By Rabbi Gidon Rothstein, WebYeshivaTo me, the best place to begin thinking about Judaism’s view of the proper balance between heteronomy and autonomy, between slavishly following God’s commands and expressing our independent human creativity, is with non-Jews. I believe Jewish tradition assumed non-Jews are obligated to follow the fairly minimal set of commandments God gave them as well as to contribute creatively to building their spiritual personae; I start with them because the smaller set of commandments is easier to work with, but the model will remain the same as I move on to thinking about Jews and their relationship to God.Even as I begin, I should note that some would already disagree with my assumption that Judaism has a religious vision for non-Jews. Some of the derogatory Talmudic statements about non-Jews might give the impression that Judaism sees “them” as a lost cause. Perhaps adding to that, many have assumed that the commandments Judaism does apply to non-Jews are universally rational, meaning that the religion only asks them to adhere to a basic morality that is and should be obvious to everyone.Let me pause here to make a note about terms. Last post, I referred to certain ideas being “intuitive,” by which I meant something different than “personally creative.” I thought of intuitive or rational as referring to those ideas or moral propositions that everyone should agree to, regardless of their training or cultural background—such as that it is wrong to kill a complete stranger with no good reason. To me, the obligation to follow such rules is not the same as autonomy; rather, I am trying to find places where God and the Torah left room for communities and individuals to make personal and nonobvious decisions about how to serve God, enriching the world in ways that are very much their own, not imposed upon them by God.It will take me two steps to show this is true for non-Jews. In the rest of this post, I offer evidence that the Talmud thought Scripture blamed non-Jews precisely for failing to realize that they were originally expected to figure out how to worship God on their own, and were only given the Noahide laws only when they failed to do so. In the following posts, God willing, I will then show that the laws God gave them are not nearly as obvious, universal, or eminently rational as they are made out to be, that the laws in fact impose a vision of goodness and service of God that is far from obvious.Loosing the Bonds of the Nations: A Verse and Its RamificationsBefore I cite the Talmudic statement that anchors my argument, I want to note ahead of time that it sounds aggadic, like many other homiletic statements, and might therefore seem unable to bear the weight I will place on it (as I noted in post 5 of the Mission of Orthodoxy project, aggadic statements have to be used with great care). In this case, though, the statement comes as part of a series of inferences from a single verse, and those inferences carry halachic weight, meaning they were meant to be acted upon.The Talmud is interpreting a verse in Chabakkuk, “He stood and measured the earth; he looked and shook the nations; then the eternal mountains were scattered, the everlasting hills sank low; his ways were as of old.”[i] Medieval commentators understood the text as referring to punishments administered to the generation of the Flood or of the Tower of Babel. The Talmud, however, sees the verse as revealing that non-Jews’ failure to observe the Noahide laws led God to punish them in everlasting ways.[ii]Most of the examples the Talmud gives for that punishment involve the loss of certain protections of law. For one example, the Talmud assumed that a Jew is not required to pay if his or her ox gores that of an idolatrous non-Jew. That is obviously a fraught legal position that would necessitate much discussion to fully explain, but is not my issue now; I raise it only as a reminder that this is an halachic conversation in the Talmud, not an aggadic one.In that series of punishments, the last one asserts that the reference to God’s having “loosed the bonds” refers to the Noahide commandments. At first glance this sounds like God absolved non-Jews of the need to follow those commandments (loosing those bonds); the Talmud rejects that possibility, since it would mean God had rewarded evildoers for their rebellion. The Talmud suggests that non-Jews are still obligated in the laws, but God rescinded the reward for following them. That view contradicts the accepted truth that non-Jews receive great reward for keeping those laws that apply to them. The Talmud therefore concludes that non-Jews only get reward as if they were performing these acts voluntarily, not the greater reward given to those who act out of obedience to a command.The give and take can be distracting, but in sum the Talmud reads the verse in Chabbakuk as meaning that non-Jews’ failure to observe the Noahide laws left them with