Answer

First, according to Maimonides (Principle 1 and the beginning of the Laws of Rebels), this is rooted in “do not deviate,” and the question does not arise. The difficulty in what you write exists only according to Nachmanides (in his glosses to Principle 1), who disagrees with Maimonides. Moreover, even according to Maimonides one can ask: even if it is written in the Torah as “do not deviate,” what obligates me to obey the Torah? So what if my ancestors obligated themselves at Mount Sinai? I do not want to. Do I have a moral obligation to obey? Rabbi Shimon Shkop deals with this in Gate 5, and argues that the basis of our obligation to the Torah itself is our commitment by virtue of reason; and in this way he explains that any reasoning that emerges from reason is binding, for even what is written in the Torah binds us by virtue of reason, and the mouth that prohibited can prohibit again.
I understand this obligation differently from you. It is not a moral obligation but a legal one. You are part of society, and as such what it decides is as though you decided it, and therefore you must stand by your decisions. As long as you are part of society, those decisions obligate you (not always morally, but always legally). Of course, once you decide that you are not part of it, it no longer obligates you.
As long as we are part of the community that is obligated to Jewish law, just as we obligated ourselves to observe Jewish law itself as part of the community that obligated itself at Sinai, so too we are obligated to the decision of the legislators of that community. They speak in our name.
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Questioner:
For the sake of the discussion, let us assume Nachmanides is right.
Even if we say there is a legal obligation here, what obligates me to the legal system? Regarding moral obligation, I have an intuitive understanding that I am obligated by it, but regarding legal obligation I have no such understanding. I also do not really understand the concept of “legal obligation.”
You wrote: “Of course, once you decide that you are not part of it, it no longer obligates you.” Is there any obligation to decide that you are part of it?
As for the community that is obligated to Jewish law, after all the obligation is toward the Holy One, blessed be He, and not toward society. Before I am obligated to the legislators (rabbinic law), I am obligated to the Holy One, blessed be He (Torah law). Therefore, it would seem to me that one should put on tefillin on the second festival day of the Diaspora, for example (despite the rule that the Sages can suspend a positive commandment through passive nonperformance). And what if the Sages had ruled that they could abolish all the commandments as they wished? Would we then also be obligated to them?
 
A current example of a clash between rabbinic and Torah law is the words of the Rebbe of Gur at a conference against the “dangers of technology”:
“In conclusion, the rabbinical judge, the eminent Rabbi Naftali Nussbaum, read out the well-known regulations in the Hasidic community, and ruled that someone whose parents have non-kosher devices is not obligated in honoring father and mother and is forbidden to visit them.”
Even if I were a Gur Hasid, who believes that the Rebbe has the power to enact regulations, I would still ask myself: to whom am I more obligated, to the regulations or to the Holy One, blessed be He?
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Rabbi:
The obligation is to the Holy One, blessed be He, but the one who undertook it is the public. And I am obligated as part of the public that undertook it. This is not an obligation to the public, of course. As long as I belong to it, I am obligated and bound. The Holy One, blessed be He, expects us to stand by our commitment, but each person will decide whether that suits him or not.
And that is the obligation to the legal system. According to my suggestion, this is not an obligation to society but an obligation of a different kind. When I committed myself (as part of society), I must stand by it. This is a demand of the person as a person, not toward another person. If it were an obligation to society, then it would have a moral basis, but I do not think law can be grounded in morality. Attempts to do so are not at all convincing to me (see any book on legal theory). Essentially, this is a kind of categorical imperative.
By the way, in my opinion most people do have such an intuition. When you ask them and they do not know how to answer, all sorts of rationalizations arise that ground it in morality.
Perhaps there is a practical implication of what I am saying in the question whether one is obligated to obey the law when it harms no one. I claim yes. See my discussion of the categorical imperative in Notebook 4. But if the reasoning is moral (as is commonly held, unlike Kant, who grounds morality too as a categorical imperative), then apparently not. Notice that according to Kant, morality is not an intuition on which one can ground legal obligation; rather the opposite: moral obligation is based on a legal intuition.
Something like this I describe in my article on ontic and moral gratitude.
As for the obligation to the Sages, clearly it draws its force from the command of the Holy One, blessed be He, but that command made us into a people and around it we were consolidated, and as such it is the source of the law’s validity. And now by virtue of it the Sages have authority to determine things for all of us. If they overstep and it appears to the public that they are not acting in its name, the obligation lapses. Meanwhile, we have not decided to throw them out, and most of us probably feel that they have not exceeded their authority.
 
