1. Obligation
״וַיִּתְיַצְּבוּ בְּתַחְתִּית הָהָר״, אָמַר רַב אַבְדִּימִי בַּר חָמָא בַּר חַסָּא: מְלַמֵּד שֶׁכָּפָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא עֲלֵיהֶם אֶת הָהָר כְּגִיגִית, וְאָמַר לָהֶם: אִם אַתֶּם מְקַבְּלִים הַתּוֹרָה מוּטָב, וְאִם לָאו — שָׁם תְּהֵא קְבוּרַתְכֶם.
אָמַר רַב אַחָא בַּר יַעֲקֹב: מִכָּאן מוֹדָעָא רַבָּה לְאוֹרָיְיתָא. אָמַר רָבָא: אַף עַל פִּי כֵן הֲדוּר קַבְּלוּהָ בִּימֵי אֲחַשְׁוֵרוֹשׁ, דִּכְתִיב: ״קִיְּמוּ וְקִבְּלוּ הַיְּהוּדִים״ — קִיְּימוּ מַה שֶּׁקִּיבְּלוּ כְּבָר.
The Torah says, “And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God; and they stood at the lowermost part of the mount” (Exodus 19:17). Rabbi Avdimi bar Ḥama bar Ḥasa said: the Jewish people actually stood beneath the mountain, and the verse teaches that the Holy One, Blessed be He, overturned the mountain above the Jews like a tub, and said to them: If you accept the Torah, excellent, and if not, there will be your burial.
Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: From here there is a substantial caveat to the obligation to fulfill the Torah. The Jewish people can claim that they were coerced into accepting the Torah, and it is therefore not binding. Rava said: Even so, they again accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus, as it is written: “The Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all such as joined themselves unto them” (Esther 9:27), and he taught: The Jews ordained what they had already taken upon themselves through coercion at Sinai.
The Obligated Self p.9
To be an obligated self was to be subject to the law of another: the Law of the Baby. The law could not be fulfilled in abstract, but only in active, embodied, material actions: soothing, feeding, cleaning, comforting, distracting, smiling and wiping....
The force of the Law of Another was greater than anything I could have anticipated or to which I could have assented. I had never explicitly agreed to be subject to it, although as an adult who was compos mentis, clearly I had some idea what I was getting into... Nonetheless, I could not agree to the law before I was already subject to it. And once in place, I could only violate the law through intention or frustration; I could not cast it off. I transgressed the law as often as I fulfilled it, leaving my crying baby or comfort-seeking toddler to calm herself when I could not bring myself to respond. Nonetheless, it was clear to me that there was a law, and that the law applied to me by virtue of being my child's parent...
And yet, as the midrash conveys, we cannot simply submit... Agency is crucial to human flourishing... We always stand "under the mountain," positioned only to respond to the conditionality of our being and of the others who constitute our being in the world. Our freedom consists not in casting off all that binds us, but rather in recognising that our boundedness and our agency are each parts of a greater whole.
2. Love
Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD.
(19) You too must love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
The Obligated Self p.30
Rabbinic texts, as I have argued, operate with the assumption that obligated activity, even without proper motivation, promotes a desired disposition [מתוך שלא לשמה בא לשמה, "doing things for the wrong reason leads to doing them for the right reason]. The rabbis understood the phenomenology of love and obligation that many mothers experience daily.
But rabbinic theological anthropology does not acknowledge the broader systems without which love can not emerge from obligation. The acknowledgment of the contingency of maternal love on factors "external" to the mother herself - including even the very activity of caregiving - offers a challenge and an opportunity for thinking about the religious meaning of commanded love.
3. Otherness
The Obligated Self p.88
Parents' simultaneous sense of responsibility for and implication in their children suggests that the Other need not be figured as utterly outside of oneself in order to issue a command, nor as simply an extension of oneself in order to be perceived as a co-participant in a common reality. So too for the divine Other. The interconnection, difference, and responsibility that characterises the asymetrical relationship between God and human beings is given texture by the work of caring for and raising a child...
The human being who understands herself as a matter of divine concern cannot have theological intimacy without theological mystery and vice versa. Child-rearing is a daily practicum in this complex form of relationality.
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה' אֱלֹקֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְמַן הַזֶּה:
Blessed are you, God our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has kept us alive and sustained us and brought us to this moment.