is mistaken, but if he chose to go down that path, then first of all I succeeded. I created a student who is a choosing person, he decides. Now I need to try to persuade him that he should not be a penitent but rather become religious in today’s terms—that he should adopt the correct path, that he should be that kind of chooser who chooses the right things. In that sense it really is not a success. But there’s another dimension here that is a success. There is something there that in my view is much more successful than someone who continues by inertia on a path because that’s his comfort zone, and it’s comfortable there and pleasant there. Fine, anything can be. Being a chooser is risky. So what, you want to turn off choice and have him do what you programmed him to do? No. Better that they choose, and choose with the risks that they may also choose something I don’t think is right. But still they need to choose. And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had wanted us to perform a set of actions, He wouldn’t have given us choice. He would have programmed us to do what He wanted us to do. Why does He give us choice? Because He doesn’t want us to do the acts; He wants us to choose to do the acts. Okay? If someone were to offer me today: come, I’ll hypnotize you, and from now on you’ll do only commandments and won’t fail in any prohibition, you’ll be a perfect person—I would not agree. No, and you also don’t need to agree. Not that I’ll fail, but you don’t need to agree. Why not? Because the goal is not a set of acts, to do or not to do. That set is what is defined in the object as commandments or prohibitions. But the goal is to do commandments also in the person. Meaning, to be someone who decides to do the commandment. It has to be defined as a commandment in the object, but the person has to decide to do it. Only then is there fulfillment of a commandment in the person. Okay, that is the meaning.

Okay, so I want to finish with one more comment about commandments in the object, something of which I already mentioned, if I remember correctly, in the first class. I have—I’ll maybe send it, where should I actually send it. On WhatsApp, where the recordings go up, in the general WhatsApp of the class where the recordings go up, I’ll maybe add links to places where one can read a bit more, where I expanded more on the topics that came up here. I once wrote two columns on my website on the question what a commandment is, which is really our topic. And there I aimed at what a commandment is in the object, not in the person. Really until now I’ve finished what a commandment is in the person. Right? The focus of what I’ve done until now was the intention—how the fulfiller of the commandment is supposed to act. Okay? Meaning the question is, what is the commandment—what is defined as a commandment in the object—and there comes to be some interplay between them, the seam between them, yes? How they relate to one another. There is a very delicate dance between these two aspects, and therefore it’s good to close this little series with that.

There is some article—you’ll see afterward when I send the link—you’ll see a reference by a Jew named Rabbi Menachem Navot, I don’t know if you know him, actually an interesting fellow, very intelligent, who writes various articles in thought, also philosophy, also Jewish law, on all sorts of topics. An interesting man. I really do appreciate the things he writes, even though on most things we disagree. And in his article he wanted to make the following claim. He basically brought there some rabbi who demanded that one be careful to intend to fulfill the obligation of the commandment of hearing the shofar—yes, this connects to the morning classes—and he was very uncomfortable with that. He didn’t agree. He claims that intending to fulfill the obligation of the commandment of hearing the shofar lowers the commandment. It turns it into something degraded, something cheap. Why? So he says, basically, that intention of this kind introduces an artificial component into the commandment. He is basically saying: you should want, I don’t know, to be carried by the commandment of hearing the shofar toward the goals, I don’t know, that it takes you toward. And the moment you do it in this technical way, just in order to fulfill an obligation, some sort of Litvak thing, then it diminishes the significance of the matter. He also comments there, within this—and this is really the main point I discussed—that someone who intends to fulfill an obligation, he says, assumes that there is such an objective thing as a commandment, what I earlier called a commandment in the object, and that you need to tune yourself to it. But he really argues that there is no such thing as a commandment in the object; there is only a commandment in the person. Meaning, if you are serving God, then you are serving God. That is the fact. You don’t need to make artificial intentions in order to define something as a commandment. If that isn’t there, then there is nothing. Meaning, there is nothing in a commandment beyond the service of God within it. Okay? There is no such thing as the object-status of a commandment.

