Theological-political post

This is sort of a different (and more personal) topic than normal, and a lot longer, but I was stood up by one conversation partner and so spent an hour outside a cafe drinking a strawberry milkshake and thinking about God, so this is what's on my mind now (I'll be back to talking about riots in a couple days)...

A couple months ago, after deciding to convert, I decided what made most sense to me was to think of the process (and the result) as committing myself to wrestle with a certain set of texts and traditions. Making that commitment is less than committing myself to any particular beliefs (such as beliefs in the supernatural), but it does mean that I've set myself the task of thinking carefully about such things.

Since being here in Berlin, I've been reading Solomon Schechter's Aspects of Rabbinic Judaism. I like it a lot - it's super-clear, and gets right at a lot of topics I want to figure out. One of those topics is why Jews are bound by God's commands.

One answer Schechter talks about is that this stems from Jews' being subjects of God as king - moreover, as voluntary subjects. Since I don't think I'll ever be able to accept the existence of a human-like political entity who personally communicated with Moses, this idea of commands being binding because they were voluntarily accepted is very appealing. So long as we know there's voluntary acceptance of them, we can see how they're binding without having to assume (or deny) that they had a supernatural origin.

But this seems to contradict something else that, for me (being under Spinoza's influence), seems very important: the idea of God as the source of morality in some sense. The thing that's special about morality is that it's binding on everyone, whether they like it or not, and whether they assent to it or not. But if God can make commands that are binding regardless of assent (as moral commands are), then how is room left for commands that are binding because they're assented to?

For me, this is kind of pressing, because it seems pretty clear that not all the commandments that are central to Judaism are, or could be, universal moral truths (e.g. Saturday being the Sabbath). And I'd feel uncomfortable about converting if I thought that those commandments were binding for a completely different reason than the transparently moral commandments.

So here's what I'm thinking now: I want to hold onto the thought of God being the source of morality (since, for me, this is part of a conception of God that I can honestly accept), and the thought that voluntary choice has a role. Maybe the way to do this is to think of God's commandments coming in two types (both of equal importance): the determinate and the indeterminate type. A determinate commandment is one that is specific enough to shape your actions pretty directly (e.g. not killing, or not worshiping idols). But indeterminate commandments aren't themselves specific enough to shape your actions. Say, for instance, that one indeterminate commandment is "regularly set aside time in your life to reflect on your place in the world and your duties." With such a commandment doesn't tell you which times to set aside - it's just important that you pick one and stick with it. And this is where the voluntary choice comes in: the indeterminate commandment is binding whether you like it or not, but you ('you' perhaps being a community) get to choose which particular times to be bound to.

Of course, this means that if we're trying to understand all this in terms of moral duties, we have to find an indeterminate duty for each commandment that doesn't claim universality. And that probably won't work out in some cases, and then we'll either need some other story, or question its bindingness.

If anyone actually read all of that... you must be seriously procrastinating. But thanks!