And why does it obligate me?

One question remains, and it may be the most important of all. Suppose God really did command. That is a fact. But from a fact no “ought” follows. Why does it obligate me?

The answer is that there are facts which whoever understands them feels at once that they obligate. We saw this in morality. Whoever truly understands that harming an innocent person is evil needs no further reason not to do it. So too here. Whoever stands before the command of the one who created him understands on his own that he is obligated. Whoever looks for a further reason is like the blind man in the parable: he lacks the sense to see it.

Some say: “It is just upbringing. Most religious people grew up in a religious home, and most secular people in a secular home.” True, but this claim hits the secular exactly as it hits the religious. It is a general skepticism, not an argument for atheism. And more than that: religious intuition is like moral intuition. A delicate instrument that must be developed. Education is development, not programming.

Gratitude

And now to the foundation itself. The Jewish tradition says that we serve God out of gratitude, for all the good he gives us. So says the Torah: “Is he not your father, who acquired you? He made you and established you.” But about this there are hard questions, and they must be stated honestly. Rabbi Yehuda Amital, head of Yeshivat Har Etzion and a Holocaust survivor, asked: can a Jew who was forced to pull corpses out of the crematoria at Auschwitz serve God out of gratitude? And he answered: “In no way, no.” And our Sages themselves said that “it would have been better for man not to have been created.” There are also logical questions: the needs that God fulfills, he himself created in us, both the disease and the cure. And whoever created a creature is in any case obligated to care for it.

The answer is that there are two kinds of gratitude. There is “ordinary” gratitude: thanks for something I received. It depends on what I received, and if I received suffering, it is damaged. And there is another, deeper gratitude: obligation toward the one thanks to whom I exist at all, regardless of what I received. Like a branch toward the tree from which it grew. That is not thanks, and it is not a feeling. It is a duty.

The test of parents clarifies the difference. Toward an adoptive parent who gave much, there is ordinary gratitude. Toward biological parents who abandoned, there is no ordinary gratitude. And yet most people feel that they still have a certain claim. That is gratitude of the second kind. And toward parents who both gave birth and raised, both together. Toward God this is true all the more. He did not give us “something.” He gave us existence itself. “He made you and established you.”

And precisely because of this, this obligation does not depend on how well off we are. It does not flow from the favors we received, but from the very fact that we were created. Therefore it does not disappear even in hard times, when the suffering in the world makes it hard to feel gratitude. And that same feeling is also the right intention in keeping the mitzvot: not fear, not benefit, not even only love, but doing because it is right. Exactly like the moral act.

What faith gives

It is worth saying also what faith gives, provided one remembers that this is not the reason to believe. It gives meaning. It gives identity: whoever is committed becomes a link in a long chain of generations. And there is richness in it: a world full of values gives more room for personal expression than a world in which there are only moral values. But there is also a warning here. Whoever persuades people to return to observance because of “the pleasant atmosphere of a Shabbat table” is offering therapy, not faith. One must be committed because it is true. And precisely because it is true, it gives meaning.

Summary

No argument on its own is an absolute proof. The power is in the combination. One can see the arguments as a series of surprising “leaps” in the world: from nothing to something, that is the first argument. From chaos to precise laws that make life possible, that is the second. From matter to a mind that understands the universe, that is the third. And from mind to the sense that there are real good and evil, that is the fourth. And from there, to a God who speaks with human beings, and to the obligation to what he asked.

Imagine we asked someone who has no idea about our universe: what do you think a universe created by design should look like, and what would a universe that arose by chance look like? He would presumably answer that in a designed universe there would be laws, complexity, varied creatures, consciousness and constant progress. Whereas in a random universe, if such a thing is even possible, there would be a chaos that leads nowhere, and if by chance something formed in it, it would quickly be destroyed. Certainly there would be no consciousness, morality or reports of revelation in it. And then we would show him our universe: the precise laws of nature, the variety of creatures, humanity with all its creations. Which of the two possibilities does it resemble more?

The atheist must believe that all this happened by chance. And more than that: if he is consistent, he must give up his trust in reason and in science, and the belief that there are good and evil. That is the real price.

There is no certainty here, but there are very good reasons. And that is how we live in every field: not by absolute proofs, which do not exist on any subject, but by what is reasonable and logical. This is neither blind faith nor an “imaginary friend,” but a logical conclusion.