I’ll maybe bring the example I gave in the first class, and that will sharpen this a bit more, because it’s the same dispute, a similar dispute, that took place there among the later authorities. The Minchat Chinukh brings the Tosafot in Sukkah 9, which asks why one needs a source to disqualify a stolen sukkah. It should follow from the fact that this is a commandment that comes through a transgression. So he says, Tosafot answers what it answers. The Minchat Chinukh says that if we were to disqualify it by the rule of a commandment that comes through a transgression, then someone who ate in a stolen sukkah did not actually eat outside a sukkah. He did not nullify the positive commandment of sukkah. He ate in a sukkah—a valid sukkah. His commandment was not accepted favorably. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not want such a commandment. Fine? Or in other words, the object of the commandment of sukkah exists here. Yes, in practice there was a commandment here. As for the act of the person, the Holy One, blessed be He, did not put a check mark next to the act of the person. Okay? Because it’s not a commandment—you won’t receive reward for it, let’s put it that way, okay? It’s not really an act of commandment from your standpoint, even though objectively it is a commandment. Do you see the distinction? A very Lithuanian distinction, right? Meaning, there is some objective state called a commandment independent of me. It’s an objective definition; in a certain sense it’s a fact. Okay? Now I can decide subjectively how I relate to that thing, or whether it is credited to me or not credited to me, whether I performed a commandment, whether it has religious value, whether it has no religious value—but first of all there is the fact, the objective matter of whether a commandment took place here or not.

Now the later authorities do not accept what the Minchat Chinukh said; really all of them like some Greek chorus disagree with him. Almost no one agrees with him. There is no such thing. Meaning, if the commandment was not accepted favorably, then there is no commandment here. And in certain senses this is a bit similar to what Rabbi Navot says. There is no such thing as the object-status of a commandment. What you do is the commandment. The concept of commandment has no objective existence. The concept of commandment is your way of serving God. Okay? Now he says more than that. He says that too; he says even more than that, Navot does. He says one could still have said, fine, so therefore it’s terribly important to intend to fulfill the obligation. Because that is really the meaning of a commandment—my service of God when I do this act. Not the act in itself. And on the contrary, apparently from his words the opposite conclusion emerges from what he is trying to derive. So it would come out that intention is much more important than the act. The commandment itself has some content of its own. Not the physical doing, but it has some content; it comes to achieve something. That is what you should focus on, not on the formal intention to fulfill an obligation. That is what he means to say. But, he says, a formal intention to fulfill an obligation is like some robot, doing it as part of your service of God. And this goes against the entire move I followed throughout this whole series. Because in this series I really wanted to show that there is such a thing as the object-status of a commandment. A commandment is an objective thing. You can of course receive credit for it, let’s call it that; there can be fulfillment of a commandment in the person if you intend to fulfill the obligation. But if you do it because you don’t want to go through a red light because it’s dangerous, or because it brings some spiritual benefit or another, that is not a commandment—or at least not a commandment for its own sake. Okay? His ideal model, in my opinion, can at most be a second story, but it has no meaning whatsoever without a first story underneath. And the first story underneath says: I do this because it is a commandment, because I have to fulfill an obligation—an altruistic act. Okay? And the intention to fulfill an obligation is really the meaning of an altruistic act.

Just to tie things together—I said I would tie these two fields together—commandments require intention means turning the act into an altruistic act. Why am I doing it? In order to fulfill an obligation, because there is a command. I’m not doing it for any other reason, including good and worthy reasons, great benefits. Maimonides says that hearing the shofar has an allusion in it: “Awake from your evil ways,” it doesn’t matter, “Awake from your evil ways and improve your deeds,” and so on. So that’s fine, that’s the allusion in the matter. Is that what I… is that the essence of the commandment of shofar? That’s a nice sermon for a sheva berakhot. The essence of the commandment of shofar is to intend to fulfill the obligation. That is the essence of the commandment of shofar. That does not contradict it, but putting that in the center does contradict it. Because if you put it on the second story, and I intend to fulfill the obligation, and besides that I have all kinds of thoughts of repentance and everything—excellent, second story, third story, hundred-and-nineteenth story. But on the first story you have to intend to fulfill the obligation. That is the basic meaning of a commandment.

