Q&A: Is There Merit/Reward for Being a Believer?
Is There Merit/Reward for Being a Believer?
Question
In your view, since faith is something that can be proven, then once I’m convinced by your proofs, I must necessarily accept the conclusion that there is a God. So what merit would I have?
I heard an argument that if there is merit for a believer, that must be because he believes despite there being no proofs for faith / because science denies faith. Otherwise why would there be any merit—after all, everyone would believe if you proved it to him.
P.S. I heard from you that, contrary to what Maimonides writes, there is no commandment to believe. So what is the first utterance, “I am the Lord”? Is it just a report about reality? Would it happen to be the only one of the Ten Commandments that is not a commandment?
Answer
Who said there is merit or reward for that? Simply put, this utterance is an introduction to the commandments that follow it, not a commandment in itself. First you get acquainted with the speaker, and then you accept His commandments.
If a person believes without having reasons, then he doesn’t really believe. So I don’t see what merit he deserves for being a fool. Of course, if he has an intuition that there is a God, that is perfectly fine. It does not have to be based on a logical-philosophical argument (which itself is based on certain assumptions). When I say that there are proofs for faith, that is always on the basis of some assumptions.
Discussion on Answer
“I am the Lord” is one of the Ten Utterances, but not a commandment. There were ten utterances.
An explicit verse: “And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Utterances” (Exodus 34:28). I once thought to say, based on the Masoretic division of the closed sections, that “I am” and “You shall have no other gods” are one utterance, while “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house” and “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” are two separate utterances. The only difficulty is: what is the difference between them? (In Deuteronomy it is easier, because there there is a difference between “You shall not covet” and “You shall not desire.”)
I didn’t understand the comment. Obviously there are ten commandments. My claim is that not every utterance is necessarily a commandment. There were ten utterances, but that does not necessarily mean there are ten commandments here.
If so, then according to your view, what is the tenth commandment?