Ethics, Faith, and Halakha – Lesson 8 – Rabbi Michael Avraham

Table of Contents

• Morality, choice, and the meaning of command as an externally binding system
• Maimonides: idolatry, acceptance of divinity, and service of God
• Maimonides: “to do the truth because it is truth” and the parallel to morality
• Maimonides: the resident alien, the seven commandments, and the distinction between a “correct act” and “religious value”
• Maimonides in his Commentary on the Mishnah to Chullin: the sciatic nerve and the principled justification for the authority of Jewish law
• Motivation, “commandments require belief,” and the critique of “traditionalism”
• Maimonides, Eight Chapters chapter 6: the virtuous person and the one who governs himself, and two categories of commandments
• Resolving the contradiction: command as motivation versus natural inclination as a measure of perfection
• Command and essence in commandments and transgressions: Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman in the name of the Ramchal
• “Why do I need a verse? It is logical”: command as constituting a halakhic prohibition and not as teaching moral content
• “Why obey a command?” acceptance of divinity, stopping the chain of reasoning, and two kinds of “that’s just how it is”
• Value according to Yeshayahu Leibowitz: that which does not serve an external goal
• Types of values: moral, halakhic, religious, aesthetic, human, and group-ethical
• Conflicts between values and the problem of incommensurability

Summary

General Overview

The text presents command as the binding foundation both in Jewish law and in morality, and defines religious obligation as obligation to a command that comes from an authoritative source called *God* in the sense that His very status requires obedience without any need for further justification. It reads several sources in Maimonides as grounding the distinction between a correct act and an act with religious value, and argues that in morality too, once something is determined to be moral, that already obligates action without any further “why.” It then develops a distinction between command and essence (content/results) in commandments and transgressions, and explains why even rational prohibitions must still be stated as commands in order to become binding norms that carry punishment. Finally, it arrives at a definition of “value,” following Yeshayahu Leibowitz, as the stopping point of a chain of reasoning in the form of “that’s just how it is,” not in an arbitrary sense but as something *self-evident*, and shows how this gives rise to the problem of *incommensurability*, which makes it hard to explain how conflicts between values are decided.

Morality, choice, and the meaning of command as an externally binding system

The discussion rests on the assumption that morality and Jewish law function as systems that are “outside us,” systems to which a person is supposed to be committed, with command serving as the foundation of religious obligation. Acceptance of *God* is defined as the stance according to which the very fact that the source commands is itself binding, without looking for reasons of benefit, fear, love, or other “external” considerations. The meaning of morality is described in parallel terms: once something has been determined to be moral or immoral, there is no room for another “why” beyond the category itself.

Maimonides: idolatry, acceptance of divinity, and service of God

Maimonides, in Laws of Idolatry chapter 3, halakhah 6, rules that one who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt, and only “acceptance of it as a god” turns the act into idolatrous worship in the full sense. That acceptance is interpreted here as seeing the object as one whose very status requires obedience, and therefore obedience not based on other considerations is a condition for a religious act. The example that judges are called “gods” is brought in order to emphasize that the duty to obey stems from the status itself, not from assessing benefit or fear.

Maimonides: “to do the truth because it is truth” and the parallel to morality

Maimonides, at the beginning of chapter 10 of Laws of Repentance, sets out the ideal of serving not for the sake of reward and not out of fear of punishment, but rather “to do the truth because it is truth.” The text compares this to the structure of moral judgment: someone who understands that murder is immoral cannot then ask, “So why not murder?” because the very question shows that the meaning of moral judgment has not been understood. Morality is described as a category that obligates by itself, parallel to the concept of *God*, which obligates by virtue of what He is.

Maimonides: the resident alien, the seven commandments, and the distinction between a “correct act” and “religious value”

Maimonides, at the end of chapter 8 of Laws of Kings, says that a resident alien who keeps the seven commandments “because reason compelled him” is “one of the wise of the nations of the world,” but not “one of their pious.” The text interprets this as saying that an act can be good and correct yet lack religious value if it is not done because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it—similar to a secular Jew who does not drive on the Sabbath and therefore behaves “correctly,” but is not fulfilling a commandment. Religious value is defined as an action done out of commitment to command, and not out of one’s own judgment of what “seems right.”

Maimonides in his Commentary on the Mishnah to Chullin: the sciatic nerve and the principled justification for the authority of Jewish law

Maimonides, in his Commentary on the Mishnah in chapter 7 of Chullin, explains that observance of commandments is “solely because of the command at Sinai,” and therefore refraining from eating the sciatic nerve does not stem from the story of Jacob but from the prohibition given at Sinai. The text distinguishes between a question about the motivation of the person observing Jewish law—which is not of interest in secular law—and a question about the principled justification for the authority to demand obedience and punish, which certainly exists in theories of secular law as well. The command at Sinai is presented as the justification by virtue of which the halakhic judge can demand obedience, and not merely as psychological guidance for the one fulfilling the commandment.

Motivation, “commandments require belief,” and the critique of “traditionalism”

The text concludes that in Maimonides’ approach, the binding element behind observance of Jewish law is command, and that religious commitment means commitment to command. It argues that “traditionalists” are worse than “atheists,” because they observe parts of the commandments out of sentiment, culture, or convenience rather than out of comprehensive commitment to the command, and therefore even what they do observe “is worth nothing” as religious value. It distinguishes between a religious person who fails because of weakness of will but sees himself as obligated by the system, and someone who chooses items of folklore based on “whatever speaks to him,” defining a traditionalist as someone who recognizes the obligation but is not actually committed to it because “it doesn’t suit him.”

Maimonides, Eight Chapters chapter 6: the virtuous person and the one who governs himself, and two categories of commandments

Maimonides describes “the one who governs himself” as someone who desires evil but overcomes that desire and does good, and “the virtuous person” as someone naturally drawn to the good and not desiring evil. The philosophers prefer the virtuous person as more complete, while the Sages praise the one who desires transgression but refrains from it, to the point of saying, “The greater a person is than his fellow, the greater his inclination is than his,” and “According to the pain is the reward,” and they quote Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: “I could desire it—but what can I do? My Father in heaven has decreed it upon me.” Maimonides resolves the issue by saying that the philosophers are right regarding “rational commandments,” such as bloodshed, theft, and robbery, where perfection of the soul means not desiring evil, while the Sages are right regarding “revealed commandments,” the “statutes,” such as meat and milk, shaatnez, and forbidden sexual relations, where the value lies in submitting to the command, because without the Torah “they would not be evil at all.”

Resolving the contradiction: command as motivation versus natural inclination as a measure of perfection

The text proposes that in Eight Chapters Maimonides is not changing the requirement that the motivation for an act be the command; rather, he is discussing the question of human perfection in terms of whether contrary inclinations exist or do not exist. It rejects the solution that the requirement of command applies only to revealed commandments, because in Laws of Kings Maimonides requires command precisely in connection with the Noahide commandments, which are rational ones. It presents a model of “double motivation,” according to which a person can have a natural inclination toward the good and still count as one who serves God, because he would act that way even if the inclination were reversed, and it connects this to questions of coercion and to the definition of an act as truly belonging to the person himself.

Command and essence in commandments and transgressions: Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman in the name of the Ramchal

Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman, in an article on repentance in the name of the Ramchal, distinguishes that in every commandment there are two values: responding to the command, and the essence/content that produces a positive result; and in every transgression there are two flaws: rebellion against the command, and a negative result in the essence. The example, “He intended to eat pork and ended up with lamb in his hand,” is presented as a case where there is command but no essence, while the inadvertent case—“He intended to eat lamb and ended up with pork in his hand”—is a case where there is essence without command. Tosafot HaRosh and the Ritva explain in this way the statement that “greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does,” because the one who is commanded and does gains two benefits—obedience and essence—whereas the one who is not commanded and does gains only the result at the level of content.

“Why do I need a verse? It is logical”: command as constituting a halakhic prohibition and not as teaching moral content

The question of why the Torah writes prohibitions that are morally self-evident is answered by saying that the verse does not come to teach that the content is evil, but to turn the act into a binding halakhic norm that justifies punishment. Cain was punished for murdering Abel even before any explicit command, because a person is supposed to understand from reason alone the gravity of murder; but “You shall not murder” adds the dimension of command, which brings the prohibition into the framework of Jewish law. The analogy to a traffic law about a red light clarifies that a law is not meant to reveal facts, but to anchor a norm as legally binding and to justify sanction.

“Why obey a command?” acceptance of divinity, stopping the chain of reasoning, and two kinds of “that’s just how it is”

The question “Why obey a command?” is defined as a logically illegitimate question when we are speaking of the command of *God*, because the meaning of *God* is a source of authority that binds by virtue of what it is. The text explains that every chain of reasoning must stop at some point with a “that’s just how it is,” and the problem is to distinguish between an arbitrary “that’s just how it is” and a “that’s just how it is” that is *self-evident*. It uses the example of axioms in geometry to show that rational reasoning rests on foundational points that are not proven but are grasped as clear, and that any attempt to keep justifying without stopping leads to an infinite regress.

