Q&A: Regarding Idolatry: Someone Who Makes Himself a God but Does Not Command Any Form of Worship
Regarding Idolatry: Someone Who Makes Himself a God but Does Not Command Any Form of Worship
Question
Hello and blessings,
A dispute came up among the friends during our regular study of tractate Sanhedrin, and we decided that we would accept the Rabbi’s judgment on the matter:
The doubt is this: if someone says that he is a god or the son of a god, but does not command that people worship him in any way, is he liable merely for the statement itself or not?
My friends say that the very statement that he is a god or son of a god is idolatry, and like the law of an inciter or one who leads others astray, and therefore he is liable to stoning like one guilty of idolatry—and in their view “it’s obvious that this is the law.”
My opinion is that he is not, for several reasons (partly based on the Mishnah in Sanhedrin 7:10), because in the end, in mere “saying” there is nothing at all, and he is like the other fools in the world.
Only in the law of a blasphemer do we find punishment for speech alone, but in idolatry one must perform one of the four acts, and thought alone is not enough
(the punishment for which is only at the hands of Heaven, if at all), nor is speech alone enough for a religious court to punish him, all the more so to execute him on a charge of idolatry.
We’re waiting for the Rabbi’s judgment 🙂
Answer
I didn’t quite understand what it means that you will accept my words. Will someone who disagrees retract just because I said so? But he doesn’t think that. It seems to me that what you really want is to ask my opinion, not receive a halakhic ruling from me.
In my understanding, there is no liability for punishment without an act. (Not necessarily one of the four acts of worship; if it is that idol’s normal mode of worship, then any act suffices.) Speech, however severe it may be, does not incur punishment. By the way, not because he is a fool, since you could say about any idol worshipper that he is a fool and exempt him from punishment. This is a rule in the laws of punishment: there is no punishment without an act. And especially in idolatry, where the prohibition itself is on the worship, not only the punishment. Heresy is not idolatry. However, “they are lowered and not raised” certainly can apply even to speech, because that is not a punishment. The words of the Radbaz are well known regarding someone who said that Moses our teacher is God: they wanted to lower him into a pit and not raise him out, and he told them to leave him alone because he was coerced in his mind (that is how he thinks).
By the way, such a statement does not fall under the category of an inciter or one who leads others astray, because the inciter must incite people to worship.
Well, the defendant was saved at the last moment. He should transfer 100,000 NIS to me and we’ll close the matter.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know of anyone who wrote against the Radbaz.
Thank you for the answer.
Indeed, the one who did not agree with me (that one does not punish for such a statement) read your words and retracted, and if it can be called that, accepted the halakhic ruling the Rabbi wrote.
When I wrote “fool” about someone who says he is a god, I meant this: to see a human being with all his physical “virtues” and claim that he is a god is obvious nonsense. By contrast, attributing divinity to a force in nature—say, the sun—is also nonsense, but a superficial understanding could mislead a person into such a thought, since it has the power of heat, its size in space, etc., and one could mistakenly think that maybe it has some kind of power (= divinity). You can also say that he is mistaken in his thinking, but regarding such an error, when it leads to action, the Torah was strict and imposed punishment.
Regarding the excellent example from the Radbaz: does the Rabbi know whether there are any halakhic decisors who disagreed with the Radbaz on this?
As for the defendant—we’ll update him 😉
More power to you