[Speaker B] I heard that in the Haggadah, about hearing the shofar, where it says there, is that what it is?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly, there is an allusion in it; that is not the essence of the commandment. Exactly. No, so as I said, there’s no problem. In the initial foundation, you are supposed to do it as an altruistic act. After that there can also be all kinds of benefits, and you can intend all of it, fine—like in fulfilling a commandment, we talked about fulfilling a commandment out of love or fear as opposed to fulfilling a commandment for its own sake. That doesn’t mean you aren’t supposed to love God; it also doesn’t mean you aren’t supposed to do the commandment out of love. Out of love, even. Also, even that. But first of all you need to do it because you are obligated, because there is a command. And the indication is in the place where one day you wake up without any love for the Holy One, blessed be He. Fine? Will you still do it? If yes, then there’s no problem even when you do it out of love. Like giving charity—I brought all sorts of examples for that. Yes, he says it’s harmful. Now I asked him how he explains there that commandments require intention. He says commandments require intention comes to exclude absent-minded involvement. That’s nonsense. There are explicit topics in the Talmud showing that this is not true. Obviously. In the Talmud itself it says that even according to the one who says commandments do not require intention, he agrees that one who is merely occupied absent-mindedly has not fulfilled his obligation. Right, that’s what the Talmud says. Someone who thinks this is the sound of a donkey and not the sound of a shofar—then he is not like someone who blows just for music. Rava says that one who blows for music has fulfilled it, because commandments do not require intention. But if he thinks it is the sound of a donkey and not the sound of a shofar, then he has not fulfilled it because he is merely occupied absent-mindedly. So clearly, whether commandments require intention or do not require intention or do require intention—that discussion is not on the plane of absent-minded involvement. It is on the plane of intention. Fine, I had more arguments about this; you can see a bit in… That is his claim. His claim is that intention comes to exclude your being in the category of absent-minded involvement. I say: first of all there is proof from the Talmud against him, but beyond the proof from the Talmud, I say there is here, in my opinion, an incorrect conception of the concept of commandment. That is why it connects to our series. Otherwise it connects to the morning series in the aspect of commandments requiring intention. But here, how does it connect to our series? It connects to our series because I think the correct understanding of what a commandment is, is a Lithuanian understanding. Meaning, a commandment is because one fulfills what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded.

By the way, I also spoke about this in the morning in one of the previous classes on commandments requiring intention. I said that Rashi’s view can be—at least in its extreme formulation—that there is only one commandment in the Torah: to fulfill what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded. That’s it. All the rest is “the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” Meaning, all the rest consists of the various commandments that He commanded, and therefore you need to fulfill them. It’s like with “do not deviate,” where there is a general obligation to heed the voice of the Sages. When they commanded not to eat poultry with milk, when they commanded to light Hanukkah candles, when they commanded all sorts of things, then I have to listen to them—but that is not many rabbinic commandments. There is only one rabbinic commandment: “do not deviate.” A prohibition and a positive commandment, doesn’t matter, but only one pair. Okay? All the rest are different implementations of that one commandment. So according to Rashi, the conception on the Torah level is also the same thing. On the Torah level there is really only one commandment: to obey the Holy One, blessed be He, just as one obeys the Sages. And there are various commands that the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded. Fine, so you have to do them because there is an obligation to obey the Holy One, blessed be He—but really this is that commandment. You understand that if that is the commandment, then it is simply the exact opposite of what Navot writes here. Right? The essence of a commandment is to intend to fulfill an obligation. Everything else is bonuses, second story, third, fourth. But in every fulfillment of a commandment, that is the commandment—not that he does it once and then moves on to do other things. Every fulfillment of a commandment first of all has this thing.

No, no, everything is fine; that’s why I said. He is speaking on a plane beyond the question of the object-status of the commandment, which gets blurred for him. He is speaking about the question of the content, what I called the benefit of the commandment, the essence of the commandment versus the command within it. Fine? Now the claim I added—I mentioned the one who says, “This coin is for charity so that my son may live.” I mentioned that Talmudic passage, right? There it appears that he, yes, because it says, “behold this is a completely righteous person.” “Completely righteous” means this is a complete commandment, not a commandment not for its own sake. So many learn from here—there is an article by Rabbi Ariel Finkelstein on this matter—he wants, meaning there are several, he brings various commentators who want to claim that in commandments between a person and his fellow, intention is not needed. According to everyone. Even according to the one who says commandments require intention, with commandments between a person and his fellow no intention is needed. Because, look, the Talmud says: one who says, “This coin is for charity so that my son may live,” that’s like someone blowing for music or something like that, and yet he is a completely righteous person. But that is not correct, because when he gives this coin to charity, he gives it in order to fulfill the commandment of charity. His motivation for why he fulfills the commandment of charity is because he wants the reward, or because he wants his son to live. But for that he needs to perform a commandment in order to receive reward. How does one perform the commandment? One does it in order to fulfill the obligation. That is a different plane of relation; it is not the same thing. These are very fine distinctions, and they have many implications that various halakhic decisors and commentators derive, and because they do not make these fine distinctions, in my opinion they err. But it is simply not true; it is not the same thing.

