Question

Hello and blessings,
It is a fact that the psychological state of a religious Jew changes in accordance with the calendar. Thus, when the month of Tishrei arrives, he is gripped by dread of judgment; on the days of Purim he is immersed in joy; and so too on the other occasions of the year (Tisha B’Av, etc.). On the other hand, it is obvious that if a Jew were stranded on a deserted island during the High Holy Days without a calendar, he would feel the ordinary sensation of regular weekdays. And likewise the reverse: if that same Jew, cut off from the calendar, were mistakenly to observe the Sabbath on one of the weekdays, it is clear that he would feel an “exalted sense of the holiness of the Sabbath” exactly as on the actual Sabbath. In the same way, a Jew can immerse in a mikveh for dozens of years and experience “heavenly spiritual experiences” while waving a particularly fine etrog and putting on especially fine tefillin, so long as it has not yet become clear to him retroactively that the “etrog” in his hand was actually a lemon, or that the tefillin had been invalid from the outset, or that the mikveh had been invalid from the outset. And so too, with God’s help, in almost every experience of performing the practical commandments between man and God that depends on the context of place, time, and object.

Is there not something objectionable about this, to put it mildly—that the “performance” of the practical commandments is based solely on an autosuggestive experience?