See here in the correspondence:

מלאכה שנעשתה בשבת על ידי דאיסט

I identify with you!

In my opinion, even someone who believes at low percentages should continue to maintain a religious lifestyle because of Pascal’s wager. True, if we’re talking about very tiny percentages, then that argument no longer applies. But on the order of magnitude of 10%, this is a meaningful percentage. By way of illustration, there is a concept in economics called expected value. If I can make a bet that with a 10% chance will yield me a gain of X and with a 90% chance will yield me a loss of Y, then the expected value (a concept parallel to life expectancy) is: 0.1X-0.9Y. In a case where X is significantly greater than Y (“One hour of bliss in the World to Come is better than all the life of this world”), then the bet is very worthwhile, and therefore rational.

Beyond that, even regarding someone who doesn’t fully believe in the giving of the Torah, that doesn’t mean he isn’t subject to normative obligations, since even before the giving of the Torah the Holy One, blessed be He, had expectations of human beings (for example, of Cain not to murder his brother, and of the generation of the Flood not to rob). That is, moral and legal obligations are still valid, and a person can and must serve the Holy One, blessed be He, through them.

Oren, yes, I completely agree with you! That’s what I do 🙂
Aharon, I identify too. Thanks for Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach there. I didn’t know that source.
But I’m not sure the tradition is quite so far-fetched. After all, even if it isn’t certain that one must or should add an entity to explain the world—God—still, this world is so unique that it isn’t far-fetched that someone created it. (Fine-tuning, soul, free will. As long as something exists, it’s preferable to posit the most basic entity. Order in creation. Law-like order in creation. Signs of intelligence in creation. The fit between souls and bodies. Emotions. A doubt regarding morality. A significant doubt regarding objective meaning. An intuitive sense of a Creator. How can it be that an entity that doesn’t exist would cause such an effect in the world—even in this correspondence right now… and so on.) So although I don’t think one should infer from this that there is a Creator, it’s absolutely not far-fetched to me that there is one. It’s even a little logical.
 
On the possibility that there is a Creator, I really don’t seriously understand a deistic approach, only a theistic one. Obviously He can do everything perfectly (certainly relative to the current situation), except for creating someone with free will, so there is a special reason to create him lacking.
Also, only a dualistic reality is apparently the reason for creation, because it is essentially different from a materialistic reality. So apparently this planet is the goal (or a similar planet as well) more than all the other galaxies.

You have a revelation that claims an experience with lots of commandments, anti-mythical. So it fits the a priori idea above. (It’s not far-fetched to hear about it.) A national revelation after the people already existed (so that it’s not mythological) claims that those who received the revelation were stubborn (I don’t know anyone who would persuade his people to rebel), a national-level tradition interwoven throughout the Hebrew Bible as well (many writers in many periods), and also a father-to-son tradition at the level of commandment observance. A very difficult Torah and very unusual ideas for the time, like the Sabbatical year, the Jubilee, freeing slaves, opening one’s hand to the poor, the prohibition of interest. Sacrifices only in one place. Sabbath. Hakhel. Pilgrimage festivals.
There is also a claim of a continuation of many prophets until the Second Temple period.

I know that in the Second Temple period there were very wise people who were willing to give their lives for this,
and Judaism survived according to the prophecies; exile is very hard to predict in advance, certainly when it is foretold ahead of time.
There are many smart Jews with lots of influence in the world.
The exile was very unusual,
there was the Holocaust—an event very bizarre and surprising; if the Jews are so bad then kill the people, but why the books too… a sign that this is a deep attitude against Judaism.

National revival in a state. And the revival of the language.

There are also various archaeological discoveries, but happy is he who relies on them. (Like the entry of monotheistic and religious settlers from across the Jordan into the Land of Israel at the period dated to the Exodus from Egypt.) But almost everyone has opposite interpretations.

In any case,
from all the above and more, I think it isn’t far-fetched that Judaism is true at about 10%, maybe more, but also not really less.

The problem with Pascal’s wager is that it assumes that observing commandments in this way has religious value (and saves one from punishment and grants reward), and that is not so. If such observance has no value, then the calculation underlying the wager collapses entirely.

I don’t mean from the angle of reward and punishment, but from the essential angle of defect and praise in reality (like if you tell a dying person to press a button that with a 1% chance will destroy all humanity, and with a 99% chance will give him a million dollars for the rest of his life—I think the rational and moral choice would be not to press the button).

