Q&A: Death or Life of a Secular Jew
Death or Life of a Secular Jew
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I am uncertain about the following case: suppose a person is forced either to become secular (say, he undergoes hypnosis and forgets Judaism…) or to die.
Is he obligated to choose death?
Heresy or death?
Traditionalism or death? (By “traditional” I mean someone who respects tradition but is completely non-religious, though he also does not commit prohibitions like idolatry, sexual immorality, and murder).
Answer
There is no difference at all between “traditional” and secular. The question is which transgressions he commits. If you define “traditional” (for some reason that is completely unclear to me and entirely detached from reality) as someone who does not violate idolatry, sexual immorality, or murder, then talk about the transgressions themselves and not about the person. A person is exiled so that he will violate Sabbath desecration, not one of the three severe prohibitions.
First, even regarding the three severe prohibitions, it seems to me that in such a case there is no obligation to choose death, since the transgression he does is done under coercion. True, regarding the law of one who places himself into a situation of coercion, the medieval authorities (Rishonim) disagreed around that case of “that infant whose hot water was spilled,” Eruvin 67, and apparently according to all opinions it is at most coercion. Yet with the three severe prohibitions one must give up one’s life even for a transgression done under coercion. But under hypnosis it is worse than coercion (there is no act of transgression here at all), and it is similar to someone who is thrown onto an infant, about whom Tosafot wrote that there is no obligation to move himself aside and give himself up to death in order to save the infant.
As for the other prohibitions, there is a dispute between Tosafot and Rashba (so the Beit Yosef claims; this is not agreed upon, and Rabbi Yisraeli wrote an article about this in one of the early issues of Tehumin) regarding someone whose daughter was seized by gentiles for apostasy (to raise her as a gentile): is there an obligation to desecrate the Sabbath to save her, or not? I do not remember, however, whether they are speaking specifically about the three severe prohibitions, because as far as I recall, for some reason this is about life itself as a gentile, which is like spiritual life-threatening danger, and the dispute is whether this is considered like physical life-threatening danger or not.
This reminds me of an amusing dialogue by the logician Raymond Smullyan (which I also mentioned in my books), in which a person asks God to take away his free will in order to remove his moral responsibility. Then God asks him whether that very request itself does not impose moral responsibility on him.
Discussion on Answer
Heresy is not idolatry. Idolatry is ritual worship, whereas heresy is an intellectual outlook. The rule of “be killed rather than transgress” does not apply to heresy, because even if they force me, I believe what I believe. They can force me to do something, but not to think something. And if they hypnotize me, then it is not I who think this, but my captive consciousness. Only actions are problematic, and about that I wrote that this is something less than coercion.
A secular person is not exempt from either a positive commandment or a prohibition; he is obligated to observe all the commandments. But if he is still secular and performs them, he has not fulfilled a commandment, and in my view he also has not committed a transgression. That is not relevant here, because he is making the decision now as a religious person. After the hypnosis he is neither religious nor secular; he is not a person at all (in the sense of a being who makes decisions and is responsible for them).
Let’s set aside the coercion through hypnosis for a moment; that was only a way of setting up the case.
Is heresy really not idolatry?
Doesn’t the Rabbi have some article about how a secular person is בכלל exempt from positive commandments and prohibitions?