Now I want to show the alternative perhaps in a more unequivocal way. So first of all I mentioned the Minchat Chinukh. I actually identify very much with the Minchat Chinukh. I think there is such a thing as the object-status of the commandment of sukkah. Even though I did not fulfill the commandment of sukkah—fulfillment in the person I don’t have—I still did not eat outside a sukkah. Fine? Another example: there is Nachmanides regarding the laws of prayer, with his dispute with Maimonides. Maimonides says that the commandment of prayer is Torah-level, a positive commandment is Torah-level, “and to serve Him with all your heart”—what is service of the heart? This is prayer. And Nachmanides disputes him; he shows that prayer is rabbinic, proves it from various places. And within his words he says—wait, I brought it here—ah, here. Well, not exactly, I’ll read it to you: “And although this could be so even without the reason, one may add further: according to Maimonides, the obligation of prayer and its commandment are from the Torah, and even according to those who disagree with Maimonides”—that is, Nachmanides, right?—“that is only regarding its obligation, but its fulfillment and essence are, according to everyone, by Torah law.” So Nachmanides says the commandment of prayer is a rabbinic commandment. Rabbi Chaim, in the laws of prayer, so he said, chapter 4, law 1, so he said that even according to Nachmanides, who says the commandment of prayer is rabbinic, there is fulfillment, there is a concept—prayer is a Torah-level concept. Someone who prayed has prayer on the plane—it is called prayer on the Torah level. The obligation to pray is rabbinic, but the concept of prayer as such is a concept that exists also on the Torah level, and this has various implications. This is very similar to the Minchat Chinukh. You see? Meaning, there can be a state where you have no fulfillment in the sense of the person—you did not fulfill a commandment because you are not commanded—but that does not mean that the act in itself, the object-status of the act, is not the object-status of a commandment. These are two different things.

I’ll maybe take an opposite example. What about women who fulfill time-bound positive commandments? According to most opinions, women can; there is no prohibition of adding to the commandments here, and it is even fitting that they do it. There is a dispute whether they may even recite the blessing, but certainly they may perform it. To perform it—almost everyone agrees that they can perform time-bound positive commandments. Now generally people relate to this as though women perform them as optional positive commandments. What does that mean? It means: they have a positive commandment, but they are not obligated in it. If they did not do it, they have no transgression, no nullification of a positive commandment. Men have to do it; if they did not do it, they have nullified a positive commandment. For women, if they did it they have a commandment; if they did not do it they have not nullified a positive commandment. This is called a commandment, an optional positive commandment. I think that is incorrect. I do not agree with that. It seems to me that it is more correct to say that they performed a good deed, women—a deed of value, not “good deed” in the moral sense, but a deed of value. But a commandment—not even an optional commandment do they have, because they were not commanded. Women were not commanded; the command did not address them. There is no such thing as a commandment without a command. There is no such thing. The object-status of the commandment does not exist, because the command constitutes the object-status of the commandment. The command is not only the motivation of the person—that because of the command he performs the commandment and then has an act of commandment in the person. The command also defines what a commandment is, and if there is no command, you cannot say this is an optional positive commandment. This is not a positive commandment at all. You can say this is a deed of value, that perhaps they achieve the spiritual results that such acts achieve. Everything is fine. But they did not perform a commandment, because without a command there is no commandment. And that is really the claim. Okay? An optional positive commandment is a commandment that has to appear in the Torah, where this matter exists—only there is no nullification of a positive commandment. But for there to be a positive commandment if you fulfill it, that has to appear in the Torah. Not every good deed is a commandment.