Even defect and praise in reality depend on the question of whether there is a commandment. If you keep Sabbath for Ahad Ha’am’s reasons, you have not repaired reality (except perhaps on a human moral level). That’s why I wrote that this has no religious value.
Obviously, if we are talking about a simple consequential act, then expected-value calculations are relevant, but commandments are not simple consequential acts.
Although I distinguished between two aspects of a commandment, obedience and benefit (and in a transgression, rebellion and harm), even the benefit depends on whether there is a commandment, not on the mere performance of the act.
Something like this was discussed by the halakhic decisors regarding a baby nursing from a non-Jewish woman (see Ketubot 60, “a baby may continue nursing,” and the Shulchan Arukh Yoreh De’ah and its commentaries): when the baby is in a life-threatening situation and is permitted to nurse, does the spiritual harm still occur or not? One could elaborate on this a great deal. A bit of it appears in a brief opinion piece I wrote here:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%9B%D7%AA%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%94%D7%A0%D7%96%D7%A7-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%9B%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%AA-%D7%97%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%A6%D7%AA-%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%A4%D7%A1%D7%97-%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%94/

I think that as far as the bottom line is concerned, these doubts (whether or not there is religious value in observance made conditionally) won’t change the result of the cost-benefit calculation. At most, it will be another factor in the expected-value calculation, and the expected value will drop accordingly because of that factor. But since we are still talking about a high expected value, it shouldn’t fall below the threshold of worthwhileness—unless this is a doubt in which an overwhelming majority of the chances lean to the side where there is no religious value to observance under uncertainty.

I didn’t understand the claim. If there is no religious value to such commandment observance, then in the cost-benefit/profit calculation the value of observing the commandment is 0. Therefore it doesn’t matter what he thinks the probability is that there is a God, since in the expected-value calculation that probability is multiplied by 0.

Is that also true regarding refraining from prohibitions? The Rabbi mentioned it briefly here, and expanded elsewhere.

My claim (which is not accepted by everyone) is that even the transgressions of someone who does not believe have no significance, not only his commandments.

The point is that there is some chance that there is religious value to observing commandments in such a way, so when calculating expected value one should multiply that chance by the expected gain. If it is a negligible chance, then indeed the expectation goes to zero, but if I understood the spirit of your words, we are talking about an evenly balanced doubt, in which case the expectation remains significant and above the threshold of worthwhileness.

Oren, I really don’t understand you!

Suppose we have a scale, from 100% believer to 0% believer.

Suppose there is no middle definition (agnosticism), and suppose a believer is defined as someone who believes at 51%.

Gedaliah (the questioner) says he believes at 10%, and so he is halakhically defined as a heretic.

Now he comes to ask Pascal whether to keep commandments. Pascal obligates him. Gedaliah is willing to observe.
The problem is that even if he does, his observance has no value at all, not even 10%! Since he is defined as a heretic, and the commandment-observance of a heretic has no value whatsoever! He is willing to observe, but his observance has no meaning!

You can perhaps discuss refraining from transgressions. Suppose the probability that Rabbi Michi is correct in equating prohibitions with positive commandments is 50%, then you could combine the probability that the Torah is true with the probability that Rabbi Michi is mistaken (using Bernoulli’s formula for conditional probability), and thereby obligate him at least to refrain from prohibitions.

Rabbi, am I right?

One more thing, a sociological note.

The phenomenon of non-believers who cannot manage to free themselves from Haredi society is very widespread. The society has succeeded in trapping them in cords of dependence, and they are unable to leave.
Gedaliah didn’t give enough details about himself, but I assume that’s the case.
The researcher Menachem Friedman, in his book The Haredi Society, argues that the fact that the Haredi public blocks the exits and keeps such people within it constitutes a danger of collapse for Haredism. They are a fermenting element and threaten the group’s stability and cohesion over time.

You wrote that his observance has no value at all, but that isn’t so certain. It may be that even such observance has value. This is a doubt, just like the doubt regarding belief. Now one has to try to estimate the percentages of doubt for each side, and put that into the expected-value calculation.

What does it mean, “it may be” that the observance has value?

If Jewish law says it has no value, are you saying “it may be that Jewish law is mistaken”?

Or did you find a dispute within Jewish law?

I didn’t understand.

