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I think this is a bit of an overstatement. In my experience — I'm an athiest who doesn't follow any particular religious rules either, but I was raised Orthodox

I think this is a bit of an overstatement. In my experience — I'm an athiest who doesn't follow any particular religious rules either, but I was raised Orthodox Jewish — most Orthodox Jews do truly believe in God, and believe that at some level they'll be punished for breaking the rules and rewarded for following them. It's true that teenagers who haven't yet left home might be going through the motions cynically — when I was in high school, I was — but that's generally not true of adults: if you don't believe, when you leave home (either for college in the US, or army in Israel), it's fairly easy to "fall off the derech" and stop practicing now that you're free to find your own community. That might not be true in some of the ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel that are exempt from army service, or the Yiddish-speaking communities in America where there's a language barrier preventing you from interacting with the rest of the world, but for most religious Jews there's a pretty strong element of true belief. Religious Jews are a pretty tiny minority in the world; if you don't believe, it's pretty easy to find something else to believe in or to have a community around. > I think about it like following requirements set by certain certifications. Not all requirements make sense in every context - sometimes you may feel silly complying, knowing you're doing it just to check a box, even though there's no practical value to it. But there is a value to passing the audit and getting the certificate saying you comply from EY or whoever, so you abide by the requirements, even when they don't make sense, so you can show your ~Kosher~ ISO certificate when you need to. In general there are a huge swaths of rules in Judaism that are expected even within Orthodox Judaism to serve no practical purpose, other than simply God (supposedly) said to follow them. If you believe that God said you can eat a goose, but you cannot eat a stork, why is it any more ridiculous to believe God said you must not light a fire on Shabbat? It's all kind of silly unless you believe in the fundamental premise that these are rules from God, in which case none of it is silly. In the Orthodox communities I was raised in, the idea of a checkbox that you feel silly complying with didn't really exist: either you believed in the premise that God really wanted you to check those checkboxes, or you didn't, at which point why were you not eating shellfish or driving on Shabbat? There are social norms too, of course. But at least for religious adults, in my experience it's mostly uncynical.

orisho 6y ago
Yes indeed, it is multifaceted and there are many reasons any one person is following the rules. But I was trying to give a plausible explanation for why one might do so, even if it doesn't make strict sense to them to use a Shabbat mode elevator (the user I was replying to asked how does this make any sense, if you're trying to avoid labor during Sabbath), further outlining the idea that there are incentives other than belief that God said so. In the case of the Sabbath elevator, obviously it was not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, so it's what the Rabbi thinks. So why believe the Rabbi when the logic doesn't seem to be 100% there? I think the reason is there is massive social incentive to comply instead of asking questions about such widely accepted ideas. It does seem you're speaking from more personal experience than mine, so I defer to you, but I'd like to reiterate that I'm just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why one who doesn't have such a strong belief might still end up doing it (the hypothetical person in the post of the poster I was replying to who's asking themselves why a Sabbath elevator makes sense), but I'm not trying to say that's all there is to it. People who don't question it in the first place because their thought process is that the Halacha is telling them what God meant and thus they are merely following God's instructions don't question whether a Shabbat elevator makes sense in the first place.

orisho 6y ago

Yes indeed, it is multifaceted and there are many reasons any one person is following the rules. But I was trying to give a plausible explanation for why one might do so, even if it doesn't make strict sense to them to use a Shabbat mode elevator (the user I was replying to asked how does this make any sense, if you're trying to avoid labor during Sabbath), further outlining the idea that there are incentives other than belief that God said so. In the case of the Sabbath elevator, obviously it was not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, so it's what the Rabbi thinks. So why believe the Rabbi when the logic doesn't seem to be 100% there? I think the reason is there is massive social incentive to comply instead of asking questions about such widely accepted ideas. It does seem you're speaking from more personal experience than mine, so I defer to you, but I'd like to reiterate that I'm just trying to provide a plausible explanation for why one who doesn't have such a strong belief might still end up doing it (the hypothetical person in the post of the poster I was replying to who's asking themselves why a Sabbath elevator makes sense), but I'm not trying to say that's all there is to it. People who don't question it in the first place because their thought process is that the Halacha is telling them what God meant and thus they are merely following God's instructions don't question whether a Shabbat elevator makes sense in the first place.