No, no matter. They learn from where they learn that women are exempt from time-bound positive commandments—two verses, three verses, a Talmudic passage in Kiddushin. It’s not written, and they derive it through interpretation—what difference does it make? They derive it by interpretation. If you’re a Sadducee, then the positive commandment is obligatory for women, not optional—it’s obligatory, everyone has to sit in the sukkah. No, everything is fine, I’m talking about the Pharisees. Okay, where did they give them an exemption? Where is it written? Right, good, so the Torah gave them an exemption. I’ll even waive the exemption for her; she is not obligated—it’s not that they gave her an exemption. There is no commandment; the commandment does not address women. No, she has no commandment. It’s not a rabbinic exemption; on the Torah level they are not obligated. With the Sadducees it isn’t Torah-level versus rabbinic-level; Sadducees do not distinguish between Torah-level and rabbinic-level. Sadducees distinguish between what is the plain meaning of Scripture and what is derived from Scripture. But that has nothing to do with Torah-level and rabbinic-level. There are laws—most of the Torah-level laws we have are not written in the Torah—Torah-level, but derived from the Torah, interpreted this way or that way, and Sadducees won’t accept that. There is such a category in the Talmud, “a matter with which the Sadducees agree.” What is “a matter with which the Sadducees agree”? It is not synonymous with a Torah-level commandment. A Torah-level commandment is a commandment written in the Torah or derived from it. “A matter with which the Sadducees agree” is a commandment written in the Torah. You don’t need to believe anything. If you believe in it, that is what Jewish law says. There is no such thing as “you need to believe”—that phrase is an oxymoron. You can do whatever you want. I am talking about people who accept the Oral Torah. Whoever does not accept the Oral Torah, fine, he has a halakhic world different from mine. My classes here are given to those who accept the framework of the Oral Torah. Okay, no, there is no such thing as you need to believe. Whoever doesn’t believe, doesn’t believe; you can’t require someone to believe. Either you believe or you don’t believe. I’m talking about those who are in that framework, okay?

Good, so I want to bring a nice definition from Rabbi

[Speaker B] Asher

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Weiss. I read this a little after I read Navot, so it actually worked out nicely for me. I got confused, never mind. There is a Talmudic passage in Beitzah 30. The Talmud says there is a prohibition on using the wood of a sukkah. “A festival for the Lord” and “the sukkah for the Lord,” and therefore there is a prohibition on using the wood of a sukkah; you may not use the wood of the sukkah except for the sake of the commandment. Now the Oneg Yom Tov asks, in his responsa Oneg Yom Tov: if so, then someone who is suffering is not merely exempt from the sukkah; for someone who is suffering it is forbidden to sit in the sukkah. Because if he is suffering, he is not fulfilling a commandment, right? If he is not fulfilling a commandment, then he is using the wood of the sukkah not for the sake of a commandment, and that is forbidden. And it says that when rain comes down, one who remains sitting in the sukkah is a fool, right? It says in the Shulchan Arukh too—a Talmudic passage in the Shulchan Arukh—that one who is exempt from a thing and does it is called a fool. So someone who sits in the sukkah while it is raining is a fool. The Oneg Yom Tov asks: he is not a fool, he is a transgressor, in that he is using the sukkah not for its purpose. The same thing with women. Women who want to fulfill the commandment of sukkah—we talked before about time-bound positive commandments—so they are exempt. The Oneg Yom Tov says they are not merely exempt; it is forbidden to them. Because one who does not fulfill a commandment when sitting in the sukkah—and this connects somewhat to the previous discussion, but he assumes they do not fulfill a commandment, and on that I completely agree with him—then it is forbidden for him. Because of the prohibition on using the wood of the sukkah; it is forbidden to use the wood of the sukkah except for the sake of the commandment. Okay? So how can it be that someone who is suffering, or women, and all these people are merely exempt? They are not exempt; it ought to be forbidden. That is the question.

So there is an answer by Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman in Kovetz Shiurim on Beitzah there on page 30. He wants to claim—and this can be developed at great length, but I won’t go into details—that when it is raining, this is not a sukkah; it’s a pergola. A sukkah is something designated for a commandment. The moment it is raining and there is no commandment, you cannot fulfill the commandment; you have a collection of boards that looks exactly like a sukkah, but essentially it is not a sukkah at all, it is a pergola. Therefore there is no prohibition on using it. The prohibition is to use the wood of a sukkah, but the concept sukkah is not a physical concept. If this thing is a structure valid according to the rules of the laws of sukkah, is it a sukkah? No. A sukkah on Hanukkah is not a sukkah; a sukkah on Hanukkah is a pergola. The concept sukkah exists only on Sukkot. And Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman says—not only on Sukkot, but only on Sukkot when it is not raining. Because when it is raining, it is like Hanukkah. It simply is not designated for a commandment. If it is not designated for a commandment, then when you use the sukkah, you used a pergola, not a sukkah. Okay? That is his claim. It can be developed; I think it has all sorts of interesting implications.