the lower reward given those who voluntarily undertake a positive practice. And yet, the Talmud and later authorities still assume that a non-Jew who specifically and formally recognizes that God commanded those observances returns to the state of being rewarded as if commanded, a prime example being R. Meir’s claim that a non-Jew involved with Torah receives reward like a High Priest.The Elusive Commandment of Noahide ObligationsThe Talmudic discussion leaves out important information to understanding its point. First, it does not tell us the timing of this verse—if God punished non-Jews for their failure to observe God’s laws, when did God command them and when did God punish them? Second, if God decided to punish them, why was it done so passively, limiting itself to a loss of a level of reward (which, incidentally, would matter little to non-Jews who had already demonstrated their indifference to these laws).On God’s commanding the Noahide laws, the Talmud presents a mixed message: sometimes it refers to the Noahide laws as having been commanded,[iii] but other times speaks of non-Jews having accepted the laws upon themselves, [iv] which suggests voluntary adherence. Perhaps most interestingly, the Talmud interchanges the terms on occasion,[v] as if there were no significant difference, although we have just seen one.The Scriptural source the Talmud cites for these laws does little to clear up the matter.[vi] The Talmud points to the verse, “And the Lord God commanded the man saying, “From all the trees of the Garden you may freely eat,”[vii] and understands each word in the verse as indicating a different one of the laws: idolatry, blasphemy, establishing a court system, prohibiting murder, incest, theft, and the eating of limbs from live animals. Since words elsewhere in Scripture mean those laws, the words in this verse can mean them as well, according to the Talmud.For just one example of how this works, the word “commanded” (in the phrase “And the Lord God commanded”) is taken as referring to the requirement to establish a court system, because another verse in Genesis uses the same verb when referring to Avraham’s ordering his children and descendants to act justly. Since courts are also venues of justice, “commanded” indicates issues of justice.The technique is commonplace in the Talmud but startling here because it seems to assume that Adam and his descendants would have understood God’s words according to their meaning elsewhere in Scripture (which had not yet been revealed to humanity). As if he were alert to this problem, Rambam writes in a notably convoluted way about Adam’s introduction to the Noahide laws:Adam was commanded about six matters, idolatry, blasphemy…and courts; even though all of these are a tradition in our hands from Moshe our teacher and the intellect inclines towards them, from the general tenor of the words of the Torah it appears that he was commanded about these.[viii]Rambam could have said simply that God commanded Adam about six rules; instead, he recognizes the authoritative tradition that these were commanded, notes that they are the kinds of obligations everyone accepts (a claim I will dispute in coming posts), and grudgingly concedes that the “general tenor” of the Torah’s words could mean that he was expected to observe them. He does not explain why he said it this way, but the obscurity of the Talmudic derivation seems a likely candidate.When he throws in that our intellects would point to these laws anyway, Rambam obliquely reminds us to wonder why God would have felt the need to command propositions and modes of behavior that were intellectually obvious. Although Rambam does not to my knowledge say this, R. Nissim of Kairouan, a 10th century North African scholar, took for granted that non-Jews must honor their parents, because he assumes non-Jews are obligated to fulfill any intuitive responsibility.[ix]Rambam would likely have known R. Nissim’s work, but not that of Rashbam, a twelfth century Biblical and Talmudic commentator, who made a similar assumption when reading a verse that speaks of Avraham as having observed God’s Torah and commandments. The verse is difficult, since both Torah and the commandments had yet to be given. Rashbam assumes that Avraham observed all the commandments the human intellect can come to on its own; indeed, he went further, arguing these are fully in force even absent a command by God. Some of Rashbam’s examples are in the list of Noahide laws, but others are not, such as welcoming guests.