Is there religious value to good deeds performed by a heretic?

In last month’s inevitable last-minute scrambling for ideas to relate at Seder-night, my attention was drawn to a piece from Rav Moshe Feinstein concerning midrashic accounts of how the Israelites merited the Exodus.

One set of aggadot focuses on the famous verse from Yechezkel “And I said to you, by your blood – live! And I said to you, by your blood – live!”. The sages teach that it was through two bloods, that of circumcision and that of the korban Pesach, that the Exodus was earned.

But what, asks Rav Feinstein, was the need for this? Do we not also read in another set of midrashim that the Israelites were redeemed in the merit of having maintained a distinct identity from that of their Egyptian hosts, in terms of language, clothes, names – and even food! The answer he offers is consistent with an important teaching of Rambam in another context.

Jewish tradition teaches that our ancestors in Egypt were heavily influenced by the pagan religious culture of their host country. The sages thus interpret the words “mishchu ukechu”, which introduce the command to offer the first korban Pesach, to be a veiled instruction to first separate themselves from idolatrous ideas and associations and only then to bring the Pesach offering. The two bloods, of circumcision representing the covenant of Avraham and the korban Pesach, represented a highly significant religious act of relinquishing Egyptian ideologies and ideas in favour of the God of Israel. The performance of good deeds and other commandments in the worship of an entity other than God, writes Rav Feinstein is not meritorious. Only once these idolatrous associations had been set aside, therefore, could their various good deeds accumulate as merits towards the Exodus.

This value system strongly echoes the teachings of Rambam in both Mishneh Torah and Moreh Nevuchim.

In chapter 8 of his Hilchot Melachim, Rambam tells us that:

“Anyone who accepts upon himself the fulfilment of these seven mitzvot and is precise in their observance is considered one of 'the pious among the gentiles' and will merit a share in the World to Come.

This applies only when he accepts them and fulfils them because the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded them in the Torah and informed us through Moses, our teacher, that Noah's descendants had been commanded to fulfil them previously. However, if he fulfils them out of intellectual conviction, he is not a resident alien, nor of 'the pious among the gentiles,' rather he is of their wise men.”

For Rambam, it would seem, it is not sufficient for non-Jews simply to observe the seven laws. They must be motivated by (and therefore implicitly believe in) the existence of God and His revelation to Moshe.

The explanation for Rambam’s position can be found in a profound passage towards the end of Moreh Nevuchim (3:51) which teaches that any attempt to worship or connect “without knowledge” to God such as by attributing physical features to Him:

“does not in true reality mention or think about God. For that thing which is in his imagination and which he mentions is his mouth does not correspond to any being at all and has merely been invented by his imagination”

Since, for Rambam, the connection that one achieves with God is an absolute reality and achieved by means of the intellect, the quality and existence of such a connection is directly affected by the correctness of a person’s intellectual perception of God. The good deeds performed by such a heretic, therefore, while being independently and objectively praiseworthy, will not bear the religious value of connecting that person to God.

When it comes to the performance of negative commandments and destructive societal behaviour, however, it is clear from the Torah that God punishes both idolators and believers for their sinful actions. We have no reason to believe that the generation of the flood or the citizens of Sodom believed in or knew of the God of Israel – they certainly had not received prophetic instruction as to how to conduct their lives. Does this indicate that, at least when it comes to negative commandments, the Torah endorses a form of natural law which all humans are supposed to be able to intuit and understand?

Not necessarily.

The “punishments” of earlier generations in the Torah may be better understood as God pursuing His plan for a refined and righteous humanity. The fate visited upon the generation of the flood and those at the Tower of Babel may therefore have been as a result of their inexorable slide away from building a society which could receive, understand and implement God’s word before transmitting it to later generation. It may not have been a consequence of culpability.

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