Q&A: Ignorance of the law is no excuse
Ignorance of the law is no excuse
Question
Ignorance of the law is no excuse! Why can’t we say that about an atheist who does not observe the commandments?
I heard that Rabbi Chaim Zimmerman wrote in one of his books (I need to look up where) that even a drunken shepherd on a remote mountain will be held accountable, or people will have claims against him—on some level, of course. Because he could have used his intellect and arrived at the correct conclusions (maybe he meant like Abraham our Patriarch).
Answer
This is a claim made by Rabbi Oury Cherki in an article. The rule in Jewish law is that a person acting under compulsion is exempt. Whatever any reasonable person would do is considered compulsion. That is true even if, theoretically, every person who examined the matter would reach the conclusion that there is an obligation to the Torah and to Jewish law. And even that itself is not necessarily true. So if that is the atheist’s position, we should not expect him to do anything else. He is acting under compulsion.
Discussion on Answer
And is there any logic at all behind saying that ignorance of the law is no excuse? Or is it simply a description of how the law works?
Does the Torah obligate a person also regarding whatever any reasonable person ought to do, and not only regarding the commandments?
After all, every person understands those reasonable things on his own—for that you don’t need the Torah! Maybe it comes to reinforce morality; maybe it comes only to say what is permitted and forbidden. But in Torah law, do they judge people for reasonable and moral matters?
And the question is also whether the reasonable person would reach the conclusion that there is an obligation to the Torah and to Jewish law—not whether that is necessarily correct!
The rule that commandments require belief is very logical. It’s just not clear that this is the Torah’s and Jewish law’s starting assumption.
I don’t know what to do with this collection of declarations. I wrote my opinion. Whatever a person does not understand is considered compulsion for him. Now decide what he does understand and what he does not. By the way, regarding “Do not murder,” it is possible that he would be considered under compulsion on the halakhic plane because he does not understand that there is such a halakhic obligation, but he would still be held accountable on the moral plane, because morally he is supposed to understand that it is forbidden.
Is he considered under compulsion even with regard to “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” etc., from the standpoint of Torah law?