Question

To Rabbi Michael Abraham,
At the end of the fifth booklet you explained what gratitude to the Holy One, blessed be He, is.
But I still do not understand how such gratitude is supposed to lead a person all the way to self-sacrifice, or even to killing all the members of his family if the Creator commands him to do so. The comparison to parents is indeed a nice one, but with parents the sense of obligation we have to do good for them speaks only about benefits on a far smaller scale, with no comparison. Just go out into the street and see what the standards of honoring parents are in the world, and what level of honor most people in the world consider to be a son’s moral obligation to his father.
And if you argue that this is true only with parents, but with the Creator of the world, who is the source of everything and on whom we are far more dependent, this feeling should be much stronger — you still have not explained why it should be so strong that we devote our whole lives to Him and agree to die and to bind our family members for sacrifice for His sake. And saying that this is an intuition a person has will not solve it, considering how far-fetched it is that a person should have such an intuition.
Besides that, I do not understand why this would lead one to keep the commandments, because even with a father, anything I do to fulfill his wishes is only when it benefits him. But when he tells me to do things and informs me that he himself does not need it and gains nothing from it, I would feel no need to obey his instructions. Obviously, even if he created me, that does not allow him to decide what I will do; it only obligates me to make sure that things are good for him. And in Jewish literature it is written countless times that the Creator of the world is Himself perfect and gains nothing from our keeping the commandments — and that is also something called for on the philosophical plane. So what logic is there that because He created me, I should keep the commandments just because He told me to keep them?
Now I will write what I understand to be the source of the obligation to keep the commandments:
As I understand it, it comes from a person understanding who the Holy One, blessed be He, is, in all His power, and that He is the ultimate truth and perfection, and what this world is within the Creator’s system. In such a state, a person should naturally have the intuition to devote his whole life to Him, because when he grasps that he is dust and ashes, an insignificant thing in a physical world that was only created within a system in which there is a God who alone is real, and is everything, while everything else compared to Him is nothing but falsehood and vanity — such ideas draw a person who seeks truth to truly want truth and to do the truth, and not cling to his own desires and lusts, which from this perspective are nothing but falsehood.
And indeed, if someone says he does not have these feelings, I have nothing to say to him — just as if someone says he does not understand and has no feeling at all for gratitude or for acting morally, I would have nothing to answer him on the logical level, as you brought in your booklet.
And indeed, these things do not fit with everything said in the words of the medieval authorities mentioned above, but this is the only way I can understand what obligates me to give up my life in order to fulfill the Creator’s commands.