Not with regard to reward and punishment, but with regard to having fulfilled the obligation. If he already fulfilled it, then he doesn’t need to do it again. And if he did not fulfill it, then does that mean autonomy is of no help whatsoever regarding fulfillment of the obligation, but only regarding reward and punishment? What about someone who serves out of love?

As it now becomes clear to him, he did not fulfill his obligation.

Is it correct to translate “did not fulfill his obligation” as “did not perform the commandment”?

Yes.

If so, then I’ll suggest a factual hypothesis and on that basis ask a question. The factual hypothesis is that nobody has managed to hit exactly on the abstract monistic truth, and therefore in all likelihood everyone, in all the commandments, is missing some specific law or detail of law (and also committing many transgressions, in whatever sense applies). Based on that, the question is: if so, it turns out that today we tell a person, do as you understand, or follow the accepted Jewish law, even though my heart and your heart know that this act is in all likelihood just some irrelevant act, like someone intending to eat matzah and eating a marshmallow. Can that be? Is it all just theater? Something here is vague to me, and I would appreciate it if you would clarify it.

I didn’t understand the question.

I’m returning to a related issue. The value in Torah study, apart from fulfilling the commandment of Torah study, which is like the commandment of lulav, is—in your view and that of others—to know the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and to know Him and cleave to Him. But in practice, what people study (not only regarding Jewish law) is whatever received formal authority. If God gave plasticine and some authorized person shaped it into a triangle, then by coming to know the angles of the triangle one neither touches nor affects God’s will at all. Even if at the moment the Holy One, blessed be He, commands us to study that and obey it, seemingly the unique value of Torah study is lost. The question is whether the value of Torah study does in fact depend on authenticity.

You’re mixing up Torah study with halakhic ruling. As far as Torah study is concerned, there is no difference between an opinion that was ruled as Jewish law and one that was not.

Where did I mix them up? People study the Talmud, especially the Babylonian Talmud, and not the halakhic reasoning of Rabbi Zokhmir Abulafia from the Land of Uz (even if we assume he would accept all the rabbinic exegeses, and within the room left under the roof he had his own ideas). And what is the answer to the question whether the value of Torah study depends on authenticity?

People study the Babylonian Talmud because it is the sharpest, and that is also why Jewish law is ruled in accordance with it (the halakhic ruling here is a sign, not a cause).

Y.D., do you mean it is the sharpest and therefore the truest and closest to the authenticity we can attain, or that it is the sharpest and therefore, if one is already studying Torah, it is simply the most enjoyable and interesting to study?

I’m not a great scholar, but just as in mathematics and physics there is a connection between beauty and truth, so too in Talmud study.

So you are claiming there is authenticity to a considerable degree. But I am asking in relation to Rabbi Michi’s well-known view that authenticity is not a condition for obligation—whether authenticity is likewise not a condition for the value of Torah study. Or perhaps the manifestation of God’s authentic will itself changes over time (any change in the world can be presented as a consequence of a higher and fixed system).

Torah study is engagement with what was given to us at Sinai and its interpretations. The question of authority is not relevant to the question of study but to ruling. Therefore any engagement with Jewish law, regardless of the source being studied, is Torah study. Even if you derive your own halakhic interpretation from the biblical text.
My claim that authenticity is not a condition for obligation means that even if I erred, or others erred, in interpretation, it is still binding in practice as Jewish law. But of course, even in halakhic ruling, we try to understand what was given at Sinai. It is just that one should not worry about the fact that there may be interpretive mistakes.
I don’t understand this whole discussion and the complications here.

All this I already know from your words in many places, and I asked a different point (and in my eyes this is an important matter worthy of complication and discussion; one should not go at it with axes in a tangled thicket of wood).
Here is a quote from your golden tongue in Column 135, for example: “The will of the Holy One, blessed be He, has self-evident value. Even if the will itself is not clear to me, and I do not know what it accomplishes, it is entirely clear that when one studies His wills one understands something about Him, about the desirable mode of conduct in the world, and about our conception of the world. When I learn that one must redeem a firstborn donkey or stone a stubborn and rebellious son, I have learned a piece of the Holy One’s will. This is self-evident to me, and therefore I have no problem with this study.”

This is about the “value” of Torah study here, even apart from the commandment of Torah study, and apart from halakhic ruling, and apart from the need to know current Jewish law in order to merit commandments and not stumble. [It seems clear to me that if the Holy One, blessed be He, said we had to listen to every whim of the most ginger and most crazy-looking redhead in the neighborhood, there would be no value in studying the redhead’s wishes—only a technical need to study those wishes in order to know what the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to do in practice.]
Does this specific value also not depend on authenticity?

One who studies the Oral Torah has not fulfilled his obligation of “and you shall speak of them.”

And a heavenly voice coos like a dove: “bam” has the numerical value of 42, and since there are two Torahs that makes 84, and “our God is one” is 85—there you have “peh,” “mouth,” and from here a hint to the study of the Oral Torah from the Torah itself, to teach you that the mouth too is an equal part of the “bam.”

Thoughts deeper than the sea—but what can you do, it isn’t written in the Torah.

Obviously, if you did not aim at His view, then you did not penetrate the depth of His mind. I still don’t see what the question is. This is true even of things that came from the mouth of an authorized body (like the Sanhedrin).

Let’s leave aside the whole issue of authority. All I’m asking is one miserable question: is the unique value of Torah study only in things that are authentic, or is it, like obligation, not so dependent on that?
Your answer is that clearly the unique value of studying His will and so forth exists only in things that are indeed His direct will (and not a will that we obey and study whatever eventually came out as that triangle of plasticine and the redhead’s whims and more unnecessary analogies)—meaning that authenticity is indeed a condition for the unique value of Torah study?
Maybe the eyes of my intellect have grown dim.

Yes. I wrote that.

And this doesn’t seem dramatic to you? In your estimation, how much of the Torah people study is authentic? On a generous day I would give it a tenth of a percent. But I don’t really understand these things.

It’s not dramatic because in practice we study what seems correct to us. If we are mistaken, we have no way of knowing that. So what practical difference does it make? We strive for the authentic truth, but we are not worried about lack of authenticity.

Is the practical difference really so ugly—namely, how much value there is in Torah study (learning a piece of His will and knowing the Holy One, blessed be He, etc.), beyond the value of a commandment like all the other commandments?

Not ugly at all.