Dear Gedaliah, read the article by Bible scholar Baruch Schwartz on the meaning of the giving of the Torah, and you’ll discover that according to many scholars, belief in a divinely-given Torah as we know it did not exist in the days of the prophets—not the Sinai revelation and not the 613 commandments. And nevertheless Jeremiah and Isaiah, Hosea and Amos and many others demanded that people keep God’s commandments and respond to His will. It follows, so he concludes, that the fundamentals of faith may depend on modes of thought, while responsiveness to God’s command precedes them by a great deal. How so? Read it there and enjoy. Stay strong, Gedaliah. Your commandment-observance is precious and important, and rules written in a book are not what should decide for you what is right and what is not

Aharon, I’ll quote the Rabbi’s words from earlier:
“The problem with Pascal’s wager is that it assumes that observing commandments in this way has religious value (and saves one from punishment and grants reward), and that is not so. If such observance has no value, then the calculation underlying the wager collapses entirely.”
That is, there is a question here whether commandment observance motivated by Pascal’s wager has religious value or does not have religious value. That is a question whose answer may be positive or negative. Let’s define the probability of a positive answer as P and the probability of a negative answer as Q. Suppose the expected value before this argument was raised was X; after raising this argument it becomes X*P. As long as P is not zero, since X is very large, the product XP still remains large enough to be above the threshold of worthwhileness.

Hello Gil,

I didn’t understand what Gedaliah believes in and what he doesn’t.

It’s nice that you’re encouraging him. I’d be glad if you could give a link here to the article you mentioned.

As for your point itself—I really didn’t understand it.

If I understood correctly, according to Schwartz there was no belief that the Torah in our hands was dictated to Moses word for word. So what? The question focuses on the core of faith: did God ask, in some way, to be served through the commandments? If a person believes that, then his action has religious value. And this minimal belief existed in those periods too.

But if a person does not believe in any expectation on God’s part toward him (a deist), all the more so if he does not believe in God’s existence at all (an atheist), then his commandments have no value.

So what have we gained from Schwartz?

Aharon is completely right. I don’t really understand what isn’t clear in what I said.
I am claiming that if a person who believes at 10% regards that as insufficient to decide that there is a God, and therefore in his view there isn’t one, then even if he observes commandments this has no value whatsoever. This is true even if in reality there is a God and he made the wrong decision. The reason is that observing commandments requires faith, and someone who has no faith—his observance of commandments is worth nothing.
Studies of one kind or another about the state and nature of faith in the prophetic period aren’t worth much in any case, in my humble opinion, but for our purposes we are dealing with the contemporary halakhic determination, not with what people once thought. In terms of the existing sources of Jewish law and simple reasoning, in my view such observance has no value.
Therefore in Pascal’s wager the calculation goes like this: the probability that there is a God is P. The value of observing a commandment for such a believer (assuming P is small enough that he decides there is not) is:
P*0+(1-P)*0=0
The crux of the matter is that the value of his commandment observance is 0 both if in reality there is a God and if there is not.

I did qualify my remarks by saying that perhaps one could make this depend on observing a commandment conditionally (like the Avnei Nezer’s condition regarding the afikoman). But that is rather doubtful, since many halakhic decisors disputed the very possibility of fulfilling a commandment conditionally. Beyond that, I very much doubt whether the Avnei Nezer himself would accept a condition on faith as a possible condition. The explanation is that observing commandments requires acceptance of God (in the sense of the laws of idolatry 3:6), and one who believes at 10% cannot accept God. Acceptance of God requires a kind of decision and cannot be done conditionally.

Hello Aharon, yes, I indeed meant the minimal belief that the commandments express God’s will for the Jewish people, even without granting validity to all the details or even to the Sinai revelation in the way it is conveyed in the Pentateuch narrative. If I understood correctly, Rabbi Michi would accept that too—provided that the person doing the commandment intends it as service of God—and that is what I think too (and perhaps Baruch Schwartz as well, though in any case we do not live by his mouth). Rather, in this article he formulated this simple and little-known innovation: that for the prophets, the stories of the Pentateuch were not necessary in order to believe in God’s will for the Jewish people as a unique collective in the history of nations. I disagree with deciding this issue on the basis of “the existing sources of Jewish law,” but unfortunately I don’t currently have the time to elaborate, with God’s help, in the future. For now, see a bit in my correspondence with Rabbi Michi on the site around the question of creation in six days and the commandment of Sabbath—look there)

I’ll gladly send you the link privately. giladstn@gmail.com

Gil,

Is this article secret?

Or dangerous to the public?

Or protected by copyright?

