Q&A: Serving God
Serving God
Question
In Maimonides, Laws of Idolatry ch. 3, it is explained (following your approach) that the highest level of serving God is to obey Him because He said so, because He has completely formal authority.
And in Maimonides, Laws of Repentance ch. 10, it is explained (again following your approach) that the highest level of serving God out of love is to do what is true because it is true.
1. How do these two fit together? Does doing what is true because it is true = obeying God because He said so? After all, obeying God because He said so would seem to mean that I do not care even if what He says is mistaken, and even if it is false—I do not care, I obey Him because He said it. But doing something because it is true means that I myself evaluate and discern, regarding what I am doing, that it is true, and that is why I do it.
2. Obeying God because He said so seems to me the exact opposite of your whole outlook—that behind everything there is logic, that everything can be understood, and that one should not do things blindly but understand them thoroughly. It sounds like the statement of some fundamentalist who performs his religious service because he has to, and not because he understands. Put differently: if I have to obey God only because He said so, then why should I bother so much with Talmud and philosophy in order to understand the roots of things, if in any case it makes no difference?
I hope you understood what I wrote. These are questions that are very important to me, and I would be very glad if I could understand your answer, God willing.
Answer
- The truth is that one must obey what God says. That itself is truth. True, it is also intrinsically true, because God speaks the truth. Hypothetically, I would do it even if it were not true, just because God said so—and that itself is doing the truth. But with regard to God, these are not really two alternatives, because whatever He says is also the truth.
- So there is no contradiction with my view either. What God says is the truth, and therefore obedience coincides with doing the truth. It is not true that everything can be understood. Not at all. I do claim that behind everything there is logic. But that does not mean that this logic is accessible to us. Obeying that is not fundamentalism. When it contradicts reason—when it is anti-rational, and not merely non-rational—that is where obedience becomes fundamentalism. Also because if it contradicts reason, then God did not say it.