Value according to Yeshayahu Leibowitz: that which does not serve an external goal

Yeshayahu Leibowitz is presented as sharpening the point that a “value” is something that cannot be justified by means of a goal outside itself, because it is itself the goal that other things serve. The example of the prohibition against excessive speeding presents it as a means of preserving human life, while the value of life itself stops at “that’s just how it is” as a foundational point that cannot be reduced to some other principle. Obedience to the Holy One, blessed be He, service for its own sake, and Torah study are presented as values of this sort, and therefore they have no instrumental justification; they are themselves the basis of justification.

Types of values: moral, halakhic, religious, aesthetic, human, and group-ethical

The text distinguishes between moral values such as human life, dignity, and equality, and halakhic values such as redeeming a firstborn donkey, which do not stem from morality but still function in the language of what is proper and binding. It adds aesthetic/social values through Jonathan Haidt’s examples of disgusting actions that harm no one but are still perceived as repulsive, connecting this to the idea of “do not make yourselves abominable” and to the “accepted conventions” in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. It also proposes values of self-realization as values that are neither moral nor aesthetic yet are still perceived as worthy, and broadens the picture to include guild values, like the ethics of the Bar Association or “the ethics of a gang of robbers,” as internal norms that are not identical with universal morality.

Conflicts between values and the problem of incommensurability

The text presents a conflict between values through examples such as saving a life on the Sabbath, where one must choose between Sabbath observance and saving life, and Sartre’s example of a student torn between helping his sick mother and joining the struggle against the Nazis. It argues that such a decision requires a scale of values, but according to the definition of value there is no common unit of measure that makes it possible to weigh one value against another. It defines this as the problem of *incommensurability* and explains that neither a verse nor a rule solves the difficulty, because the problem is not lack of knowledge but lack of meaning in the comparison when there is no common measure—similar to the question, “Which is greater, kindness in the Middle East or water in the Indian Ocean?” It stops before continuing and signals that the next discussion will go on to deal with questions of decision-making and with the connection to the topic in Yoma.

