Mitzvah of the Week: #1 - To know/believe there is a God

In light of what I have learned over the past couple weeks about this mitzvah, I felt some serious editing was in order.  Rather than publish this as an entirely new post, I decided instead to re-write it, retaining those parts from the original that made sense, adding new ideas where necessary.

The important change, which I discussed in this post, is that rather than relying on the Rambam's Sefer HaMitzvot (see here for Hebrew-only version), I am going to work my way through his Mishneh Torah ("MT"), tackling the mitzvot in the order in which they appear there.  There's a lot more commentary and discussion in the MT, so I think in the long run this will make the most sense.  (Chabad's English translation of the MT can be found here.  Hebrew can be found here and, in a slightly more readable format, here.  I am also relying on Rabbi Eliyahu Tougher's translation and commentary published by Moznaim.)

Introduction:

Interesting that what is arguably the most central, important mitzvah is described by the Rambam in two different ways.

In Sefer HaMitzvot, he explains that believing in God - this first positive commandment - means "to believe [להאמין] that there is a Cause and a Reason which is the Maker of all the creations..."  He cites Exodus 20:2, in which God says "I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me" as well as Deut. 5:6, where Moses quotes God saying these same words.  Rambam also refers to Makkot  23a [53-54]:

R. Simlayi lectured: Six hundred and thirteen commands were said to Moses; three hundred and sixty-five of them negatives, corresponding to the number of days in a year counting according to sunrise; and two hundred and forty-eight positives, corresponding to the members of a man's body. Said R. Hamnunah: Where is there an allusion thereto in the Scripture? [Deut. xxxiii. 4]: "The Torah which Moses commanded us." The letters of the word Torah number six hundred and eleven (Tav is 400; Vov, 6; Reish, 200, and Hei, 5), and the two first commandments [i.e., Exodus 20:2], however, of the ten, we ourselves have heard from Heaven.

Concludes Rambam, "It is clear, then, that 'I am the Lord your God' is included in the 613 mitzvoth, and it is the commandment to believe, as we have explained."

However, in the MT (Sefer HaMada, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, Chap.1), the Rambam says "The foundation of all foundations and the pillar of wisdom is to know [לידע] that there is a Primary Being who rought into being all existence..." and that "the knowledge of this concept [וידיעת דבר זה מצות עשה] is a positive commandment..."  The basis of this comandment is the same as in Sefer HaMitzvot (i.e., Exodus 20:2), though there is more discussion in this chapter of MT about what this knowledge entails.

Some preliminary thoughts and questions:

1. I was surprised to see "belief in God" on the list of mitzvot.  Somehow -- not sure why -- I had it in my head that one wasn't actually required to believe in God, only to behave as if it were true.  Apparently I was wrong about this.  But then I see in MT that Rambam says something different, that the commandment is to "know that there is" God.  What is the difference between "to believe" (להאמין) and "to know" (לידע) in the context of understanding and observing this mitzvah?
   
   
2. Can one be commanded to believe something?  If one believes in God in the first place (putting aside for a moment that the meaning of this statement isn't entirely clear), then commanding one to do is superflous.  If one doesn't believe in God, how is the commandment to do so supposed to work?  How do you force yourself to believe something you don't believe to be true?  How could any commandment possibly change this?
   
   One way of approaching the problem is to think of being commanded to believe X as implying that X is not a matter of fact.  For example, it would be nonsensical to command someone to belive that they sky is blue, when direct observation alone would lead someone to know it is true.  It seems to me, therefore, that the mitzvah to believe in God is really about how one should think about something that cannot be decided by resorting to facts; if facts were capable of establishing the existence of God, there would be no need to believe anything; we would simply know.
   
   
3. The problem remains, however, of commanding someone to believe something they don't already believe.  One could say that one who doesn't believe in God is unlikely to take mitzvot observance very seriously, rendering the commandment basically irrelevant, but this hardly seems right.  How could the very first mitzvah discussed by the Rambam be irrelevant?
   
   
4. Perhaps being commanded to believe X may be a way of saying that the nature of X is such that there is no way to know whether or not it is true.  I can apply reason to the matter as far as it will go, but at some point, reason ends and belief or "faith" begins.  For example, could I not say, "All of my logical faculties lead me to conclude that there is no God, but to the extent that the nature of God is such that God's existence cannot be either proved or disproved through logic or evidence, it is therefore possible for me to accept the positive commandment to believe that it is so."
   