What about the eighth day? No, someone who sleeps in the sukkah on the eighth day, according to this—even if he intends to add to the commandment—so what? But it’s not a sukkah. That is called adding to the commandment. The commandment you add is always not a commandment anyway; you invented it, right? You add a fifth species to the lulav—is that fifth species a commandment? It isn’t; there is no such commandment. Fine, you invented that it is a commandment. And once you invent it, that is the prohibition of adding. So I’m saying, he is speaking regarding rain. And regarding rain, when it rains, it is not a commandment. Regarding women, that is a different story. Some want to say that it is part of the husband’s dwelling, because “you shall dwell” means as you live all year. For that there are other answers. In any case, Rabbi Asher Weiss offers another explanation. A nice piece—it’s not an article, it’s a lecture of his that I heard—he gave it during COVID. He gave yeshiva students some lecture during COVID and someone sent me the recording; I enjoyed it very much. He said there that really when someone is suffering and is exempt from the sukkah, in the sukkot of the COVID year?

[Speaker D] Yes.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So he says, if you’re sitting in a sukkah, say, in the rain, then basically you did fulfill the commandment of sukkah. The rain doesn’t invalidate the sukkah. The law of someone who is suffering discomfort is a law in the person, not in the object. The sukkah is a valid sukkah. Like the Minchat Chinukh: when you sat in the sukkah, there is a commandment of sitting in the sukkah here; it’s not just making use of the wood of the sukkah, there is a commandment of sitting in the sukkah here. Except that this commandment is not pleasing to the Holy One, blessed be He. So you won’t receive reward for it. Okay? But you did fulfill the commandment. He says, for example—yes, he brings more examples, let me just see if I can find it here. He says, for example, that reward is given for giving pleasure to the Holy One, blessed be He. Obviously if you do it in this way, it gives no pleasure to the Holy One, blessed be He. The Talmud says, after all, it’s like a servant whose master pours out his pitcher in his face when rain falls during Sukkot; and the Holy One, blessed be He—it is not His will that we perform the commandment when it is raining. But that doesn’t mean the sukkah is invalid. The sukkah is valid. There is an object of a commandment here, exactly like the Minchat Chinukh. For some reason he doesn’t bring him, but it’s exactly the same thing. There is an object of a commandment here; for you as a person there is no fulfillment. Meaning, you accept the objectivity of the concept of commandment: an object of a commandment was produced here, it exists here, but you as a person did not fulfill the commandment of sukkah. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not want this commandment. And he says reward is received only for giving pleasure to the Holy One, blessed be He, not for the fulfillment of commandments. You fulfilled a commandment, but it gives no pleasure whatsoever to the Holy One, blessed be He, so you do not deserve reward.

For example, he says: what happens if I sent an agent to circumcise my son? Let’s start differently. I come to circumcise my son, and someone comes and snatches the commandment from me. He circumcises him quickly, before I manage to. So he has to pay ten gold coins. This is a rabbinic fine for someone who steals a commandment from another person. What happens if I sent an agent to circumcise my son? A mohel—I appointed a mohel to circumcise my son. Now the Talmud says that it is a greater commandment to do it oneself than through one’s agent, in the Talmud at the beginning of the second chapter of Kiddushin. So it is preferable that I circumcise him rather than my agent, right? Now someone comes before my agent manages to circumcise him, and quickly circumcises the child. So they discuss there whether he has to pay ten gold coins to the agent or not. The Shakh discusses it, and there are discussions about this. Rabbi Asher Weiss asks: but what about the one who appointed him? Why not pay the father—the one who appointed the agent? After all, the commandment is his; the agent is only acting as a person’s representative. So he says: what does it mean that it is a greater commandment to do it oneself than through one’s agent? It means that when you perform the commandment through an agent, the commandment has been fulfilled—an object of a commandment. But you will not receive reward. You did not perform a commandment. The commandment was fulfilled; you even discharged your obligation in some sense, like someone who ate in a stolen sukkah or in a sukkah in the rain. But you—it does not give pleasure to the Holy One, blessed be He, because He wants you to do the commandment; here the agent did the commandment, not you. Now there is a rule that a person’s agent is like the person himself, but that rule regarding an agent being like the person himself applies to legal effect—when I send an agent to buy something, there is no commandment here, the whole question is whether it takes effect or not. Yes, the rule that a person’s agent is like the person himself means it takes effect. But when I send an agent to perform a commandment, it is not enough that I discharge my obligation in the objective sense, as with transactions; I also need to be registered as someone who performed a commandment. I deserve reward; yes, I got the check mark; yes, I performed a commandment as a person, not only in the object. That, he says, does not happen through an agent.

