Q&A: A Religious Right to Exist for a Secular Person
A Religious Right to Exist for a Secular Person
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi,
I watched the series “We’ll Meet Again” and saw an interesting scene there, in which a man who had gone off the religious path as a young man tries to renew contact with his sister, but the brother-in-law (her husband) is the one guarding the family, and he does not allow him to meet with her in order to protect the home and out of concern that his family might be harmed.
During the argument he explains to him that, as far as he is concerned, a person who denies God and goes against Him has no right to exist, and so on—”I hate those who hate You, O Lord.”
When I heard those things, there was something very shocking about them, but I think that when you think about it afterward, you actually can find many things that support his approach, starting from the severe cases of one who incites others to idolatry, one who leads a city astray, and the law of an apostate city, and ending with various milder statements about a heretic. I think that even usually, the statements made in outreach to such people are attempts to explain why, on the religious plane, an approach of drawing them near is better (if you bring him closer, then he will grow stronger religiously, there will be less desecration of God’s name, and so on).
So I wanted to ask what you think about Judaism’s attitude toward the very existence of the secular “heretic”—that same person who is not considered like a “captured infant,” even if he is not inciting or leading others astray, but simply living his life.
Attached is the beginning of the clip
https://youtu.be/tnFJEcjpse4?t=1938
Answer
I haven’t seen it, so I’ll answer in general terms. It is clear that our sources did not recognize the reality in which we live today. A considerable part of the people is not committed to Torah and commandments on an ideological basis. The phenomenon of mass secularization, and so on. The accepted categories for dealing with this phenomenon are usually anachronistic. Clearly, from a religious worldview, secularization is undesirable and mistaken. That is more or less a tautology. The question of how to relate to it is a question of policy more than of values. Such policy is derived from the current circumstances in which we operate.
There is a distinction to be made between two kinds of considerations: the way to positively influence secular people, and preserving the religious world, especially the youth.
Therefore, the laws of one who incites others and of the apostate city also cannot teach us very much. They were said in a completely different reality. The assumption of the Sages and the Bible is that if someone does this, it is a result of the evil inclination, but inwardly he believes and knows the truth. Today that is clearly not the case for most people.
One can understand the position of the Haredi relative. What is the difference between someone who went off the religious path and someone who, say, denies Zionism and perhaps even enlists in efforts to boycott Israel? Wouldn’t he be considered a traitor?