Question

Dear Rabbi Michi,
Hello.
I enjoyed reading your post about Modern Orthodoxy.
A line of thought that occurred to me בעקבות that post:
The relationship between tolerance and religious values, in my opinion, is the main point where there is a split in thinking between Modern Orthodoxy and “conservative” Orthodoxy, or “fundamentalist” Orthodoxy (my own labels; I am not projecting them onto your way of thinking).
This led me to question something a bit. The reason I think that, as religious people, we can sometimes adopt tolerant values of democracy and freedom of choice, and tolerance in general, is because of our attitude toward people who do not observe Torah and commandments, and toward their culture as a whole—the way we see them and the conclusion that they are not sinning intentionally, but out of lack of knowledge; that their values do not stem from a desire to rebel against the Kingdom of Heaven and against the Holy One, blessed be He, but from a distorted perception of reality.
And that got me thinking a bit about the essence of sin and its definition in general:
Is a sin a sin because of a thought that a person imagines while carrying out the forbidden act, or is the forbidden act itself the sin? It has been ruled that commandments require intention, and an atheist who keeps the entire Torah—his commandments have no value in general, except perhaps indirectly, in that as a result he may in the future come to observe commandments.
But do transgressions require intention? Or is the intellectual and emotional consciousness a person holds what determines whether he is sinning or not?
The Haredi Chazon Ish, and earlier halakhic authorities, already determined that a captive infant is not a sinner, since he does not know his Creator. In practice, an apostate with regard to even one transgression—whether out of appetite or ideology—is considered more severe in a certain sense.
Some halakhic authorities went so far as to argue that idolatry in association was not forbidden to Noahides, apparently based on the same reasoning—that they are captive within a religion of vanity, and since they do not know the Creator of the world and associate vain things with Him, they are not responsible for it.
On the other hand, some saw the matter differently:
Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman wrote that even idol worshipers in some remote hole will be punished, because they should have learned and did not learn.
Apparently Maimonides too is strict regarding idol worshipers, and regarding part of Israel. True, one never executes from among them a deaf-mute, a minor, or an incompetent person, because they are not of sound mind; but on the other hand there is a commandment to compel everyone to observe the seven Noahide commandments, and whoever will not accept them is to be killed. That is, according to Maimonides, the commandments do not seem to depend on the sinner’s “evil will,” because there can be a Jewish heretic, a Jewish idol worshiper, or someone who imagines that the Holy One, blessed be He, has a body, and also a Noahide who imagines this; but in any case all of them sin, because they should have learned and did not learn. And it seems that he does not make leniencies in the realm of distorted opinions and beliefs, neither with Noahides nor with Jews, except for captive infants among Jews.
Today, however, it is accepted to see a person whose perceptions are distorted, but who acts not out of corrupt character traits but innocently, as not being a sinner.
And maybe that is connected to one’s view of the essence of sin.
My questions:
1. In your opinion, is the sin created by the act itself—that is, does the transgression as such cause spiritual damage, regardless of the person’s character traits and the intentional defiance involved? (Perhaps because that is also how the spiritual worlds operate, such that every commandment or transgression affects those worlds.)
2. You wrote in the past that, from your perspective, a traditional Jew is in a certain sense worse than an atheist, if he is aware of his transgressions and chooses to do them anyway. Is that because, in your opinion, intellectual intention is the main thing, and not emotional traits and character? (For among apostates out of appetite one can find more fear of Heaven and love of God than among ideological wanderers.)
3. On such an assumption, can one say that a person has a certain right to remain in his comfort zone if he is unable to change his way of thinking? I’ll explain:
There is a political media figure named Gali Bat-Horin; I assume you’ve heard of her. I do not want to get into all the storm around the festival behind her and so on, but in several of her posts she explained why she is not religious, and what she says is:
“There is no Creator who made the world in my inner consciousness, but I support religious people because their values are good and upright.”
Not exactly in those words, but that is the spirit of it. That is, by her own account, her imaginative faculty and her intellectual and emotional recognitions are not capable of reaching the conclusion that there is a Creator of the world, and for her it makes no difference whether He exists or not.
Is such a mental stance respectable? Can the very inability of a person to arrive at a certain recognition and change his ways of thinking be seen as something that gives him legitimacy from the outset to remain in his position? Can there be a situation where a person has the status of a captive infant while knowing that this is his status?
And there are countless examples like this—of people who do not intend evil, and do not act out of corrupt traits or bad intent, but also not out of lack of knowledge; rather out of an inability from the outset to change intellectual and emotional structures.
You mentioned Angela Buchdahl in one of your columns in the past. We are talking here about a non-Jew who knows Judaism, knows that there is a prohibition against using the name Israel, yet still acts in the name of “Judaism,” which she imagines in her head to be correct.
What I mean, bottom line, is to ask: to what extent do you think there exists a concept of a person who is intellectually coerced knowingly, and cannot see and grasp reality any differently?