Q&A: Emotional Identification with Fulfilling the Commandments
Emotional Identification with Fulfilling the Commandments
Question
Hello,
You quoted in one of your notebooks Maimonides, who writes (quoting from memory) that if a gentile fulfills the Seven Noahide Commandments based on rational judgment and not out of a desire to carry out God’s command, then he will not receive reward for it.
At first glance, this approach seems to rule out emotion and identification with the commandments. For example, is there a problem if I give charity out of compassion for the poor person and reach a point of identifying with his hardship? Is there a problem if a person does not betray his wife out of an understanding that one should be a moral person and faithful to his wife and to society in general? It is hard to accept that God wants us to do this like robots. That a person should think that it really would have been good to murder his friend who angered him, but because God commanded it he will not do so. There are, of course, many more examples like this regarding rational commandments. But the basic point of the question is clear. So what is the plain meaning of Maimonides?
Answer
He does not write that such a person will not receive reward for it, but rather that he is among the wise of the nations, not among their pious. In my translation: maybe it has value, but not religious value. It is not service of God, because service of God is only out of commitment to the command.
You can challenge this from Maimonides’ own words, in the sixth chapter of the Eight Chapters, where he says that in rational commandments there is greater value in fulfilling them out of identification, whereas in non-rational commandments the opposite is true. And that is exactly your point.
But there is no contradiction at all. I did not say that identification is wrong. On the contrary, it is good and proper to identify (if possible). But the motivation for fulfillment is not the identification, but the commitment. An analogy for this is the introduction to Aglei Tal, where he writes that those who think there is no value in Torah study done with joy and pleasure are mistaken. On the contrary, every morning we ask, “Please make the words of Your Torah pleasant in our mouths, Lord our God.” But he adds that if one studies out of a desire for pleasure and joy, that really is Torah study not for its own sake. The test is whether you would study even when you do not enjoy it and are not happy.
By the way, regarding charity, this is explicit in the Talmud: “on condition that my son will live” or “that I may merit the life of the World to Come.”
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Questioner:
And after I have reached identification, isn’t it better that I fulfill the commandment with the motivation of identification, with commitment serving only as a safety net in case I fall from that level of identification (or do not reach it)?
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Rabbi:
These are word games. When we say that you should fulfill it out of commitment, the meaning is that even if you have no identification, you still fulfill it. We are not dealing here with questions of dosage, to the extent that such questions have any meaning at all.
Let me sharpen it further. One must distinguish between the motivation by virtue of which you do things and what is present in your consciousness at the time you do them. These are two different planes. You can give charity to a poor person and, while doing so, feel great compassion for him, with commitment to God’s command only at the margins. That is what is in your mind at the time of the act. The test for the question of motivation is what you would do if there were no identification or compassion. You are talking about the second plane, while I (and Maimonides) am dealing with the first.