Hello there,
A. The closing words of your response — “I am also not saying what is more important in my eyes” — impress me in terms of your fairness and courage. In them you imply that one need not necessarily decide what is more important. In other words, in the sentence “Religiosity is not the most fundamental identity for me,” you see it as possible to replace “fundamental” with “important” without falling off the chair. In my opinion such a possibility is an oxymoron, because if the existence of the entire world and of us human beings is contingent, and “draws sustenance” from the reality of the Creator, the Necessary Existent, and there is no purpose, hope, or meaning to our lives that is not connected to God, then religiosity is necessarily the most important identity in the consciousness of a person who truly believes these things.
I am not claiming that one must deal with God all day long and consciously connect every act and thought to religious values, but the word “identity,” which you used, marks a basic inner existential stance toward the value, direction, and boundaries of your life/our lives and everything in them. Or perhaps I did not understand what you meant by the word “identity.”

I wondered to myself whether your conception of faith in God as a high probability and not as mystical certainty is what prevents you from investing your identity fully in the “religious” aspect of life. Similarly, I wondered whether the cracks in the value of petitionary prayer — an issue you write about often — are also bound up with your probabilistic conception of God’s existence, which does not allow for a full prayer experience.

B. And regarding Nachmanides’ words on the Ten Commandments, assuming you brought them as proof and not merely as an illustration: it seems to me that he did not mean a relative conception, but rather that when a positive commandment overrides a prohibition, there is no act of transgression in violating the prohibition, since that is the Jewish law, and thus the conflict disappears. That is how Meshekh Chokhmah explains it on Deuteronomy 34:12.

Best regards, Jacob

Indeed, there is no need to decide what is more important. Either way, there is not the slightest trace of an oxymoron here. Suppose I created a robot to help me in a carpentry shop. What is more important: that it do its work in the shop well, or that it not kill pedestrians on the sidewalk?
Here we come back again to Nachmanides and the difference between what is basic and what is important. For a person, is it more important not to murder or to keep the Sabbath? My assessment is that it is more basic not to murder and more important to keep the Sabbath. And that is how Sdei Chemed explained Nachmanides there. What you brought from Meshekh Chokhmah seems to me untenable as an explanation of Nachmanides (because that principle does not emerge from his words), and also problematic in itself (because the question is why that is the Jewish law, so you cannot rely on the fact that this is the Jewish law), but this is not the place to elaborate.
As for your speculations, they all pertain to the psychological plane and are therefore unimportant in my view. When I make a claim I usually give reasons for it, and a substantive discussion should examine the reasons and arguments, not the motives and influences. Even if all this is true, it is not relevant to the substantive discussion but to the psychologist’s couch.

A. Your position is still not clear to me, so I will use an analogy of my own. In your view, is a person (including a Jew) in this world like a soldier during his years of compulsory military service, in which his main role is on the patriotic-military plane, while at the same time he is occupied with other obligations — both as a citizen toward his state and as a private person with a moral compass toward others, and so on — and is also immersed, as much as he can, in interesting or enjoyable goals and hobbies? In this example, the soldier’s personal and inner life, both on the side of duty and on the side of the optional, is not exclusively subordinated to the command of the state, even though it constitutes a large chunk of his existence. And indeed, the state has no right, force, or claim to drain to the very end the human existence of its citizens.
Do you think that this is how a person’s relation to God and His commandments ought to be? Or perhaps the example I gave seems exaggerated to you, and ordinary life combined with reserve duty is what, in your view, better resembles the analogue — in which military duties take up an even less significant portion.

In any case, in both versions, the military plane is not a total existential matter in the being of the soldier/citizen — except for a soldier who chose such an individualistic approach.
According to my position, which is the accepted one, that God’s laws are not like the laws of a human state, and therefore there is no place devoid of Him in the broad sense of the phrase — the religious identity (especially the Jewish one) is total.
B. Precisely according to your own view (which I share), since in your lectures and writings you often point out that recognizing the moral obligation between one person and another by definition compels recognition that there is a Commander, namely God, what practical difference is there for you between keeping the Sabbath and “do not murder,” and between the robot’s helping in the carpentry shop and its being careful with pedestrians’ lives? For both this and that are forms of serving God. After all, in this discussion we are not dealing with priorities internal to religion, but with setting human elements against religious elements.
C. My psychologizing remarks were indeed intended on the substantive plane. A person who is convinced with mystical certainty of God’s existence — even if it does not necessarily follow from that that he would disagree with you on these two issues — still: 1. Such certainty would add significant weight in favor of the position that “religiosity ought to be the most fundamental/important identity.” 2. On the issue of petitionary prayer, it is really difficult on the emotional-technical side to pray for God’s help when His very existence is accompanied by hidden doubts in consciousness, because then the hope that the request will be fulfilled becomes a kind of vague double doubt upon double doubt upon doubt.
May I ask you: if you yourself (or any given person) held faith with mystical certainty, would your conclusions on these issues not be different? This is a personal question, but with an entirely substantive aim.
Thanks for your patience.

It is hard for me to discuss things at such length. I will answer briefly.

A. The soldier example is not bad, but one should remember that Jewish law is not all of God’s will. Morality is also part of His will. It is just that everyone in the world is obligated in that part, not only Jews. Therefore, the identity of a commandment-observant gentile includes God’s moral will (from the gentile side) and the halakhic one (from the Jewish side).
Even if your position is such, and that is of course your right, I do not see in it an argument (but rather a declaration). And I certainly cannot see how my words are an oxymoron, as you wrote at the beginning.
B. There is no practical difference between the Sabbath and “do not murder”; both are unrelated to morality and related to Jewish law (see Column 15). “Whoever sheds the blood of man” is the moral command, and it is universal.
C. I do not know what mystical certainty is. If he is convinced, then he is convinced. But that has no connection at all to the question being discussed here. As stated, the degree of conviction is in no way connected to the question whether Jewish identity is the most fundamental and whether it encompasses everything.

This discussion has reached a dead end. An interesting phenomenon caught my eye. In your articles and columns you bring order and clarity to various issues. You successfully simplify complications and ambiguities, and contribute greatly to public intellectual hygiene. (Let me stress: this praise refers to the form, not to the contents themselves.) But on the other hand, in your replies to various commenters you seem to act in the opposite way: you break concepts apart, move from point to point, and thus shift the discussion. You raise side aspects and new parallel terms, until the relatively simple subject becomes more and more complex and dizzying, and the commenter’s mind also grows tired and his patience evaporates. In honor of this week’s Torah portion, Chukat, I would liken in this sense your columns and the polemics that follow them to the red heifer, which purifies the impure and renders the pure impure.
I fear that, in principle, your answers evade standing with your back to the wall, in the sense of the verse “and my beloved slipped away and was gone”… [And I do not ignore the fact that some of your expansions this way and that, and in every direction, are an unavoidable necessity in light of the shallowness and narrowness evident in a large portion of the comments.]
The main point of your columns is thought aimed at repairing the world, correcting attitudes and approaches in practical life. That is unlike Torah study and learning pursued for their own sake, where one may wander without reaching a conclusion and decision. If so, how will these clever and charming dialogues, sharp and piquant as they are, lead to awe and to love?
A person like you, who fulfills the commandment of rebuke to the public every day and with such great excellence, will surely be glad to examine this remark/insight, if indeed there is truth in it, a little or even a lot. I mean a reflective examination of your intuition or feeling, who knows.
Love truth and peace.