Where are we holding? I spoke a bit about the definition of morality, about the relationship between morality and choice, and in the previous class I started talking a bit about the meaning of command. And I said that basically the foundation for the whole discussion of morality, and of Jewish law in parallel, is really some kind of system that stands outside of us, and we are supposed to be obligated to it. That’s true with respect to morality, and it’s also true with respect to Jewish law. We’ll still talk about the relationship between those two systems, but right now I’m only speaking on the principled level. And I began looking at various sources in Maimonides. Netanel? Right. We saw various sources in Maimonides from which one can learn about the meaning and importance of command. I started with Maimonides in Laws of Idolatry, chapter 3, law 6. Maimonides says there that someone who worships idolatry out of love or fear is exempt; only if he accepts it as a god, the idol, and accepting it as a god is basically the condition for your being a full-fledged idol worshiper. So I explained what it means to accept something as a god. Accepting it as a god means that I see the idol—or, on the other hand, the Holy One, blessed be He—as a factor such that the very fact that He commands me obligates me. Meaning, I don’t need to look for explanations why I should obey what He commands. That’s the definition of a god. A god means someone whose very being what he is is enough to give force to his commands. That’s why I said that even in the Torah, for example, judges are also called gods. They’re called gods because you are obligated to listen to a judge by virtue of the fact that he is a judge, not because it’s worthwhile to listen to him, not because you’re afraid of him, not because I don’t know what benefit it will bring you in some way. You have to listen to him by virtue of his being a judge. Meaning, the fact that he is a judge is the reason you must listen to him, and no explanation is needed—nor is any additional explanation required. And therefore in that sense he resembles God, which is why he is called god. The same is true with the Holy One, blessed be He: when I ask why I should listen to Him, the answer is: because. Because He is God. That’s it. The moment I said that He is God, I already said why I need to listen to Him. Therefore accepting something as a god is the condition for the worship to count as religious worship. So if I do that toward an idol, that’s idolatry; if I do it toward the Holy One, blessed be He, that is worship of God. But religious worship is worship whose addressee, when I stand before him, is a god. A god in the sense that what he says, by virtue of his being what he is, obligates me. Not because of any other consideration—that it’s worthwhile for me, that it’s beneficial, not beneficial, that I owe him, that it will help me, that I love him, that I fear him, things like that. That it’s useful, that it’s moral—all those things are foreign considerations; they’re irrelevant. I have to obey because He is God. That’s the point. I said that I also brought Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of Laws of Repentance, where Maimonides says that what one should do is not serve for the sake of reward nor out of fear of punishment, but rather do the truth because it is truth. Which is basically the same thing. I do it—ask me why? Because. Just like asking—I think I already mentioned this example—I understand that murder is immoral, but why not murder? If you ask why not murder, that means you don’t really understand that murder is immoral. Because someone who understands that murder is immoral cannot ask, so why not murder? Don’t murder because it’s immoral. I don’t need any additional explanation. Meaning, the category of morality in this sense functions like the category of a god. Meaning, once I determine that something is moral, that means it should be done; no additional explanation is needed. Or when I say that something is immoral, that means it is forbidden to do it; I don’t need another explanation that tells me don’t do it because it is harmful, because it’s this way, because it’s that way. You can ask whether it falls under morality or not—that’s worth discussing. But once you’ve reached the conclusion that this is the command of morality, you don’t need any further rationale to explain why you should do it. Someone who asks, I know it’s moral, but why do it—he doesn’t know that it’s moral. He simply doesn’t know, because if he knew, he wouldn’t ask. Okay, so the reason one should do something moral is because God? That’s the meaning of morality. That’s the meaning of morality, but we’ll get to that. So that’s Maimonides on doing the truth because it is truth, yes, from chapter 10 of Laws of Repentance. After that I moved to two additional sources in Maimonides. One source is Maimonides at the end of chapter 8 of Laws of Kings. There Maimonides basically says that any resident alien who keeps his seven commandments because of intellectual conviction, meaning because in his opinion that is the right thing to do, is one of the wise of the nations of the world but not one of their pious. Not one of the pious of the nations of the world, but one of their wise men. Okay, what does that mean in my translation? The act is a good act; that’s how one ought to behave. But it has no religious value. Why doesn’t it have religious value? Because you do it because that’s what seems right to you, not because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it. The moment you don’t do something because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it, your act has no religious value; it is not fulfillment of a commandment. It’s like a secular person who doesn’t drive on the Sabbath. He behaves correctly, but he has not fulfilled a commandment. He cannot fulfill a commandment because he does not intend to do it because there is a command not to drive on the Sabbath, or to rest on the Sabbath. Okay? Therefore it doesn’t have the meaning of a commanded act, even though it is the right act. So someone who does it is wise in the sense that he behaves correctly, but he is not pious, meaning he is not a servant of God; it has no religious value. I brought a similar source, but afterward I explained why it’s not completely the same; that’s in the Commentary on the Mishnah in the seventh chapter of Hullin, where Maimonides explains regarding the sciatic nerve. There Maimonides explains that what we observe of the commandments of the Torah is solely because of the command at Sinai. And therefore, for example, the sciatic nerve, which is described with Jacob—“Therefore the children of Israel do not eat the sciatic nerve to this very day”—that is not the reason we don’t eat the sciatic nerve. A story that happened in the days of our forefather Jacob—that’s not what matters. We don’t eat the sciatic nerve because of a command given at Sinai forbidding us to eat the sciatic nerve. That’s the reason. And again, ostensibly this is the same principle we saw in Laws of Kings: that the reason to do a commandment or avoid a prohibition has to be the very fact that it is a commandment or a prohibition. Nothing besides that. If you do it for another reason, then you are acting correctly, but it has no value as worship of God, no religious value. Religious value means accepting the Holy One, blessed be He, as God. What does that mean? That whatever He commands, I do. Why do I do it? Because He commanded. Not for any other reason. I said that there is a difference between these two sources despite the similarity between them, because I said that, say, in a legal context—not in Jewish law, but in a legal context, say in the law of the State of Israel or in the law of a modern state—nobody is interested in the person’s motivation when he obeys the law. If he obeyed the law, everything is fine; there’s no problem with him. I don’t care whether he did it because that’s what the law says, or by chance, or because it seemed to him the right way to behave. It doesn’t matter. The motivation of the citizen is not the concern of the legislator, or the judge, or the police officer. Okay? Motivations are irrelevant. What matters is that you do what is required and don’t do what is forbidden. That’s all. So in that sense, the question that appears in Laws of Kings, which interests us in the halakhic context—that you must do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded it—does not interest the secular legislator. That doesn’t exist in the secular context. But what appears in the chapter on the sciatic nerve, in the Commentary on the Mishnah there, does interest the secular system as well. Because that is not speaking about the question of what your motivation should be when you come to do a commandment—whether you do it because of this or because of that. The question of the sciatic nerve is a question that says—the discussion there is a discussion about the question: what is the principled justification for demanding that you obey Jewish law? Essentially I’m asking—and this is addressed to the judge, not to the citizen—you, the judge, who demands that a person obey Jewish law or not violate it and who will punish him if he violates it—by what authority? What gives you that justification? So I say: the command at Mount Sinai. The command at Mount Sinai obligates, and it gives me that justification. That exists in secular law as well. Secular law can also ask itself: what is the justification, what gives force to the decision of the judge with respect to the citizen? By what authority can a judge make decisions about citizens? That’s a valid question in the secular context too, right? So the type of question raised by the Commentary on the Mishnah on the sciatic nerve exists in the secular context too. It’s a question in the theory of law: what is the justification by virtue of which we make legal demands of the citizen? What justifies that? The question in Laws of Kings looks very similar, but it is not. The question in Laws of Kings is not a question in the theory of Jewish law; it is an instruction for how one should fulfill Jewish law. When you come to fulfill Jewish law, you should do it in order to fulfill the command of the Holy One, blessed be He. That is what is supposed to be in your consciousness when you fulfill Jewish law—something like commandments require intention. Okay? I only said: commandments require faith, not commandments require intention. This is not connected to the dispute whether commandments require intention. It is speaking about the motivation a person has when he comes to fulfill Jewish law. Okay, so up to this point, in any case, what have we seen? That according to Maimonides, the foundation that obligates me to fulfill Jewish law—and this is also supposed to be in my awareness, that’s an additional novelty—is the command. And religious obligation means obligation to command. That is why I said that traditionalists are worse than atheists, right? Why? Because traditionalists are not obligated to command. There are commands that they observe; they observe them because it’s nice for them, because they have sentiments, because they have—I don’t know—various things of that sort, it’s part of their culture, all good. But they don’t observe them because the command obligates, because if they did observe them because of that, they would observe everything. The command obligates everything. When you decide for yourself, you choose what yes and what no, the problem is not that portion which you don’t observe; the problem is that this testifies that even the part that you do observe, you are not doing because of obligation to the command, so that too is worth nothing. Not only the part you don’t observe; the part you do observe is also worth nothing. Okay? What? Because you’re not doing it because of obligation to command; you’re doing it like the resident alien who does it because of intellectual conviction. There is no religious value to that action. A traditionalist could be someone who accepted upon himself—he went to some, I don’t know if a farbrengen, but some Torah class that his friend pressured him into going to, understood that one should draw close to the Holy One, blessed be He, and took upon himself to put on tefillin. That’s not traditionalist. What is it if not? That’s fully religious, fully religious. So what does traditionalist mean? Why doesn’t he do the rest? Because he doesn’t know, or because he doesn’t think it obligates? He thinks it doesn’t obligate. So why doesn’t he do it? What, no, tell me why. No—weakness of will is nothing. Everyone who sins—it’s weakness of… If it’s weakness of will, that’s not traditionalist. Weakness of will—even a religious person sometimes sins, right? So why is he religious and not traditionalist? Why? Because he is obligated to the system. That’s called religious. It doesn’t mean he’ll do everything. The fact that he is obligated—there is weakness of will, there are urges, all true. But in principle I am obligated, meaning I understand that I have to do it; sometimes I fall. That’s