Q&A: A Dispute about Maimonides
A Dispute about Maimonides
Question
Hello Rabbi. I understood from you that in your opinion some of the Jewish laws, and even the Torah itself, were not accepted at Mount Sinai, but rather developed over the course of the history of the Jewish people; and nevertheless those laws still have binding force even if they were ostensibly not given at Mount Sinai. But Maimonides counts among the Thirteen Principles that one must believe with complete faith that the Torah in its entirety was given at Mount Sinai, and I have not found anyone who disagrees with him. So seemingly there is a halakhic obligation to believe this even if it is hard to agree with him—just as, in your view, one must observe the laws of selecting on the Sabbath even if in your opinion that is not actually a prohibited labor. And if we say that there is no halakhic obligation to believe in the 13 Principles because faith and Jewish law are separate categories, then what about the halakhic implications regarding a person who does not believe in these principles? Such a person is disqualified from testimony, his slaughter is considered carrion, he has no share in the World to Come—these are clearly halakhic consequences. To me, this looks a bit like a contradiction. What do you think?
Answer
A. Even if Maimonides says that something is obligatory, why should that obligate me? At most, you can infer that he believed it (and even that is of course not correct).
B. There is no such thing as authority with respect to a factual determination. Therefore, an "obligation to believe" is a self-contradictory phrase. If I do not believe something, no obligation can change that unless someone convinces me.
C. Maimonides himself understood very well that not everything came down from Sinai. After all, he himself distinguishes between laws that came down from Sinai, regarding which there is no dispute, and other laws about which disputes arose.
D. At most, one can say that we are supposed to relate to all the laws as if they came down from Sinai. That is a normative claim, not a factual-historical one.
Discussion on Answer
I do not see where you got your first claim from. The claim that the Creator knows the future has nothing illogical about it. And if knowing the future that will be chosen contradicts logic, then conclude from that that He really does not know that.
Anyone who truly believes counts toward any prayer quorum, even if in your opinion he is mistaken. Someone who denies out of his evil inclination is a different discussion. And likewise regarding libation wine (even on the absurd assumption that ordinary gentile wine, and not actual libation wine, belonging to a person is prohibited even to that person himself). So I recite kiddush quite calmly, and even pray from time to time.
Maimonides: "A human being has no power to comprehend and attain the mind of the Creator… Since that is so, we have no power to know how the Holy One, blessed be He, knows all creatures and deeds. But we know without doubt that a person's actions are in the person's own hands, and the Holy One, blessed be He, does not pull him nor decree upon him to do so." That is, the fact that the Creator knows our choices does not contradict the fact that free choice is given into our hands, but the way in which this is not a contradiction is something we are not actually capable of understanding with human intellect. Meaning, when Maimonides lists the Thirteen Principles, he writes them as principles of faith that we are obligated to believe even if our conclusion is proven and contradicts one of the 13 principles.
I still do not understand your argument. We have seen that regarding principles of faith the question is not whether I agree, because Maimonides himself admits that we are incapable of understanding how they are supposed to be true, and nevertheless we are obligated to believe them—at least in your view by force of the authority of the Sages. So a person who does not believe in these principles, even if he does so because through a search for truth he reached a different conclusion, is denying the command of the Sages, and necessarily all the detailed laws concerning an apostate are applied to him.
Someone who "truly believes" is not a denier only in my opinion; he is a denier in the opinion of the Sages—not only socially, but halakhically in practice. Can someone really decide whether a person is denying a principle or is "truly believing," or whether it is because of his evil inclination? When a person desecrates the Sabbath because he is sure it is Sunday, does he not need repentance? After all, he is lighting a cigarette because he truly and sincerely believes it is Sunday. Evil inclination is not so relevant here; sometimes a person, due to circumstances beyond his control, forgets and gets confused. In the same way, he may arrive at a heretical conclusion and be sure he is right, without any connection to evil inclination, and the rest of the Jews will have to act according to the relevant laws so that his sons and daughters will not marry theirs.
Someone acting under compulsion does not need repentance for anything. Someone who thinks something is under compulsion in his thinking, and therefore no sanctions apply to him. And if you do not know whether it is because of inclination or genuine conviction, there are presumptions. And if you cannot decide, then there are the laws of doubt. I answered the rest.
It seems to me I have exhausted the issue.
If someone acting under compulsion does not need repentance, then why is a person who desecrated the Sabbath because he was sure it was Sunday liable for a sin-offering, and during the offering also required to recite confession? Why in the text of the penitential prayers on Yom Kippur do we say, "For the sin that we have sinned before You under compulsion"? And even aside from repentance: if the Sages decreed that it is forbidden to drink wine touched by a person who denies a fundamental principle, presumably they did not distinguish between someone compelled in his thinking and someone who does so out of evil inclination. So even though you have exhausted it, we return to the same point: the Sages decreed, and every Jew must observe that, as long as he holds that the decrees of the Sages have authority over him.
I do not understand how it is possible for a person to believe something that he thinks is not true. Will he say, "I think this is impossible and illogical, and therefore it is not true, but there is an obligation to believe, so I will believe it and think it is true even though I think it is not true"?
That is absurd! It is not logically possible.
Thought can influence belief, but it takes time and effort.
And if one day a new thought arises that contradicts an old belief, then until the thought affects the belief, the person will be in a state where he thinks in a way that contradicts his belief.
If a person does not believe, or thinks something is not true, and you have not convinced him otherwise, he will never believe it. He can behave as though he believes, but that will not change anything, because inside he does not believe.
Just as no matter how much I try to force you to believe that the sky is red, and say there is an obligation to believe that it is red, you will never believe it. In order for a person to believe, he has to believe or understand that it is true (that is also the definition of the word belief).
Some of Maimonides' Thirteen Principles are obligations that completely contradict logic, and Maimonides says this too. For example, the obligation to believe that the Creator knows the future, and in addition the obligation to believe that you have free choice. In other words, the obligation to believe in the Thirteen Principles applies even though they do not seem logical to us; this is not a matter of establishing facts like Wikipedia, it is a halakhic obligation to believe even if it does not seem logical (to you). In addition, indeed there are laws that were not given at Mount Sinai, and we were given the tools to derive them (for example, an a fortiori inference), but the Creator gave the appropriate tools so that we would find exactly the laws He wanted us to find—meaning that they too are from Heaven. Moreover, it is obvious to you that Maimonides never imagined that anyone would understand from his words that even a single letter of the Torah scroll we have in our hands was not received at Mount Sinai.
Second, even if you do not see in the authority of the Sages any obligation to believe certain things, but only dry laws of set-aside items, selecting, and the like… if there is an explicit law that someone who does not believe that the Torah is from Heaven does not count toward a prayer quorum, how do you pray? How do you recite kiddush on the Sabbath if according to the Sages your wine is libation wine?