I believe there are necessary beliefs and there are true beliefs, and as for the latter, there is no commandment to present them publicly to people for whom it would be harmful and cause them pain. Teaching someone that God does not answer prayer adds nothing for him. See Leibowitz’s answer in the book I Wanted to Ask You, how the illustrious professor contracts and changes his position regarding prayer when his questioner is a spiritually disabled and weak person. The internet is home to such people too. And for them there is no point in going around spreading articles that are very problematic from the standpoint of faith. Casting doubt on the historical event of the revelation leads many to deny that the Torah is from Heaven, because they do not understand that just as God created the world through providence over many years, so too He made—or could have made—the development of Jewish law, and everything comes from His hand. In the words of Rabbi Kook (what can you do, sometimes one can quote him without waving him around like a foolish devotee), based on Maimonides in Guide of the Perplexed, part 2, chapter 48: “For the foundation of everything is what we teach in the world, that everything is God’s action, and the intermediaries, many or few, to myriads upon myriads, are all God’s works; He omitted nothing from His world.” (Shalom Rosenberg:) Science relates to the intermediate causes, to the processes that actually occur in the world, whereas the Torah relates to the first cause, which is the final one—the purpose of creation, to the extent that we are able to understand it. And from here is the key to reading the texts: (Rabbi Kook:) “Sometimes we say by way of a leap, ‘And the Lord formed,’ ‘and God made,’ just as we say of Solomon (I Kings 6:1), ‘and he built the House for the Lord,’ and we do not say that Solomon commanded the ministers, and the ministers those below them, and they the architects, and the architects the craftsmen, and the craftsmen the simple laborers, because that is a known manner, and also not essential.” So too with evolution, and so too with biblical criticism (assuming one accepts its truth, of course, needless to say). In short: “May they be pleasant when you keep them within you.” You are not suspected, Aharon, of such weakness of faith—and you are fit to receive the “truest truth” privately. Therefore I offered you the offer you can’t refuse (or apparently you can). In any case, that is my opinion; sometimes I sin against it—but I have no doubt about it. Even flint rock will not move me from it

P.S. to Aharon: I briefly presented the metaphorical interpretation of the Sinai revelation here: https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%A6%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%9C%D7%92%D7%99%D7%9C-%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%9D/

Note well: unlike Schwartz and decisive scholars, the metaphorical proposal contains no denial of the historical event. Only an additional level, the palace of Torah above it. And that’s simple

To Gil:

Don’t suspect me of not understanding why you don’t want to publicize the location of the article.

I thought that here, in “the master’s domain,” which recoils from “holy lies,” as he explained at length in column 21, you would accept the fact that today concealment no longer works, and that it only arouses suspicion.

When you publicly refuse to share information and knowledge, you only awaken mistrust toward yourself among those influenced by you. I suggest you read our Rabbi Michi’s article in column 21.

To this day I cannot forget an episode that happened when I was in a junior yeshiva. The Talmud teacher told about Rabbi Chaim Vital and his being the reincarnation of the Maggid Mishneh. He said that Rabbi Chaim Vital came to repair a grave sin that the former had damaged, though in the end he himself failed in a similar sin. The teacher adamantly refused to add details.
More than the natural curiosity I had, I felt hurt by the patronizing attitude he conveyed: “I am great, wise, and experienced, and I will censor and control what information you receive.”
So at age 14 I went and searched for Sha’ar HaGilgulim, and I pored over it until I found the story. This is an episode that illustrates the deterioration of my trust in the system. And who is to blame? People like that teacher.

You are trying to protect someone who is “spiritually disabled and weak,” in your words. So I tell you that in this kind of discourse, he will very quickly sense the way you look at him, and he will lose all trust and desire to receive from you. He will immediately feel that you see him as “spiritually disabled and weak.”

If you want another reference on the matter, a lucid and wonderful article has now been published on the Tzarich Iyun website, called “On Apologetics.” Among other things it deals with this point. A must-read article for anyone involved in influence and explaining faith.

Hello Rabbi,

I was recently at a funeral where the deceased woman’s only son said Kaddish after her, with the guidance of the burial society’s sexton. That man is an atheist, certainly. Is there any point in answering Amen after him?

It seems to me that yes. You hear words that you identify with, and you say that with your own mouth, even if the one saying them does not really intend them.
Perhaps this can be compared to answering Amen after a blessing heard on a recording (where the accepted practice is not to answer; see responsa Yechaveh Da’at part 2, siman 68, and responsa Yitzhak Yeranen part 7, simanim 11–13, Bi’ur Halakhah siman 215 סעיף 2 beginning with “obligated,” and Piskei Teshuvot there, note 3). But one can distinguish between the cases.