religious, not traditionalist. A religious person who thinks that tzitzit obligates me but the Sabbath does not obligate me—no, that’s not traditionalist either; that’s just someone who is mistaken. That’s someone who thinks only tzitzit is obligatory; he doesn’t know there are another 612 commandments besides that one. No, that’s someone mistaken. A traditionalist is someone who knows the commandments; some of them—doesn’t matter which—he doesn’t do because it doesn’t suit him right now, he doesn’t feel like it. There are commandments he does feel like, and commandments he doesn’t. Whatever arouses in him emotion, sentiment, I don’t know exactly what—he does. He goes to synagogue on the Sabbath, afterward gets in the car and goes to a soccer game. Why? Not because this is permitted and that is forbidden, but because he does not relate to prohibitions as something binding. It’s folklore. Fine, there are things I do because they speak to me, and things I don’t do because they don’t speak to me. Now, if you understand that all this is binding and you still don’t do it, then you are a criminal. If you don’t think it is binding at all, then you are basically an atheist. An atheist with traditional sentiment. Doesn’t matter. There are lots of atheists with traditional sentiment; I know quite a few atheists who make kiddush on Friday night, who come to synagogue—I know some like that. They are complete atheists; they do it just because it’s nice folklore. A traditionalist isn’t that. A traditionalist is someone who understands that these things are binding, only it doesn’t suit him right now, he doesn’t feel like it. Okay? Good, that’s of course a side discussion. So now I want to continue to another source in Maimonides. We are currently in Maimonides’ approach because he… Do you know why in yeshivot they always study Maimonides? Do you know why Maimonides is so popular in yeshivot? Because Maimonides is the only one—wait, yes—Maimonides is the only one who wrote on the entire Torah, so you can always check his consistency, and that’s where the questions come up. He contradicts himself from here to there because everywhere he wrote—he ruled what he ruled in every place—and then you can and have to check consistency and raise questions and so on. No other author did this. There is no other author who has bottom-line rulings on the whole Torah. There are commentators in whom you can find contradictions—here they explain this way, there they explained that way, somewhere else differently. In Maimonides this is the only thing that is really committed to some sort of consistency. Meaning, you can raise questions, give answers—it’s a broad field for yeshiva-style analytical learning. In any case, here too I chose Maimonides, because Maimonides really writes—all these sources are from Maimonides—and this is supposed to produce some coherent method. Meaning, unlike someone who writes one source here and another there, but you can’t and needn’t expect some coherent method there and reconcile different sources. So here is the additional source in Maimonides. It’s chapter 6 of the Eight Chapters, on the difference between the virtuous person and the person who rules over his soul. Let’s read. “The philosophers said that the person who rules over his soul, although he does excellent actions, still does good things while desiring evil actions and yearning for them, and he struggles with his inclination and acts in opposition to what his power, desire, and character incline him toward, and he does good things while suffering in doing them.” Yes, so we have two figures: the virtuous person and the person who rules over his soul. The person who rules over his soul is someone who has an evil inclination, but he confronts it, overcomes it, and does the good thing. Fine? Meaning, in practice he does good, but inside he also has bad urges. This is what in the Tanya is called a beinoni, an intermediate person. A beinoni is one who has bad urges, but always does only good. And the complete righteous person is basically what Maimonides here calls the virtuous person. “But the virtuous person is drawn in his actions after what his desire and disposition incline him toward, and he does good things while desiring and yearning for them.” He has no evil inclination; his natural inclination is to do good. Okay? Meaning, he is simply built in such a way that he is naturally drawn to do good. So that is the virtuous person. The person who rules over his soul is someone who always does good like the virtuous person, but he must struggle with urges in order to do good. He does not desire the good; he sometimes also desires bad things, but he overcomes that and does the good things. So up to this point, the two figures. Now he says: “And the philosophers unanimously agree that the virtuous person is better and more complete than the person who rules over his soul.” The virtuous person is better; he is a complete person; he doesn’t even have an evil inclination, not only does he do good things. “But they said that the person who rules over his soul can stand in many matters where the virtuous person stands, though his level is necessarily lower, because he desires evil action even though he does not do it. But his desire for it is an evil trait in the soul.” Fine? Therefore the virtuous person is better than the person who rules over his soul. “And Solomon already said something like this: ‘The soul of the wicked desires evil.’” Yes, a soul that desires evil is enough to turn him into a wicked person. He does good; he only desires evil. Okay? “And regarding the joy of the virtuous person in good actions and the sorrow of one who is not virtuous in doing them, this is the verse: ‘It is joy to the righteous to do justice, but ruin to evildoers.’” Yes, doing a good thing—the evildoers are distressed by it and the righteous rejoice in it. “This is what appears from the words of the Torah, fitting what the philosophers mentioned.” Fine? Meaning, the philosophers say that the virtuous person is better than the one who rules over his soul. “But when we investigated the words of the sages on this matter, we found that for them, one who desires transgressions and yearns for them is better and more complete than one who does not desire them and does not suffer in refraining from them.” Yes, the sages say the opposite: that one who subdues his inclination—the person who rules over his soul—is better than the virtuous person. He hasn’t yet said anything; at this stage he is only describing the two—he hasn’t said what his own opinion is. We’ll soon see what his opinion is. “Better and more complete than one who does not desire them and does not suffer in refraining from them, to the point that they said that the greater and more complete a person is, the stronger will be his desire for transgressions and his sorrow in refraining from them.” And they brought stories about this and said, “Whoever is greater than his fellow, his inclination is greater than his.” So the fact that you are greater than your fellow means your inclination is greater, implying that the one with the greater inclination is greater than his fellow, not the one with no inclination who is greater. Okay, one can argue a bit about that proof, because one could say they’re describing facts—meaning, someone greater than his fellow has to contend. It could be a fact; it’s not necessarily a value judgment, okay. Fine, in any case, that’s what he said. “Not only that, but they also said that the reward of the one who rules over his soul is greater according to the measure of his suffering in ruling over his soul. And they said: ‘According to the pain is the reward.’” The more you have to struggle to do good, the greater your reward. And again, that doesn’t mean he is greater. He deserves more reward because he works harder. The question of whether he is greater is a different question; I wouldn’t bring proof from that. “Moreover, they commanded that a person rule over his soul and warned against saying: By my nature I do not desire this transgression, and even if the Torah had not forbidden it. And this is what they said: Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says, a person should not say: I do not want to eat meat and milk, I do not want to wear wool and linen mixed together, I do not want to have relations with forbidden sexual partners; rather he should say: I do want to, but what can I do? My Father in Heaven has decreed it upon me.” That is indeed good proof. Yes, here we really see that the ideal figure is specifically one who struggles with urges, not one who has no urges. Don’t say, I don’t want to eat pork, I have no desire to eat pork. No—I do want to eat pork, but I overcome it. Fine? So here there already is an evaluation, a judgment: this is a more complete figure than the other one. That really does stand in opposition to the philosophers’ approach. Okay. Now Maimonides continues and says: “According to the plain sense of these two statements, at first glance they contradict one another.” The philosophers’ view and the sages’ view ostensibly oppose one another; they contradict each other. That itself is already an interesting remark. So what? It contradicts. The sages taught us that the philosophers are wrong. What’s the problem? Maimonides apparently understands that what the philosophers say has standing. It’s not: so what if the philosophers say this and the sages say that—okay. Usually what would people say? Fine, so it turns out the philosophers are wrong. And that’s all. What’s the issue? For Maimonides, no. If the philosophers say something, that has standing. If the sages say something, that too has standing. Does it contradict? Okay, one has to think what to do with it. It does not automatically mean, fine, the sages said this, so the philosophers were wrong, let me move on. What’s the issue? No need to write this sixth chapter then. So he says: “This is not so. Rather, both are true, and there is no disagreement between them at all.” Why? He says as follows: “The evils which the philosophers regard as evils are those of which they said that one who does not desire them is better than one who desires them and rules over his soul with respect to them. And these are the things universally acknowledged by all human beings to be evils, such as bloodshed, theft, robbery, deception, harming one who has not harmed you, repaying evil to one who has done good, dishonoring parents, and the like.” “And these are the commandments about which the sages, peace be upon them, said: if they had not been written, they would have deserved to be written.” And some of our later sages, who contracted the illness of the dialecticians, the mutakallimun, called them rational commandments. “And there is no doubt that a soul which desires any of these things and yearns for them is a deficient soul, and that the virtuous soul will not desire any of these evils at all and will not suffer in refraining from them.” Fine? He says: the rational commandments—there the philosophers are right. If it’s something immoral, then if you desire it and overcome it, that is less good than someone for whom it is naturally obvious that one simply does not do such a thing. The virtuous person is greater than the person who rules over his soul. But all this is in the rational commandments, moral, rational, and so on. “But the things concerning which the sages said that one who rules over his soul with respect to them is better and his reward greater”—what the sages said—“are the revealed commandments,” the non-rational decrees. “And this is true, because were it not for the Torah, they would not be evils at all. Therefore they said that a person must let his soul desire them and only the Torah should restrain him from them.” Meaning, with respect to the non-rational commandments, specifically one who desires them and does not do them because he is obligated to the command, because the Torah commanded not to do it, is more virtuous than one who does not desire them at all. Why? Because there is no value in not desiring these things; they are not evil in themselves. They are evil only because the Torah commanded concerning them. Again. And why specifically did they bring those examples? Okay, in a moment he’ll get to that, yes exactly. Okay, in any case, what distinction is he making? The sages’ position does not contradict the philosophers’ position. The philosophers are speaking about the moral, rational commandments, and there it is clear that one who does not desire to do evil is better than one who desires it even though he doesn’t do it. But with respect to the non-rational commandments, there the sages are right to say that greater is one who desires them and overcomes than one who does not desire them at all, because there is no point at all in not desiring this matter, since it is not evil in itself. All that is needed is obligation. You have to understand: this is a novelty. If you asked a person on the street today, he would say the opposite: but someone who doesn’t want to eat pork at all, who is revolted by eating pork, is much more righteous than someone