Halakhah do Rodzaju 3:5

In the immediately following responsum, Iggerot Mosheh, Oraḥ Hayyim, I, no. 99, a responsum actually authored some two years prior to the preceding responsum, Rabbi Feinstein offers somewhat broader guidance. The question posed to him is whether it is permissible to invite people to attend synagogue services when it is known that they will travel by automobile in order to do so. He responds by ruling that it is forbidden to extend such invitations to people living at a distance from which it is impossible to come by foot on the grounds that the invitation constitutes a forbidden act of "placing a stumbling block before the blind" that is prohibited on the basis of Leviticus 19:14. He further advances a novel thesis in declaring that an invitation of such nature entails an additional transgression in the form of "enticement" (meisit). Deuteronomy 13:7-12 establishes successful enticement to commit an act of idolatry as a capital transgression. Citing the statement of the Gemara, Sanhedrin 29a, declaring the serpent that tempted Eve to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as having had the status of an "enticer," Rabbi Feinstein argues that enticement to commit any infraction constitutes a distinct sin, although only enticement to idolatry constitutes a capital transgression.²Iggerot Mosheh’s assertion that the prohibition against “enticement” is not limited to idolatry is not found in earlier sources and is directly contradicted by R. Meir Dan Plocki, Klei Ḥemdah, Parashat Re’eh, sec. 4. The serpent’s declaration, “You shall be as God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5), constituted enticement to deny a fundamental principle of faith. Denial of fundamental principles of faith constitutes heresy which, in turn, is tantamount to idolatry in other areas of Jewish law as well, as shown in this writer’s “Be-Bi’ur Shitat ha-Rambam be-Sheḥitat Akum u-Mumar,” Bet Yiẓḥak, XX (1989), 279-284.