 
As for the matter of the Rebbe of Gur: when the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself tells us to obey, there is no contradiction. If the Rebbe of Gur were to say not to obey the Holy One, blessed be He, one must not listen to him. But regulations are part of Jewish law. It is like someone who stipulates on condition that the Sabbatical year not cancel my debt to you—that condition is void—versus on condition that it not cancel my debt during the Sabbatical year—which is valid. And certainly in a case like the one you brought, where the Rebbe of Gur did not even enact a regulation but interpreted Jewish law itself to say that one need not honor wicked parents (there is, by the way, a dispute among the medieval authorities on this), and he merely explained who counts as wicked in our day. Here there is no clash at all.
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Questioner:
According to your words, I understand that there are three types of obligation: religious, moral, and legal.
Now the question is what happens when there is a clash between obligations that come from different sources. I assume religious obligation is the highest. But regarding a clash between a moral obligation and a legal obligation, what would the answer be?
In addition, from this analysis it follows that the prohibition against putting on tefillin on the second festival day of the Diaspora stems from a legal obligation, whereas on the other hand, the obligation to put on tefillin on the second festival day of the Diaspora stems from a religious obligation. Seemingly, according to this, it would appear that one should put on tefillin on the second festival day because the religious obligation is stronger, no?
 
In addition, what is the source of the validity of legal obligation according to your view, if you do not ground it in morality?
 
By the way, regarding the Rebbe of Gur, the Shulchan Arukh ruled in accordance with Maimonides, that even if the parents are wicked one is obligated to honor them.
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Rabbi:
1. A halakhic obligation is like a legal obligation, except that it is directed toward the halakhic system.
2. The question of conflict exists even apart from me. The fact that morality obligates obedience to the legal system does not mean that it will always prevail over the legal directive. Exactly as according to those who hold that morality obligates obedience to Jewish law, Jewish law still overrides morality (at least in the accepted conceptions).
3. Questions of conflict also exist within morality itself, and there is no simple way or algorithm to decide. I wrote about this in the third book of the quartet, Human as Grass. In the meantime the theory has been developed further (and I will probably explain it in the third book of the theological trilogy).
4. As I explained, both the prohibition against putting on tefillin on the intermediate days of a festival and the obligation come from religious obligation (whose foundation is a legal obligation toward Jewish law).
5. I do not accept the claim that religious obligation is stronger than others. Everything depends on the context. The Hazon Ish spoke about the fifth section of the Shulchan Arukh, by which he meant that sometimes the will of God in morality overrides a clear halakhic ruling. And likewise regarding a transgression for the sake of Heaven. And likewise from the words of the author of the Akedat Yitzhak regarding the institutionalization of prostitution, and various other examples.
6. Why does legal obligation need a source? It is a foundational principle, like the principle at the base of moral obligation. After all, if I do not ground one in the other, then clearly each of them is based on a separate principle. Every chain of reasoning ends with a principle that cannot be justified. One intuitively senses that it is correct. So it is with morality, and so it is with law.
7. As for the obligation to honor a wicked father, these matters are well known and ancient. By the way, even according to Jewish law, honoring him after his death does not exist according to some opinions. The words of the Rebbe of Gur really do require halakhic scrutiny, and perhaps that itself proves that his intention was to enact a regulation and not merely to interpret, as I wrote earlier. Or perhaps he does not mean there is no obligation to honor them, but that if honoring them will lead us to stumble, there is no obligation to do so (“Every man shall fear his mother and his father, and you shall keep My Sabbaths”). But I really do feel embarrassed to defend such nonsense and explain it.
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Questioner:
Following up on this question, I recall that in one of your recorded lectures you argued regarding the Jewish law that worms that originated inside the fruit are permitted, that this is a law based on an error (that worms are generated from fruit; see the attached image from Nadav Shnerrb’s book on the weekly Torah portion, “Keren Zavit”), and therefore the law is void and the worms are forbidden. But this seems to contradict your statements that we accepted the authority of the Sages and the Talmud even in places where they were mistaken. If you say that where it is clear to us that they were mistaken (as with lice on the Sabbath, for example), then the law is not in accordance with the Sages, perhaps that opens the door to voiding regulations whose reason no longer applies, or other laws that do not seem correct?
 
