Q&A: Torah in the Person
Torah in the Person
Question
Regarding Torah in the person, you argue that if someone studies, say, The Guide for the Perplexed, then if it helps him understand the world and the Torah, that counts as Torah study; and if it does not help, then it is not Torah study.
And this is difficult, because whether it helps him or not is only known after he finishes studying. If so, it comes out that a person studying Jewish thought has an uncertain status, and only afterward, once it becomes clear whether it helped him or not, does the learning retroactively become Torah study or not. That seems very unlikely, and it is hard to argue that the definition of a person’s act is determined retroactively after the act.
Let me phrase it differently, perhaps a bit more extremely: if a person studies Jewish thought and dies in the middle of the learning, does that count for him as Torah study or not?
Answer
How is this different from a thousand other things that are clarified retroactively?
Discussion on Answer
2. Changing topics but still on a related point (that is, going back to the beginning of Between Those Who Stand), I didn’t understand the relationship between decision and commandment (discussed in chapter 2). You write (p. 49) that our obligation is rooted in the very meaning of the commandment itself (which is basically the answer to “why observe the commandments”). If so, I don’t understand what place our decision has. If there is a commandment, that means I am obligated to fulfill it, so where is my decision?
I also didn’t understand the meaning of the sentence (p. 52): “Our obligation to the Torah’s command is founded on a decision by force of our reasoning and not only on the command itself.” That seems to contradict what I quoted above, no?!
1. That is another reason for my claim that, by reasoning, it is not proper to recite the blessing over Torah study on learning that is not Torah in the object itself. If it is only clarified retroactively, then there is a doubt that the blessing may have been recited in vain. But that is of course only a technical reason.
2. One must distinguish between the claim that the commandment obligates and the claim that I decide to be obligated. A situation is possible in which there is an obligating commandment and a person who is not obligated to it in practice (a transgressor). Take morality as an example. Morality obligates me by virtue of being morality. I cannot decide that morality means standing on one leg every morning. That does not depend on me. But there is value to a moral act only if I do it out of my own decision to be obligated to obey morality. It seems to me that this distinction is also discussed in the fourth conversation in the first book (part 3), as an apparent contradiction in Kant’s view, since he speaks on the one hand about autonomous morality (secular, without God, proven from my own values), and on the other hand about heteronomous morality (the proof from morality is based on the assumption that without God there is no morality). There too I distinguished between the validity of morality itself, which does not depend on me but on God, and the manner of my action, which has to stem from my own personal decision to be obligated to moral values.
I don’t know exactly, but it seems somewhat reasonable to me that reality itself can be clarified retroactively (for example, the legal validity of betrothal, divorce, and so on), but the actions a person performs… seemingly he does them with awareness and knowledge of what he is now about to do.