who wants to and overcomes. Not true, Maimonides says. Not true. There is no value at all in reaching a level of identification where I don’t want to eat pork, it disgusts me. There is no such value. That does happen for many people, but there is no value in it; it is not something of value. In a certain sense even the opposite: if you desire to eat pork and overcome, that means you really are obligated to the command; you deserve more appreciation than one who has no inclination to do it at all. That is his claim; that’s how he reconciles the philosophers’ view and the sages’ view. “And reflect on the wisdom of the sages, peace be upon them,” says Maimonides, “and how precise their example was, for they did not say: a person should say, I do not want to kill, I do not want to steal, I do not want to lie; rather they said, I do want to, but what can I do, and so on. Instead they brought only non-rational matters: meat and milk, wearing wool and linen mixed together, and forbidden sexual relations.” By the way, forbidden sexual relations for him count here as non-rational. “And these commandments and the like are what Scripture calls ‘My statutes’—statutes that I have decreed for you and you have no permission to question them, and the nations of the world challenge them and Satan accuses regarding them, such as the red heifer and the scapegoat, etc.” “And those which the later authorities called rational are called commandments”—or ordinances—“as distinct from statutes, as the sages explained.” Statutes are the non-rational commandments; commandments or ordinances are the rational commandments. So he says: regarding ordinances the philosophers are right; regarding statutes the sages are right; and all the examples they brought—don’t say I do not desire—are specifically examples from statutes, not by accident. That’s the point. Now he concludes: “From all that we have said, it has become clear with regard to which transgressions one who does not desire them is better than one who desires them and rules over his soul concerning them, and with regard to which of them the opposite is the case. And this is a marvelous novelty and a marvelous reconciliation between the two statements, and the wording of both statements indicates the truth of what we have explained. And the purpose of this chapter has now been completed.” Here he sums up. What really comes out? It is somewhat opposed to what we saw, because Maimonides says that in the rational commandments—not in statutes but in commandments—there it is preferable specifically that you not have an inclination against the Torah, that your natural inclination should be aligned with the Torah. But we saw that in all commandments the value of someone who fulfills a commandment—the religious value of the act—comes from the fact that you do it because of the command, not because of intellectual conviction. If you do it because of intellectual conviction, because that is your natural inclination—not good; you need to do it because of the command, right? That’s what Maimonides said. Here he says not necessarily; rather, there is value in your natural reason, your natural inclination, taking you to do these things—not that you should impose the obligation of command upon your natural inclinations. If I had an inclination to do this thing, then I wouldn’t do it because I’m obligated—but why is it better not to have that inclination? Why? Ostensibly what comes out from Maimonides here is that in the rational commandments, your motivation for doing them should be that your natural soul wants to do good; that is the complete person. The person who forces his inclination and nevertheless does good is a less complete person. But above we saw not that way. The whole idea—what turns this thing into a commandment as opposed to just a good act? A good act is determined by the question of what you do. If it is a good act, then it is a good act. But when does it receive religious value? It receives religious value when you do it because of the command, not because of your natural inclination to do good, but because that is the command. Here it ostensibly says the opposite. After all, my motivation for doing—say, I also don’t want to kill people, let’s say. I know that if I were to want to kill people, assume there were a situation where I wanted to kill people, I wouldn’t do it because I’m commanded. But the fact that I don’t want to kill right now is good—but at the end of the day, the line that stops me is the command. You’re saying—I’ll rephrase what you’re saying; I agree. What you’re basically saying is this: Maimonides in the Eight Chapters is not talking about the question of what my motivation is in doing it. He’s not talking about motivation; he’s talking about the question whether I have an inclination or don’t have an inclination. He is not talking about whether that inclination is the motivation because of which I do the act. And then it comes out like this: the motivation always has to be the command. That’s the motivation. But now, there is still room to discuss—fine, I do it because of the command, whether I have an inclination or not. Now there is another question: is someone who has an inclination and overcomes it better than someone who has no inclination at all? This has nothing to do with the question why you do it; both do it because of the command. It has nothing to do at all—whether there was an inclination or not, they would do it because they are obligated to the command. Still, there is room to discuss whether having an opposite inclination inside you makes you a less virtuous person, less complete. That’s a different question. Exactly, I agree completely. And therefore Maimonides’ words here do not contradict his words there. I’ll say more than that: one could have reconciled it in another way. After all, we saw that Maimonides here speaks about the rational commandments, where there is value in your naturally inclining to do them; the non-rational commandments, not. So it could be that everything Maimonides spoke about in the sources we saw was only about the non-rational commandments, and here he is speaking about the rational commandments, and then there is no contradiction at all. But that cannot be right. Why? It cannot be right because Maimonides in Laws of Kings, which is one of the sources we saw, is speaking specifically about these commandments. What are the seven Noahide commandments? Maimonides says these are commandments to which reason inclines. Commandments of morality and logic and reason, and so on. And about them he said that if you do it because of intellectual conviction, then you are not one of the pious of the nations of the world but one of their wise men. It has no religious value. He says this about rational commandments, not non-rational commandments—the commandments with which the children of Noah are obligated. Okay? Therefore one cannot say that the sources we saw in Maimonides until now simply deal with non-rational commandments and here he is speaking about rational ones. No. And therefore there is no choice but to say what you said earlier: that there is no contradiction even regarding the rational commandments. The motivation to do them has to be because of the command. The question whether there is value in my also having a natural inclination to do good—Maimonides says yes, you are a more complete person if you also have a natural inclination to do good. But if you ask me why I do it, I do it because of the command. The indication would be: what would happen if one bright morning I woke up and my heart had turned over and now I had an inclination to do evil? I would still do the good because I am obligated to the command. In such a case, even if I have a natural inclination to do good, it is considered worship of God, because I know that even without it I would do it because I am obligated to the command. And this is a question in philosophy of action: what happens if you have a double motivation to do something? You do something because you have a natural inclination to do it, and also because of obligation to command. So what is the real motive? There are, for example, passages in Ketubot that discuss what happens if, say, I threaten you with a gun to do something that you wanted to do anyway. Are you considered coerced or not? Did you fulfill a commandment or not fulfill a commandment? Say you did it under coercion. So the claim, I think, should be: if I would have done it even without the coercion, then it doesn’t matter that there is coercion, because I am doing it because I wanted to do it. What? I might not even know. Someone can put a gun to my head while I’m going—I don’t know—to take the lulav. I’m going to take the lulav, someone puts a gun to my head, and silently decides to himself: if he doesn’t go take the lulav, I’ll kill him. Fine? I don’t even know about it. I go and take the lulav because that is what I wanted to do. So because there is a gun to my head, is it not a transgression? Is it not a commandment? Not reasonable. So now if he tells me that, then what? So he says it—so what? I would have done it anyway. What difference does it make whether he says it or not? Therefore the simple logic says—there it’s not quite so simple—but the simple logic says that this is determined by the question what you would do without the threat. If you do it because of the threat, then the act was done under coercion. But if you would do it even without the threat, then even if you did it under threat, it is your act. So what if someone threatened you? And here too, the same thing. Your natural inclination causes you to do it—that’s true. We do it also because of the natural inclination, obviously. But the criterion will be: what would happen if I didn’t have that inclination, or one morning I woke up with a different inclination? Would I still do it? That means I do it because of the command, even though generally I also have the inclination and really do it because of that as well. But this is essentially a double motive. I have a double motive here, and if I would do it even without the inclination, then it doesn’t matter that I also have the inclination; that’s fine—it counts as a commanded act in every respect. Okay. Yes, that’s the Aglai Tal, which we already saw, basically. Okay, so these are things regarding the meaning of command. What are we really seeing here? We are seeing here that the basic motivation we are supposed to have in worship of God, in fulfilling commandments or refraining from transgressions, is the command. The command of the Holy One, blessed be He, basically constitutes the value of the commandment, and it is supposed to be the motivation because of which I act. Then it has religious meaning. In the same way, in the context of morality too, this is the case. Someone who does moral acts because it seems nice to him is not a moral person. Only if he does it because he is obligated to moral principles. That doesn’t mean you now have to work on yourself so that it won’t feel nice to you to act morally; that’s what Maimonides says. On the contrary, someone who has a natural inclination to behave morally is a more complete person. But yes, you need to pay attention that you are not doing it because of the natural inclination, such that if the inclination were absent you wouldn’t do it. No—you need to make sure that you would do it even if the inclination were absent. If that’s true, then even when the inclination is there and you do it because of the inclination, it doesn’t matter, because you would do it even without it. Okay? That’s the point. So this is true both with respect to commandments and with respect to morality. Now this essentially means that in commandments and transgressions there are two aspects. This is what Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman writes in an essay on repentance; he says in the name of the Ramchal that every commandment we fulfill has two positive values. One value is responding to the command. The fact that I am obligated to the command and carry out what I was commanded. The second value is the content itself, meaning the act itself apparently creates something positive; it has some utility, which is why we were commanded concerning it. So let’s call that command and essence. In every commandment there is the command and there is the essence. Say I kept the Sabbath. Keeping the Sabbath apparently creates some positive value, which is why we were commanded to keep the Sabbath. So if I kept the Sabbath, I actually fulfilled two positive things: I responded to the command, meaning I was obligated to the command and acted accordingly—that is the dimension of command in the commandment—and there is the content dimension: if I kept the Sabbath, then I also brought about the positive results because of which we were commanded to keep the Sabbath. The same when I eat pork. If I eat pork, then I committed a transgression. What is bad about a transgression? There are two bad things. First, I rebelled against the command, I acted in a way not obligated to the command. That’s one bad thing. The second bad thing is that