In addition, if we say one must be stringent regarding worms that “originated in the fruit,” it follows that eating figs nowadays becomes very complicated halakhically (see the link on Kosharot: ⁠⁠⁠http://www.kosharot.co.il/show_bama.asp?id=61849). It does not seem reasonable to me that the Sages understood that this is how one should act before eating a fig. Perhaps if the Sages had known that there is no such reality as worms being generated from inside fruit, they still would not have brought about a situation in which a fig requires extremely careful inspection before eating it (one of the seven species), because it seems very unlikely that this is what the Torah intended. If I had to interpret the Torah’s intention regarding the prohibitions of worms and creeping creatures, I would interpret it to mean that the entire prohibition applies only to intentional eating—for example, Thai worm soup—but not when the worms are inside a fruit in a small quantity and there is no intention to eat the worm, only the fruit. That would be similar to an inevitable result one does not want, or to an impaired taste. What do you think about that?
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Rabbi:
When a rabbinic enactment is based on an error, it is automatically void. This is not a case of the reason lapsing, but of a “mistaken transaction.” Had the Sages known what we know, they would never have enacted it in the first place. After all, this is not a mistake that came into being in our time; it existed in their time too, except that they did not know it. The lapse of a reason is when reality changed, not when our knowledge of reality increased.
Your reasoning regarding the prohibition of eating worms when it is unavoidable has merit (“the Torah was not given to ministering angels,” “its ways are ways of pleasantness,” etc.), though I hesitate whether that is enough to permit it. One could expand it according to the principle of possible but unintended, or impossible and intended (Pesachim 25), and I believe the Arukh HaShulchan explicitly discusses lack of intention in the eating of worms (and perhaps it depends on the dispute among the halakhic decisors in Orach Chayim, section 316, regarding a doubtful inevitable result; see Biur Halakhah there). But this reasoning is new, and it cannot explain the Sages’ own determination. You are only claiming that the determination is indeed void, but that there is room to permit for another reason.
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Questioner:
I recall that you said in one of the recorded lectures that even where the Sages were mistaken, we are still obligated by their ruling, similar to a law enacted by the Knesset, where even if the law is mistaken we are still bound by it. If so, why specifically here do you see the error as a “mistaken transaction,” but in other places where the Sages erred you would still say that we are obligated by the ruling?
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Rabbi:
I was speaking only about a factual mistake. When it is a halakhic mistake, it is binding, but with regard to facts it is not. There is no authority regarding facts (either they are true or they are not). There is authority regarding norms (that is, one can require us to act according to incorrect norms solely because of considerations of authority).
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Questioner:
Do you mean that only where the halakhic mistake is stringent is it binding? Or also when we are dealing with halakhic mistakes that lead to leniency in Jewish law, according to the actual truth—are we then also bound by the mistake? And if so, why? After all, when the words of the Rabbi and the words of the student conflict, whose words does one obey?
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Rabbi:
I think that even lenient mistakes are binding, because the ruling of the Talmud is binding. However, in such a case one could say that it is proper to be stringent, because ultimately the halakhic truth is different (which does not happen in the opposite case).
As for the reasoning of “the words of the Rabbi,” the Rabbi also said in “do not deviate” to listen to the Sages and accept the ruling of the public (on the authority of the Talmud).
This is very similar to the words of the author of the Derashot HaRan, who asks how they instruct a rebellious elder to obey the religious court when he knows they are mistaken (the assumption is that a rebellious elder who thinks they are mistaken is probably right, since this is someone qualified to issue rulings; at the very least, he himself must assume they are mistaken). After all, the mistake will cause him spiritual harm (at least according to those who hold that sins cause harm by nature)? And he answers that “do not deviate” is also a transgression, so not obeying them also causes harm.
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Questioner:
I thought of an idea that may explain the obligation to the Talmud:
The obligation to the words of the Sages is born from the fact that the obligation to keep the commandments was imposed first and foremost on the people of Israel as a people (and not on each individual as an individual), and from that, the collective understanding of the people regarding the Torah is the path that obligates the individual, even where the individual disagrees with that understanding. And in our day, the people understand the Torah in accordance with what is said in the Talmud, and the people see the Talmud as the correct interpretation of the Torah. Therefore, even if the individual disagrees with this view, he is still obligated to the collective understanding. This is also the difference between moral obligation and halakhic obligation: moral obligation is individual (each person is obligated according to how he understands morality, and not according to how society understands morality), while halakhic obligation is collective.
What do you think of this idea?
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Rabbi:
That is somewhat like what I myself wrote above. However, I think the public does not necessarily assume that the Talmud is correct, but rather sees it as binding. That is not exactly the same thing. And in any case, principles like these are sweeping and too general, and therefore there will be cases in which one may depart from them. The collective understanding has weight, but there are other principles that enter the balance when deciding what we should do. When the public decision is obviously mistaken, or obviously harmful, then with all due respect to this model, I will not necessarily obey it. Beyond that, the collective understanding is formed by all the understandings of the individuals, and I too am one of those individuals. Therefore I must necessarily formulate a position of my own and contribute it to the overall balance. If I always act according to a statistical survey of what the majority thinks, then I will never be able to formulate a position of my own.