And therefore the question of giving the ten gold coins to the one who appointed the agent does not arise among the halakhic decisors at all. It’s not an issue at all. Because the ten gold coins are compensation for a person from whom the reward of the commandment was stolen, the pleasure to the Holy One, blessed be He. He did not do that; the agent did that. Right? But there is no discussion about the one who appointed the agent. And his claim is that the fine of ten gold coins comes to compensate you for the pleasure you could have brought to the Holy One, blessed be He, and did not, for the reward that was stolen from you in the World to Come—I don’t know exactly how you want to define it. But as for the act of the commandment in itself, why should anyone compensate me if I didn’t perform the commandment? So what if I didn’t perform the commandment? You compensate me for damage that happened to me. The damage that happened to me is that I don’t deserve reward, that I did not give pleasure. So he says that when the Talmud says it is a greater commandment to do it oneself than through one’s agent, it means that when you perform a commandment through an agent, the commandment was fulfilled, but you are not the one who fulfilled it. No commandment was credited to your account. That is basically his claim.

Now this is, I think, a very sharp formulation of this approach, which says that there is such a thing as an object of a commandment even though the person did not fulfill the commandment. And there is an object of a commandment, and this closes the circle with which I opened this series. I asked two questions, about the person and the object. Clearly there cannot be a situation in which the person fulfilled a commandment but no commandment occurred in the object. But there can be a situation in which a commandment occurred in the object but the person did not fulfill it. There may be similar things—let me add this in parentheses—you could expand on this; later I’ll send you the links. There can be cases like someone who intended to eat pork and ended up with lamb meat. A Talmud in Nazir. Right? So he wanted to commit a transgression; he thought he was eating pork, and it turned out to be lamb. So he needs forgiveness and atonement. That is what the Talmud says there. The simple understanding of the Talmud, and this is how most commentators understand it, is that there is no prohibition here, not even an unintentional prohibition. There is no prohibition—he did not eat pork. But it’s still not okay, because he wanted to. Rabbi from Brisk, in the stencil notes on Nazir—the Griz—yes, he argues that this is a full-fledged prohibition. A complete prohibition. It’s just that there is a Scriptural decree that if it did not actually happen in practice, there is no flogging. But you violated a Torah-level prohibition. That is his claim.

What is his conception here? His conception here is far more extreme than Rabbi Nebenzahl and people like that, who do not grasp the object of a commandment—even though that doesn’t really fit the Brisker style. But he basically holds that everything there is in a commandment or a transgression is simply your relationship to the Holy One, blessed be He, somewhat similar to Nebenzahl. Therefore he says: if you intended to commit a transgression, that is the transgression. Fine, it didn’t work out in practice, so you are not flogged. But in the final analysis, that is the transgression. The actual realization in practice is only a condition for punishment. Now one can of course discuss what happens if I thought about eating pork, and that’s it—I didn’t eat anything, nothing came to hand and I didn’t eat, I only thought. Is that also a prohibition? I’m sure he would not say that. That is not a prohibition. Why not? Otherwise why do we need the case of intending to eat pork and ending up with lamb? Just say: he thought about eating pork, period. Without it turning into anything—just thought. An evil thought the Holy One, blessed be He, does not combine with an action. So why, why is that not a prohibition? Because that’s not really a thought. A thought that is realized in action means that you thought seriously. All kinds of passing thoughts occur to me all the time. A thought of that kind that becomes realized, such that I even carried it out in practice—that is already a thought that is prohibited.

Now, the fact is that I proved that I really thought it; I had firm intent. Meaning, I also acted on it. In practice I didn’t do it—I ended up eating lamb, not pork. But once I realized it in the real world, then that thought is a serious thought; there really is a prohibition here. Clearly even he would agree that merely thinking about eating pork is not a prohibition, that is obvious. But still, if it is a thought that is realized, then the realization is only a condition. The transgression itself is basically nothing more than the thought. That takes us back somewhat to the person, and really leaves only the person. The object is just some kind of condition for flogging, but not really—the actual transgression is a transgression in the person.

Okay, one could go on about this, but let’s stop here. What? No. It seems to me that you need both. You need both. I spoke about this in Maimonides’ ninth root. I explained that you need both. May you be sealed for a good year, a good year.