eating pork—why was it forbidden to us? Apparently it creates some problem, creates something negative. So that is the essence. So in every commandment there is essence and command, and in every transgression there is essence and command. Okay? That is Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman’s claim in the name of the Ramchal. For example, he says that someone who intended to eat pork and instead pork didn’t come into his hand but lamb did—the Talmud in tractate Nazir—who is this? This is basically a person for whom, from the standpoint of essence, nothing happened; he ate lamb, everything is fine. But from the standpoint of command, he thought it was pork and he ate it, so here there is rebellion against the command. So here there is violating the command but not the essence, right? What is the opposite case, where there is essence but no command? An inadvertent transgression. He intended to eat lamb and pork came into his hand. The opposite. What happens there? He really wanted to eat lamb; from the standpoint of command he didn’t want to violate the command, he did not rebel against the command. But in practice he ate pork, so he probably brought about the bad consequences. Okay? So here there is the essence but not the command. Inadvertent transgression and someone who intended to eat pork but ended up eating lamb are opposite situations: in one there is command and no essence; in the other there is essence and no command. Okay? He resolves various difficulties with this, not important at the moment, but he makes that distinction between those two things. By the way, Tosafot HaRosh and the Ritva explain in this way the Talmudic statement: greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does. Usually when we ask ourselves why greater is one who is commanded and does—and they themselves say, both Tosafot HaRosh and the Ritva, that the accepted explanation, the one more widely known, is that someone who is commanded has some greater evil inclination not to do it, because we are contrary creatures like that. So if we are commanded to do something, naturally some opposite inclination arises in us, trying to keep us from doing it. Okay? So since that is so, if you overcome the inclination—related to the Maimonides we saw earlier—then you are greater: greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does, because he overcomes the inclination. Okay? Of course there’s another side to the coin, because he is commanded so he also fears the… Okay? The second explanation they bring, in my opinion, is the simplest and most natural one, and yet people don’t know it so well. He says that greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does because when one who is commanded and does performs the commandment, he gains both benefits. He both responds to the command and also brings about the positive result that the commandment produces. In contrast, one who is not commanded and does brings about the positive result, but there is no command upon him; he is not responding to a command. Therefore one who is commanded and does gains two benefits when he performs a commanded act, while one who is not commanded and does gains only one benefit. Therefore the first is greater than the second. It’s just arithmetic: two is greater than one. Fine? You don’t need all kinds of psychologizing explanations about some inclination arising in him and him overcoming it, and things like that—rather dubious explanations. So that is basically an implication of that same distinction I brought in the name of Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman. We see that command gives acts religious value, and essence basically gives them what I’ll call consequential value—not utilitarian, consequential. Yes? There is a positive result to a positive act, a negative result to a negative act, and so that too is a reason to do or not do the act—to prevent the negative result and gain the positive result. The religious value is not received because of that. When you do it in order to achieve positive results or prevent negative results, that is not a commandment for its own sake. You need to do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, or not do it because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded not to do it. Okay? So that is the relation between command and essence. By the way, there is for example the question: why does the Torah write, say, the prohibition against murder? Why do I need a verse? Reason itself would tell me. Right? In several places the Talmud asks: why do I need a verse? Why is a verse necessary? I would have known it by reason even without the verse. It’s a superfluous verse. Why write “Do not steal,” “Do not murder,” “Honor your father and your mother,” all kinds of things that are simple common sense—people keep them even without verses. That is why we also need the whole discussion we saw in Maimonides: what happens if someone does it because of intellectual conviction? Maybe I’ll complete one more point here. I explained that in Maimonides in Laws of Kings he is speaking about commandments to which reason inclines. Fine? And he says that there, greater is one who is commanded and does than one who is not commanded and does. There really are those who wanted to argue—when I made this argument, many argued against me—that maybe Maimonides is speaking only about a resident alien, not about every Jew. For a non-Jew, he must do it because of the command; if he does it because of his natural inclination, then it is not a commanded act. But for a Jew, no, because we have a Jewish spark inside, I don’t know, all kinds of nonsense like that, and therefore for a Jew it is different. But it’s obvious that this is not true. From plain reasoning, Maimonides is speaking both about a non-Jew and about a Jew. Why does he bring this specifically in Laws of Kings, in the discussion of a resident alien, and not, I don’t know, in Laws of Foundations of the Torah? The answer is because in Laws of Kings he is discussing the resident alien, and the resident alien means the seven Noahide commandments. Where is there a sensible place where a person might do something because of intellectual conviction and not because of the command? I don’t know anyone who would redeem a firstborn donkey because of intellectual conviction. That you do because there is a command, right? When is there something that someone might do because of intellectual conviction and not because of the command? In those logical, moral commandments that also exist for the children of Noah. Therefore it appears in Laws of Kings—not because Maimonides is speaking specifically about a non-Jew, but because the type of commandments involved there are the commandments in which there could be a possibility of doing it because of intellectual conviction and not because of the command. Okay? So I return to the question once again: then basically all these commandments—for what purpose did the Torah write them? Simple reason. And I’ll prove it to you, for example, regarding “Do not murder.” After Cain murders Abel, the Holy One, blessed be He, comes to him and says: “Where is Abel your brother? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.” And then He decrees his punishment—“You shall be a wanderer and vagabond in the earth,” and so on. What’s the problem? There had not yet been any command forbidding murder. There was no “Whoever sheds human blood, by man shall his blood be shed,” certainly no “Do not murder,” there was nothing. What does the Holy One, blessed be He, want from Cain? Because clearly a person is expected to understand by reason, even without command, that murder is forbidden. Not only is he expected to understand it—if he violated it, he gets punished. Meaning, it is expected of a person to behave this way to such an extent that it even justifies imposing a sanction if he doesn’t; it’s not just some pious trait not to murder, okay? Even without the command. So why is a command needed? If all this was clear before the command, then why do we need a command? The answer is simple. Because you need to add to the prohibition of murder the dimension of command beyond the dimension of essence. Reason says that murder is bad because the result is a problematic result. You took a human life. Okay? I would know that by reason. For that, no verse is needed. The verse does not come to teach me that murder is bad. That I know by myself. The verse comes to turn murder into a halakhic prohibition. I turn murder into a halakhic prohibition. Now someone who murders is both a moral criminal, because he violated the essence, he did an evil act, and also a religious criminal, because he violated the command—there is a prohibition, “Do not murder.” So the verse does not need to introduce any content beyond what I would know by reason. The verse simply comes to tell me: there is also a command here, not only essence. The essence you would know even without this, and here there is also a command. And now this becomes part of Jewish law. Because now it’s like—we discussed this, I think, at the beginning of the semester, when I talked about, say, if there were no law forbidding running a red light, it would still be problematic to run a red light. It’s dangerous, endangers others, endangers me; it’s a problematic act. So why do we need legislation? Why do I need a verse—reason itself tells me. Everyone understands it, so why do I need a law? Because without a law it wouldn’t be forbidden. It would be an act that is not okay, that is—I don’t know—not advisable to do, perhaps even morally bad, I don’t know exactly. But it wouldn’t be a prohibition, and you wouldn’t be able to punish someone who did it. Because the law, the legislation, turns that thing into part of the binding law. It doesn’t come to tell you that running a red light is bad. That I know by myself. The lawgiver’s purpose is not to tell me facts, not to tell me about the goodness or badness of some act. That I know by myself. The purpose of law is to anchor the understanding I already had and turn it into law, into something binding on the legal level and one that justifies punishment, and so on. In Jewish law too it’s like that. Therefore the question “why do I need a verse—reason itself would tell me” is completely irrelevant in such contexts. If it were only reason, then it would not be a halakhic prohibition. It would be a moral prohibition against murder, not a halakhic prohibition. You could not, for example, give the death penalty for it. Indeed no punishment at all could be given for it. You cannot punish if there is no offense, and in order for there to be an offense there must be a law that determines that this thing is an offense—like the law against running a red light—and therefore you need the command. Fine? So all this is meant to sharpen the point I made earlier: in the whole meaning of command, the meaning of command is basically that the command is what gives validity to the instruction, to the norm. Okay? When I follow the norm, obey it—that is, do what is required or refrain from doing what is forbidden—I am basically responding to the command. I act according to the command; I am obligated to the command. Of course, the command is not arbitrary. Why is murder forbidden? Because murder is evil. Okay? But the need for the command is not to reveal to me that it is evil, but to turn something that is morally evil into something that is also halakhically evil. Okay? And therefore now there is also a prohibition or command forbidding one to do it. I’ll come back to this later when we discuss the relationship between morality and Jewish law. Now of course this brings us back to the question: so there is a command, and the command gives force to the commandments. Why obey the command? So what if there is a command? About that I spoke earlier. I said this is called accepting Him as a god. The question is illegitimate. You ask why obey the command? That is an illegitimate question. Not illegitimate because the command forbids it, but an illegitimate question on the logical level. Why? I’m speaking on the assumption that the command comes from an authoritative source, say God. Okay? So if the command is a command of God, then there is no room for the question why obey the command. One should obey because that is what God commanded. That’s it. That’s the meaning of the concept God. Exactly as with morality, yes. I know that morally murder is forbidden, but why not murder? That’s a meaningless question. Because if you know that morally murder is forbidden, that’s what that statement means. When I say that it is morally forbidden, that means it is not right to do it. It doesn’t mean something else. If you say you know it is morally forbidden, then you have no basis for asking why not do it. That’s what we said here. Okay? Therefore when I ask the question, basically, why obey the command, the only possible answer here is: because. Simply because. That’s all. Because God commanded, that’s all. And why obey what God commanded? Because He is God. So what? Because. Meaning that’s it—because He is God. That’s it. The