Q&A: One Who Says the Torah Is Not from Heaven
One Who Says the Torah Is Not from Heaven
Question
You say that you keep Jewish law, but you don’t believe that anyone can tell you what to believe—I can relate to that. But as I understand it, “one who says the Torah is not from Heaven” is not telling us what to believe; rather, it is a law like any other law, that it is forbidden to say such a thing, just as slander is forbidden to speak regardless of whether it is true. Sorry for the poor Hebrew—I used Google Translate.
Answer
The Jewish law regarding one who says the Torah is not from Heaven presupposes the fact that the Torah is indeed from Heaven. As for slander, you are absolutely right about the prohibition against saying it. But the prohibition against accepting it is not tenable at all, because if I have reached the conclusion that it is true, then in my view it is true, and it is impossible to command me to change my factual beliefs.
Discussion on Answer
I could understand the Sages forbidding people to say that the Torah is not from Heaven even if they believed that only parts of it are really from Heaven, because once you start casting doubt on some parts of it, others will cast doubt on all of it. It would be like the way things escalated in Germany before the war—as a decree or ordinance.
And about this statement, Professor Agassi, of blessed memory, said: it is written specifically, “one who says the Torah is not from Heaven”—specifically one who says it—but nothing is written about what one is obligated to think.