Question

Honorable Rabbi Michael,
I heard a lecture of yours on YouTube about rabbinic/sovereign authority, and hoping you could help me decide that the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Torah should be my authority, I even bought the trilogy.
A few personal words: I’m formerly religious, and among other things I’m a tour guide, and I mention this because in your books you brought that mountain climber who answered, “Because it’s a mountain,” when asked why he climbs the mountain—and that immediately touched my heart. On the other hand, I immediately remembered that I myself wrote an article, “Why It Is Rational to Travel” (with many good reasons). In other words, personally, answers of that sort don’t win me over. I try to understand why I climb a mountain, even if it feels right to me. After reading The First Being (fascinating!!) it sharpened for me where I still don’t connect to religion, and I’m here, with your permission, to share that.
Broadly speaking, my claim is that although I believe in God, God left the earth for His own reasons. Second, it is not clear to me why I am obligated to keep His commandments. I’ll explain.
I do believe that God exists and created the world, and even that God had involvement with us and an interest in us somewhere at the beginning, when the world was formed—and even revealed Himself to us at Mount Sinai and gave the Torah, which our ancestors kept because of divine reward and punishment—not because they thought it was the best thing for us to do, but because it was God’s will, and along the way He would indulge us or punish us if we violated His word. But then, at some point in history (the Ninth of Av?), God abandoned us for an unknown reason, just like the unknown reason why He created the world in the first place (and apparently we agree on this—that it may be impossible for us to know the purpose, according to page 457 of The First Being).
And even if we assume that God is indeed involved and present and gave us the Torah about 3,500 years ago, I still have not been convinced why I should keep His commandments. Your claim (p. 550) is that we owe Him philosophical gratitude, from intuition, just as we would feel obligated to honor our biological parents even if they abandoned us after birth. I am not persuaded by this argument, because although I can say that I honor God for creating me, from there to obeying what He says is a big leap. In the parable of the parents, it would be like parents who abandoned me ordering me, at age 25, to go study accounting. Surely I would honor them, but I would not necessarily obey them, because for me, obeying instructions about what to do belongs to a more intellectual place than that emotional one. In addition, I do not feel the emotion you describe (p. 549), that we are a kind of limb of the Holy One, blessed be He, meant to carry out His will. In my view, we are simply His creation, just as a person might create a sophisticated computer, and from that point the computer has free choice to operate within the rules of the game I defined for it. In our case, the rules of the game are the laws of nature, which of course God created at some point.
The strongest claim I found in your writing is that we are supposed to keep the commandments in the same way that we keep morality. Surely you would argue that if we listen to morality, then we should understand that it stems from an external force (God) who instructs us accordingly even today. In other words, it seems that you tie obedience to the moral command to obedience to the religious command, and you even brought a proof for God’s existence from morality, because of the difficulty of understanding morality—why we obey one categorical command or another. Personally, I reached the opposite conclusion, and I’d be glad if you could explain where I went wrong: morality, in my view, is a fiction, and human beings basically seek to do things that will advance the gene they carry (some would call this “seeking meaning”), just like other creatures on earth. If we claim that human beings have some special quality of altruism, I don’t think that’s true, because there are quite a few animals—for example ants—that will sacrifice themselves for the integrity of the nest in a way that from the outside appears to be altruism, but that is only because it helps the genes of their siblings survive, while those ants that kill themselves to protect the nest also carry those same genes of the siblings they are protecting, as part of the rules of the community.
In other words, I claim that we all act for the sake of some interest. (I know you wrote in The First Being, page 389, “I do not intend to argue with this claim,” but perhaps I can still get an answer from you in this context.) Let me explain: in my view, some people have a more communal interest—what I think is mistakenly called a moral person toward his community—that is, someone who thinks about how to advance the whole community more than about the survival of his own very specific gene. And there are those who think about helping all humanity as bearers of the human gene. There is also someone who helps humanity, of which he is a part, because it makes him feel good—also self-interested, but on a lower level. And there is the self-interested person who thinks only of his own four cubits, with no consideration at all for anyone else—what people call immoral.
The fact that every nation and group chooses its own basket of values and calls itself “the most moral” strengthens my claim that there is no one morality. Rather, every society adopts for itself a basket of “values” that it believes will preserve that society better, in its own eyes (like the ants’ nest). In this matter, I share the view that the world is progressing to a better place, because one society learns from another how our gene will survive better. The progress is toward behavior that preserves the gene of the human collective (what one might call supreme morality), and it happens gradually, through our challenging one another with ideas. To explain how, in my view, interest can advance a society toward “supreme morality,” let us take as an example a society in which slavery is customary. Seemingly, that self-interested society should leave the situation as it is, because it is a pure interest to employ slaves without pay from a group that does not belong to my gene pool (for example, we are from Europe and they are from Africa). However, over time, the society will advance toward a higher understanding that a society without slavery will succeed better in the long run and make life less bitter. How, for example? Society will reach the conclusion that the slaves living among them have become partners in fate, and therefore it is forbidden to continue supporting a situation in which that slave population is embittered while living alongside them—or beneath them. In fact, on the scales in the question of whether to free the slaves or not, on one side are the short-term physical benefits, and on the other side is the low morale that eats away at society from within—for granting freedom to the slaves will fill the hearts of these partners in fate, and a happier society will survive better in the long run, together with the long-term physical fear that the slaves may one day rise up against them. In other words, what we call morality is what our society thinks will help it survive better in the long term. The very fact that society progresses in its “laws of morality” (abolition of slavery, equal rights, etc.) is further proof that this is not some supreme morality fixed in advance by God, but something that we as a society refine through trial and error (and the supply and demand of opinions).
In fact, I disagree that morality is born within us; rather, we learn to live by its ways from our educators. You could take Lord of the Flies as an example of a world run by children without an adult to teach them the wisdom of proper communal life. “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth,” and only after we rub up against our environment do we become “better”—that is, we learn how to set small ideas aside in favor of larger ideas that will advance society as a whole. Morality can be summed up in the sentence: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” (Kant).

For fairness’s sake, I do find one difficulty with this theory in the realm of morality—for example, why not just abuse an animal for no reason? (Although even that can be explained in terms of an environment that rejects abuse of any kind so that, God forbid, it won’t eventually spill over into abuse of members of the community—but that certainly isn’t a smooth explanation.) Still, I think altruism is a kind of global social interest.
I would be deeply grateful for your response to my remarks.
Best regards,