chain of reasoning stops. Now many times, when people look at this sort of reasoning, it looks like something de— but that’s a mistake. Think about it: if I were to give a reason—yes, the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded; they ask me why obey Him? Because I owe Him gratitude, because He created me, I owe Him gratitude, and therefore what He commands I need to do. Then of course one can continue to ask: why should I show gratitude to someone? And how would I explain that? I don’t know, explain it by something else, give some explanation. And then I’ll be asked about that. And why do I need that thing? Where would this stop, in that infinite regress? How can it stop? If it doesn’t stop, then it means there is no explanation. It has to stop. Where does it stop? At the point that is inherently understood. It does not require justification outside itself to justify itself. There are things that are self-evident, and they begin every chain of reasoning. That’s where a chain of reasoning begins. You begin with something self-evident, something that does not require a prior principle to ground it, but is itself the thing that is clearest and most obvious to me, and on that I build all the other things. Right, that is called justification. Therefore, to say that if I justify something in a way of “because” then it is not rational—if that’s what you claim—then that means there is no rational justification in the world. Because there is no justification in the world that will not eventually stop at some “because.” The whole question is when it is justified to stop at “because.” And the answer is: when you are speaking about a principle that is self-evident, meaning clear in itself, there you can say “because.” If you say “because” about some random arbitrary thing, then that arbitrariness is foolish. Fine? Why do I think that every time you see an air conditioner you have to stand on one leg and say cock-a-doodle-doo? You ask why? Because. It’s an axiom. That’s idiotic. It’s idiotic because it’s not self-evident. It’s not something understood in itself. Okay? But if I begin with something that is self-evident, there is no reason for me to give you a justification for why I adopt it. It is self-evident. Other things that I try to justify—the justification will rest on that thing. Okay? That is what it means to justify. Think about a chain of logical reasoning. In a chain of logical reasoning I always ground a claim on an argument. What is an argument? I have a set of premises, and using logical tools I derive from them some conclusion. Okay? And how do I know the premises? Maybe I derive them from prior premises. And those—how do I know? When does this stop? It stops where I have premises that are self-evident. In geometry there are axioms, right? Through two points there passes one straight line, parallels do not meet, and so on. How do I know that? There isn’t some proof, right? It’s an axiom. So what, then all of geometry is nonsense because the axioms are just an arbitrary matter? Then what do I care that you succeeded in proving a theorem on the basis of the axioms, if the axioms themselves are completely arbitrary? So what does that help me? Is it a game? I really do believe that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. I claim that this is true. Measure and see. Okay? How can that be? Because in my eyes, my premises are true. Therefore, on their basis I can build propositions derived from them. And how do I know they are true, if I have no proof for them? They are self-evident. It’s clear. It’s simply clear that they are true, that’s all. You don’t need to justify something self-evident. You always justify something less clear by means of something clearer. But the thing that is clearest—you have no way to justify it. There is nothing clearer than it. On the contrary, other things you justify by means of it. Okay? Therefore the claim is that when we construct a chain of reasoning for something, it will always stop at some stage with a “because.” And that doesn’t mean you are evading, and it doesn’t mean it is irrational, and it doesn’t mean anything of the sort. It’s unavoidable. There is no way around it. You will always reach some stage that is the “because.” Okay? That basically means—and this is what often confuses people—that there are two types of “because.” There is arbitrary “because.” Yes? You see an air conditioner, you have to stand on one leg and say cock-a-doodle-doo. Why? Because. That is an arbitrary because. It is not because it is clear to me that it is true. It is because I feel like it, because I decided, because I flipped a coin and that’s what came out. Okay? But there is another kind of “because” that has a different meaning. It is “because” that says: it is self-evident. It is simply true in itself, I don’t need prior explanations to ground it. That too is a kind of “because.” Okay? And when I speak about chains of reasoning, they always begin with “because” in the second sense, not in the first. Because otherwise, if you begin with something arbitrary, everything you build on it remains arbitrary. There is no point in building on it at all. If you attribute meaning to that structure, that means your foundation is not arbitrary in your eyes, but self-evident. Okay? Now this brings me, basically, to the concept of value. What is a value? Yeshayahu Leibowitz in a number of places defines value—and I don’t think he was the first, but he perhaps sharpened it in the clearest way—that a value is basically something I have no way to justify. It is not a tool that serves a goal outside itself, but rather the goal that all the other steps we take are meant to serve. Okay? Basically, when I say, for example, don’t drive excessively fast on the road, and they ask why not? It’s bad, not good. Why is it bad? Because it endangers lives. That is a justification. I ask: and why is it bad to endanger lives? Because life has value and must be preserved, not ended. Okay? Why does life have value? Because. There is no better answer. Simply because. If you don’t understand that life has value—it’s self-evident. Meaning, it’s obvious. Okay? So my chain of reasoning stopped at the point where I say “because.” That point is called a value. It is the principle that cannot be reduced or grounded in another principle, that doesn’t need another principle to explain it. The fundamental principle on which, or by means of which, I can explain other things—that’s what is called a value. Therefore, for example, not driving excessively fast on the road is not a value. It is a means. It is a means in order not to endanger lives. Not endangering lives is also not a value. It too is a means, because if I endanger lives, in the end lives may be lost. And that is a value problem, because it is a violation of the value of life. Okay? Meaning the value is always the last link—or the first, depending how you look at it—in the chain of moral or ethical reasoning. The point from which you begin is called a value. Everything else comes to serve the values. When you ask what the value itself serves, when you ask me why this value is correct, what are you really asking? What is this value meant to serve, right? In virtue of what is it correct? The answer is: it doesn’t serve anything. That’s the meaning of value. A value serves nothing. A value is good because of what it is. It does not come to serve anything. Okay? Other things serve values. I explain other things—why one must not do this or must do that—because I point to some value problem that this thing causes or solves, and that is why I justify why it is forbidden to do this or why one needs to do that. Values are the justification. The things I justify are not values; they are instruments. Meaning, according to Leibowitz, a value is defined as something that cannot be grounded in something outside itself. There is no more fundamental principle that explains why this value is correct, because the value does not come to serve anything. So when I carry out a chain of reasoning and end with “because,” what I’m really saying is that the point I have reached is, for me, a value. Right? Obeying a divine command—you ask me why obey a divine command? Because. What does “because” mean? Obedience to God is a value. It is a value, so you cannot ask me for a justification of that value or what this value serves. It serves nothing. Understand that service for its own sake—everything we talked about, serving for its own sake and not for other reasons but only because of obligation to command—that basically means that obedience to the Holy One, blessed be He, is a value. That’s what it means. Therefore there was once a discussion in the yeshiva in Yeruham where I taught, about why study Torah. What good does studying Talmud do, learning… what does it give? Not what does it give me in some self-interested sense. What does it give even spiritually—meaning, what spiritual benefit is there in this matter? And I argued that the whole discussion is misguided from the outset. I am not looking for an answer at all. Why? Because the moment I give you an answer, you will ask me about the answer: and why is that true? Explain that to me. And I will need another answer. Where will it stop? It will stop at that thing which requires no explanation. It is understood in itself. Self-evident. For me, the value of Torah study is self-evident. It is the thing by means of which I will explain other things. There isn’t some other thing that needs to explain it. Okay? So often something like that seems terribly arbitrary, evasive, irrational—but that is not true. On the contrary, the path of rational thought always begins with a principle about which I say “because.” It is correct because it is correct. And now you can begin with logic and derive conclusions from it: such actions are forbidden, such actions are permitted, because they serve such-and-such a value or because they harm some other value. But values themselves, when you ask why they are correct—because. That is value. And this “because” is not in the arbitrary sense—because I feel like it, because I flipped a coin. It is “because” in the essential sense: it is simply true because it is true. Just as through two points there passes one straight line—this is true not because I decided so. True, I have no proof of it, but it is self-evident that it is true; I do not need proof for it. Proof always relies on things that are self-evident. This itself is self-evident; I do not need proof to explain it to me. Okay? So this in fact means that we have reached a definition of the concept of value. A value is something that cannot be grounded in something else; it does not come to serve anything else; it cannot be grounded in anything else. And on the contrary, other things are grounded in values; they come to serve values. That is justification in ethical discussion: the justification for why something is permitted or forbidden is through values. There is no justification for values; there cannot be. If they had a justification, then the first thing that would start the chain of reasoning would be your value, and the thing you explained simply wasn’t a value. That’s all. Now this thing basically tells us something about the concept of value, and it raises all kinds of philosophical problems. But before I get into those problems, I want to speak a bit about kinds of values. There are moral values—that’s usually the context when we speak about values. Human life, property ownership, human dignity, all kinds of values, equality, things like that. Those are ethical values, moral values. But halakhic values are also values. Meaning, if you want to, I don’t know, redeem a firstborn donkey—that’s a value. It’s a value not connected to morality; it’s not moral—it’s a halakhic value. Meaning, one should do it because Jewish law commands it, a kind of “because.” And therefore it is a value. So there are two types of values, at least for now: the moral value and the halakhic value. There are more types of values. Why preserve the sanctity of the priesthood, I don’t know exactly—that’s a religious value in some sense, even if it isn’t halakhic, say. But it’s also not moral. Or there are values one might call aesthetic values. Yes? Jonathan Haidt—you know who he is? A Jewish-American psychologist, very popular in recent years, whose books have also been translated into Hebrew. And he gives examples like this: say you buy a frozen chicken in the supermarket, okay? And then you have sex with it, then cook it and eat it. Sorry for the graphicness, okay? Is there something problematic about that? What’s the problem? Whom did you harm? What? You harmed… everything’s fine, what’s the issue? Another example: the neighbors’ dog got run over—a terrible accident, okay? I go at night, take the dog, cook it, make good soup, and eat it. Is there anything problematic about that? Gross. What is gross? From the English word “gore,” you know that word? Disgusting. Repulsive. Yes, one can call it that. In halakhic language, that’s what’s called “do not make yourselves disgusting” — things that are repulsive. But they