[x]Could Rationally Obvious Ideas Be Considered Commanded?All of these oddities make sense if we assume that, at least until the time of the Flood, people were both privileged and required to define their obligations to God on their own. That is not true, I note now, of the Noahide laws the Talmud defines, since elements of those were decidedly not universally intuitive, as we will see next time. Rather, I am suggesting that had human beings shouldered their responsibility correctly, God might have been equally satisfied with a similar but not identical set of laws.That explains the prooftext the Talmud offers, in which the literal sense says that God permitted all the trees in the Garden but one, and the Talmud showed how each word could refer to another elsewhere in Scripture. Perhaps the statement was indeed meant to be filled with meaning, each word symbolizing a mode of behavior, but that it was originally Adam’s right and obligation to articulate that meaning. After the Flood, God defined them more exactly, and we could never go back. My point is that perhaps before the Flood, the command was fluid enough that it could also have encompassed other visions of law. It is that fluidity, perhaps, that Rambam was noting when he spoke of the “general tenor” of the Torah’s words.Humanity’s neglect to flesh out a life of morality and striving to get closer to the Creator finally “forced” God to react to the generations of the Flood or the Tower, with the punishment mentioned by Chabakkuk. If so, the punishment was not for specific transgressions, it was for the failure to articulate and adhere to a reasonable standard of behavior.This would mean that before the event referred to in Habakkuk, a non-Jew who behaved morally out of a belief in a God who desires moral behavior would have been rewarded as if he had observed a commandment, a specific order from God to act this way. Thus, for R. Nissim of Kairouan, for example, a non-Jew who honored a parent– despite there having been no specific command to do so– would have been rewarded by God as if he or she were responding properly to a Divine dictate.A First Example of Autonomy LostThat is not the state of Noahide law in Jewish thought since at least Talmudic times. Rambam and Ramban each note that non-Jews only get full reward for their observances if they follow them because God told them to do so, as articulated in the Torah and Talmud. Rambam famously writes that non-Jews who keep the Noahide laws are only considered of the “righteous of the nations” and earn a share in the World to Come if they accept those obligations because God commanded them in the Torah. I am suggesting that that only became true after the time of the Divine decision reflected in Chabakkuk, when God limited their right of autonomous legislation.Ramban explicitly differentiates an ordinary moral non-Jew from a ger toshav, a resident alien, along these lines. Though their actions may be exactly the same, the former is rewarded only as a volunteer while the latter is rewarded as one commanded, precisely because he has formally agreed to observe the Noahide laws as Jews see them.[xi]To my mind, then, the Talmud’s use of the verse in Chabakkuk indicates a significant shift in God’s relationship to humanity, somewhere around the time of the Flood or the Tower of Babel. Originally, God wanted us to articulate or create our own morality, as long as it fit the one explicit command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.When humans failed at that task, God required humans to accept and adhere to pre-determined laws, a first instance where the descent into heteronomy starts with the failure to properly handle the responsibility of autonomy. Even so, these commandments were not so restrictive as to take away creative human input. Rather, they are a way to inculcate a worldview that was supposed to form the basis of many independent and personal contributions to the world, as we will begin to see next time.[i] Chabakkuk 3;6.[ii] Baba Kamma 38a and Avodah Zara 2b.[iii] Tosefta Sota 6;9, Avoda Zara 7;4, and Sanhedrin 74b refers only to their having been commanded.[iv] See, for example, Avoda Zara 2b and 64b, where the Sages require a ger toshav, a resident alien, to formally accept the seven commandments that the Noahides accepted. This example is particularly interesting, since it is in the context of requiring the non-Jew to repeat an earlier commitment, yet refers to that original commitment as having been self-initiated.[v] Baba Kamma 38a and Sanhedrin 56a-b.[vi] Sanhedrin 56b.[vii] Genesis 2;16.[viii] Hilchot Melachim 9;1. There are only six because Rambam agreed with another Talmudic tradition that eating meat was prohibited until after the Flood, so the commandment of ever min ha-hay, eating a piece of an animal that was removed in the animal’s lifetime, could not have come until then.[ix] Introduction to the Talmud, printed in the Rom Talmud. R. Nissim further assumed that Chullin 92a’s reference to 30 commandments that Noahides accepted meant ones they intuited before the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The Talmud does not list the 30, but others have tried to reconstruct it, notably Samuel b. Chofni Gaon of the 10th century and R. Menachem Azaria da Fano of the 16th.[x] Rashbam, Genesis, 26;5, s.v. Chukkotai.[xi] Novellae to Makkot 9a.