Q&A: How can you command a person to adopt a value system when he still doesn’t understand?
How can you command a person to adopt a value system when he still doesn’t understand?
Question
Hello and blessings. I’ve thought a lot about the fact that from bar mitzvah age onward (aside from the laws of educating a minor), religious education trains children in the commandments once they have reached a basic level of understanding. But after a person has already come into his own mind, he is carrying around a whole sack of habitual commandment-observance that now he has to try to understand the truth behind—even though probably a whole lifetime would not be enough to fully grasp this entire system in a way that also creates real identification with it. And that’s pretty frustrating. The commandments are experienced as habit—because that’s how I was educated—whereas with most other things a person does, he understands quite simply what the benefit is (I study in order to do well on a test, I run in order to be healthy, and so on). With the commandments, the relationship is in a way where the intention and the act don’t match up, and that’s harmful: doing things without identifying with them as right and without understanding why. I’d be glad if you could explain your perspective on this problem and suggest possible solutions. Thanks. (I hope I explained clearly enough what I meant.)
Answer
How can you command a person to take medicine when he doesn’t understand how it works? If you trust the doctor, you take it. If you don’t, you don’t take it. The same is true with respect to Jewish law and the commandments. If you trust the “doctor” (the Holy One, blessed be He), then you observe; if not, then not. There is no necessity to understand what it does. By definition, you cannot fully understand, because what it does is not always connected to our world. (If it were connected to the world and to the human beings in it, then that could not be the purpose of creating the world and human beings. They simply should not have been created, and then there would be no need for the commandments either.)
Incidentally, this very lack of understanding is exactly why there is a need for education from a young age—to instill in you the obligation toward these things. In morality, the need for this is much smaller, because there the obligation is already deeply embedded within us, and usually it is also understood why it is necessary (although with the categorical imperative this is not always so. See Column 122 and more). In the observance of commandments and in faith / belief, education helps implant this within us.
I’ve written more than once that the fact that education is necessary, and that without it it is very difficult to get there, does not necessarily mean that education creates the obligation (which would be mere conditioning). It is like studying geometry, mathematics, or physics: without study we cannot understand them, but these are not fields the teacher invented, nor do they cease to exist without him. Incidentally, secularism also does not exist unless one is educated into it. See Alterman’s little clerical song.