don’t harm anyone, they’re not… it’s not that you hurt someone; you didn’t hurt anyone, everything is fine. One might call these aesthetic values, human values, I’m not exactly sure. In Maimonides’ language in chapter 2 of the Guide for the Perplexed, maybe that’s what he means when he talks about conventions. Conventions are socially accepted norms of behavior. So being polite, behaving in a civilized way—that’s not because you’re harming someone; that’s what is accepted in society. So that too is a kind of values. Agree or disagree, but that too is a kind of values that exists in the world. There are halakhic values, there are moral values, there are religious values, and there are aesthetic values or self-fulfillment. That a person should realize his abilities—what is that? Is that a moral value? Why should anyone care whether I realize my abilities or not? That concerns only me. Is someone harmed by it? Is it anyone else’s business? No. It also doesn’t belong to aesthetic values. Nothing. So what is it? And yet we understand that there is some value there—let’s call it a human value. Yes, a value that says a person ought to behave this way. Fine, this is how you, I don’t know, express the image of God in the best possible way, however you want to put it. But I think most of the world sees self-fulfillment as a kind of value. Right? It’s not a moral value, it’s not an aesthetic value, it’s not a halakhic value. It’s another kind of value; I’m not exactly sure what. But it is something worth doing. It’s not a fact; that’s why I call it a value. It is something spoken of in the language of fitting and not fitting, worthy and not worthy, not in the language of truth and falsehood, but of what is worthy and what is not. A moral value is like that, a religious value is like that, a social-aesthetic value is like that, and a human value is like that too. Okay? It’s a collection of all sorts of kinds of values. There are the guild rules of the Bar Association. Or, I don’t know, the ethics of a gang of robbers—it’s about the same thing. Meaning, both of those are systems of norms that include various values, not necessarily moral values, but these are the values accepted in that guild. Okay? So these are different kinds of values. What characterizes all these kinds of values? That they are all collections of principles that you cannot ground in something else, and also need not. Meaning, you assume they are self-evident, obvious. This is how one should behave. Other things you explain by means of these values. If they fit those values, don’t fit those values, harm those values, help those values—those will be explanations for what is permitted and forbidden to do, or what one is obligated to do. Okay? But these values themselves have no explanation. You cannot ground them in something outside them. Now this creates for us several problems. For example, let’s think of the example of saving a life on the Sabbath. Fine? Now the dilemma in the Talmud in Yoma is this: you are in a dilemma. On the one hand, you need to keep the Sabbath; on the other hand, you need to save a life. You can’t do both. Meaning, if you save a life, that is desecrating the Sabbath. If you keep the Sabbath, that will harm—well, you won’t save the life. Okay? So we have a conflict. In this conflict, two values clash: the value of life and keeping the Sabbath. Fine? In this case these are two halakhic values, or one moral and one halakhic value, but that’s not important right now. It is a clash between two values. What happens in such a case? You essentially have to decide which value prevails, right? You have no option; whatever you do is some kind of decision. If you don’t desecrate the Sabbath, that is a decision; if you do desecrate the Sabbath, that is a decision; and you can’t just stay on the sidelines quietly and wait. You have to decide what prevails: keeping the Sabbath or the value of life. Okay? So this is essentially a conflict. However, in order to decide a conflict of this sort, I basically need to construct what is called a scale of values. Right? I need to decide whether the value of life stands higher than the value of keeping the Sabbath, or lower. The value that is higher will override the value that is lower. But there it seems as though the value of the Sabbath is the only one making a claim, so why are you setting… We’ll get to that later. We’ll get to that later. Right now I’m using this irrespective of the Talmudic issue, only as a principled example of conflict. Okay? I’ll give you another example, doesn’t matter. Sartre writes in—I think I brought this—he writes in one of his books that a student of his in occupied Paris during World War II came to consult him. His elderly mother was living in Paris, his father had been murdered by the Nazis, and his older brother was collaborating with the Nazis. He was left with his mother, who needed help; she was elderly and somewhat ill. And he was deliberating whether to flee to the Free French army, to de Gaulle, and help him fight the Nazis, or to stay in Paris and help his mother. So this is a value dilemma between the value of fighting evil and the value of helping an elderly mother who needs help. Right? Now here too there is a dilemma, and this has nothing to do with Jewish law; it’s a question of morality. Two moral values clash. You cannot realize both. You now have to decide which one prevails. What do you need to do in order to decide? You need to build a scale and see whether fighting evil stands above helping a sick mother or below it. That is what will determine it. Whatever is higher overrides whatever is lower. Right? Meaning, deciding conflicts requires a scale of values. I need to take the values I believe in and rank them relative to one another on some scale. Okay? However, according to the definition I gave earlier, there is no principled way to produce such a scale. Why? Let’s think, for example, about Sartre’s case. How would I rank these two values? Which is higher and which is lower on the scale? In order to rank them, first I need to weigh each one. To see how much each weighs. Now in what units will I measure that? Are there common units by which I can measure the value of fighting evil and in those same units measure the value of helping one’s mother, and see how many units this is and how many units that is, and then put them on a scale and see which is higher? Right? That’s basically what one would have to do. And for that I need to find a set of universal units capable of measuring all values, assigning each value a score of how many units it is worth, and then place them on the scale according to those values. But there is no such scale. Not only is there no such scale; conceptually there cannot be such a scale. Why not? Because in order to measure this, I am basically asking—for example, if I say, should I study medicine or drive carefully? Then I can say, look, studying medicine will save lives, and driving carefully will also save lives. Right? Now the question is how many lives I’ll save this way and how many lives I’ll save that way. Then I can rank the two things. I have a scale—I might find it hard in practice, but in principle I have a scale by which I can measure the two sides and compare. There has to be a common unit by which I measure both sides and then compare them. Right? So here the unit is how many lives you save. The value is saving lives. And the question is how many lives you save. So you can measure this against that. But that is exactly why it is possible there: because neither side of the alternative is itself a value. They are both actions that realize the value of life. So I measure each such action in terms of the value of life. How much is it worth in terms of saving lives? Then there’s no problem, I can measure it. But the value itself—if I want to measure that, I need to measure it according to how much it serves the purpose for which it is intended. But a value is not there to serve purposes—that’s the definition of value. You can’t ask how much it contributes to a certain goal. It contributes to nothing. It is not there to contribute to something. A value is the goal. The other things are there to serve it. It is not there to serve other things. So you have a clash not between two actions; you have a clash between two values. Keeping the Sabbath and human life, or helping your mother and fighting evil. What do we do? You have no way to measure them against each other, because they have no common measure, no common scale by which you can place them both and then see which is higher. In analytic philosophy this is called the problem of the incommensurability of values. Incommensurable means lack of a common measure. Common measure, yes? In short, incommensurable means there is no common measure. It cannot be measured by a common unit. Okay? So there is no common measure here. Now I want to sharpen the problem involved in incommensurability. Suppose I am deliberating over the question of saving life and the Sabbath. Okay? Which prevails? And now I encounter the problem of incommensurability. What would be the scale on which I place keeping the Sabbath and the value of life and see what each is worth, so I can know which prevails over which? There is no such scale. Right? Now suppose I found a verse. The verse tells me that the value of life prevails over keeping the Sabbath. Suppose that for the sake of argument. Does that help at all? It helps nothing. It helps nothing because the problem is not that I am not smart enough to know the answer and then the verse comes and tells me—the Holy One, blessed be He, is wise; He can tell you the answer that you don’t know. Here the problem is that there is no answer. Not that I am not smart enough to know it. The question is meaningless. It’s like if I ask you what is there more of: goodwill in the Middle East or water in the Indian Ocean? Which is there more of? The question is meaningless. Right? Why is it meaningless? Because the two things are not measured in the same units. You are comparing quantities of different kinds. They are not measured in the same units. So you have no basis for comparison. That is exactly what incommensurable means. There is no common measure that measures both. You can’t compare those two things. Now if there were a verse that said there is more water in the Indian Ocean than goodwill in the Middle East—would that solve the problem? No. Because the problem here is not that I don’t know the answer. There is no answer. Such a verse would simply be nonsense. It would be saying nonsense. A verse also cannot solve the problem here, since this is a question without an answer. It’s not a question whose answer I don’t know. Therefore a verse won’t help in this context either—not to mention morality, where there are no verses. So in fact, because of the definition of value as something that cannot be grounded in something outside itself, something that does not come to serve anything outside itself, a very difficult problem arises here. There is no way to build a scale of values. There is no way to measure which value is worth more and which is worth less. So how does one decide conflicts between values? Now the point is that no rule, no divine decree, no verse you bring me will help. My question is a philosophical one. It is not a question of reveal to me what the decision is. I am asking what meaning there is at all to the concept of decision. It won’t help if there is a verse that tells me which one overrules which. I don’t understand at all how one can speak of which one overrules which. What is the meaning of the concept of decision? It’s like water in the ocean and goodwill. You’re just moving your lips without saying anything. So a verse won’t help me here either. I need to solve a philosophical problem here. After that, if I have a problem—suppose I solved the philosophical problem—now I ask whether to study medicine or to drive carefully. Yes? Then I say: here the philosophical problem doesn’t exist. Both things contribute to saving human life. I can measure them. However, it’s hard for me to measure. I don’t know how many lives I will save if I am a doctor as opposed to how many lives I will save if I drive carefully. Okay? Here a verse could reveal to me where I will save more lives, because I am not smart enough to know but there is an answer. So the Holy One, blessed be He, reveals to me that the answer is this and not that. That’s fine. That is the role of a scriptural decree. That is what a scriptural decree can do. But a scriptural decree cannot answer a clash between values, as opposed to a clash between two actions measured on the same scale, by the same value. And when the clash is between values, there is no meaning to the answer. No verse can help me here. So what does one do? Meaning, there is a serious philosophical problem here. In this context, I don’t know if we still have time for that. I think not. Fine, so let’s stop here and continue next time. I’m arriving precisely at the sugya in Yoma that you mentioned earlier. Fine, let’s stop here. See you. More accurate to call you Rabbi Doctor Alon.