   
5. Being commanded to know -- rather than just believe -- is something quite different.  But how?  If being commanded to believe implies that the matter does not concern facts, being commanded to know implies that the matter does concern facts.  Yet the Rambam goes to great lengths in the MT to argue that God is completely surpasses all human faculties of perception.  In other words, God's very nature means that we cannot have facts concerning God's existence -- words imply limitations whereas God has no limitations.  So what is it that we can "know" about God?!?

Things I am going to do this week:

• I will explore actively believing in God in light of the fact that I have been commanded to do so (rather than because I myself arrived at this beleif on my own, in the past).
• I will observe the implications and effects of actively believing in this way.
• I've put a reminder on my cellphone standby mode:  "BELIEVE IN GOD"
• I will read, study and think about this mitzvah as much as possible.

....

And now for the week-1 roundup:

• Actively believing in God is a lot more difficult than I had expected.  To say I believe, then file it away is easy, but to keep the idea in my mind...that takes effort.  Everything else conspires to get in the way.  This isn't easy.
  
  
• When I tried to believe in God, really what I did was remind or reiterate to myself that I believe.  Whether or not these are the same things I don't know, but the act of reminding really did make the entire world look different to me.  I felt watched, as if everything I did (or didn't do) had greater significance.  The flip side is that when I wasn't actively believing in God, I didn't feel as if I was being watched.  Strange.
  
  
• Having put the stickie on my cellphone to "BELIEVE IN GOD," I now know why I have seen this bumper sticker in the Arab world:  أذكر الله (Udhkur Allah), which roughly means "Rember God."  Without it, it would be so easy not to.  But it also made me wonder what this mitzvah is really asking me to do.  It doesn't say "remember" God (there are other "remember" mitzvot), it says "believe" or "know" that there is God.  Did I fulfil the commandment this week?
  
  
• So I turned to some additional, secondary literature on the web.  This interesting paper offers the concept of "hechsher mitzvah" or "precondition for mitzvot," meaning that the commandment is to know God through study and deeper understanding, not to force the unbeliever but rather to get the believer to "get to know Him a little better...to study, contemplate, and philosophize, with the aim of achieving a more sophisticated knowledge of the nature and necessity of God's existence."
  
  
• Other interesting ideas are here and here, the latter of which says that the mitzvah as described by Rambam, is not so much to believe in God as to know God (i.e., "to constantly recognize God's existence").  Interestingly, the interviewee here, Moshe ben-Chaim, makes the argument that proof is a necessary part of belief.  That's an eye-opening thought...I thought that if you have proof then belief isn't needed?!?
  
  Indeed, a close reading of the Rambam's discussion in MT suggests that ben-Chaim is right, that whatever his motives in using the words "to believe" in Sefer HaMitzvot, what he's really saying is that the action of this mitzvah is to puruse a certain kind of metaphysical knowledge about God, not to constantly remind one's self to believe in God (as I thought at first).  As Tougher comments, the mitzvah implies that "our knowledge of God's existence must be developed and cannot be left as a general, undefined conception." 
  
  
• If I am to take the Rambam's discussion seriously, fulfilling this mitzvah is an extremely tall order. Indeed, Tougher explains that "Through our belief in God, [one] must work to internalize that belief and make it part of [one's] conscious process."  It seems to me that this internalization can take place through study, but also through the kind of active reminding that I've engaged in over the past few weeks.
  
  
• Already I'm starting to appreciate how complicated theology can be.  That this seemingly simple commandment could be so...not simple is pretty mind-bending. 
  

Conclusions:

1. I do believe in God, and I do follow the Rambam's logic and argument to a great extent...so I think I can say I observe this commandment, but I'm sure there's a lot more to it.  At the very least I don't object to anything here.
   
   
2. That said, I'm not sure I could learn to constantly remind myself about my belief in God, and if I could, I'm not sure I would like myself very much.  Where would I draw the line?  How much remembering to believe in God would be "enough"?  At what point would the obsessiveness required to rememer to believe in God outweigh the point of believing in God in the first place?
   
   
3. But this is worth more exploration and consideration...

So for now, the tally is:

Mitzvot I can get on board with: 1
Mitzvot that I can't accept: 0
Mitzvot that no longer apply: 0

"Question marks": 0

Mitzvot tried out: 1
Mitzvot to go: 612

Stay tuned next week, for Mitzvah #2:  Not to believe in/consider the thought of a divinity other than God...