Confesses and Forsakes: Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu’s Apology and Its Meaning (Column 546)
In Column 543 I quoted Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu’s words regarding the disaster in Turkey and its victims. He wrote there that there is cosmic justice in the matter, for everything that happens is done “in order to cleanse the world and make it better,” and therefore we must thank God and sing praise for what befell them. This stands in contrast to the natural tendency to pity them, which stems from shortsightedness:
It’s not that we are insensitive to human suffering. Absolutely not. But if, God forbid, we don’t give thanks to God who protects us—this is ingratitude. If we think it was random—this is hardness of heart. If we think we are more compassionate than He is—this is wickedness and folly.
And he concludes:
Therefore, let us say aloud the words from the evening prayer: “The God who exacts retribution for us from our adversaries; who pays retribution to all the enemies of our souls; who preserves our lives and has not let our feet stumble; who leads us upon the heights of our enemies; and raises our horn over all who hate us.” We will give thanks in Nishmat Kol Chai for all the goodness, miracles, and wonders that You have done for us and for our fathers. We will give thanks in the Sabbath Mincha and say: “Your righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and Your Torah is truth.”
I criticized him very sharply for these remarks and attributed them to his theological outlook (which is the conventional one). I wrote there that Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu possesses several notable virtues, foremost among them integrity and the courage to say what he thinks (as in speaking out against sexual crimes within our camp, even when committed by prominent figures and rabbis), and I wrote that this very courage is likely what led him to draw conclusions from his theological views. Such courage and integrity are lacking in many who hold the same theological views but are unwilling to draw from them the full, necessary conclusions; rather, they prefer to leave things in fog and ambiguity, speaking vaguely about our inability to understand the Almighty and His ways, about leading “complex lives” on different planes (understanding that everything He does is moral even if we don’t comprehend it), and the like.
This past Sabbath, an article containing his apology was published in Olam Katan:
Following the criticism he received, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu apologizes for what he wrote, and this deserves great appreciation. Once again he demonstrated the integrity and courage that accompany him. Some will say that I, too, should apologize, with courage and integrity, for the harsh language I used toward him. In order to examine this issue—and not only for that reason—I wanted to consider the meaning of his apology, because I think it teaches us a great deal about the depth of the problem and its roots. I will return to the matter of my own apology at the end.
Preliminary Examination
At the beginning of his apology article, Rabbi Eliyahu writes:
When I read the criticism of the esteemed rabbi… regarding my words in this bulletin about the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, I understood that the recognition of the pain and suffering of those injured in the earthquakes and of the families of the dead was very much missing from the article…
And he concludes:
It is very important for me also to say something to any Turks who read the translated article and were hurt. Know that the entire State of Israel aches over your disaster, and therefore sent you planes with the finest officers and doctors to help you in these difficult moments. We all strengthen the hands of those dear people assisting you and hope that healing will come to you quickly. The entire article came out of the belief that earthquakes do not happen by chance and that we are obligated to try to understand what God is saying to us and to you. Forgive us if you were hurt.
Essentially, he says that he shares their sorrow and asks forgiveness if they were offended. At first glance, an apology and correction made with integrity is worthy of respect. But let’s look a bit more closely, and I hope you will understand why I am not satisfied and am unwilling to end the discussion here.
An apology to someone “if he was offended” usually conveys that I stand by what I wrote but did not intend to hurt him. This is an apology without retracting the content. It would seem that here there is mainly an apology for a lack of tact (which is one of the failings I pointed out in my critique; to my mind, the most marginal of them), without retracting the content. And no wonder, for the content is nothing but the theology accepted by him and by many like him (in fact, likely most of the public, at least declaratively), and the conclusions necessarily flow from that theology.
What he is saying is that what happened is precisely what they deserved as haters and enemies of Israel, and as a result the world became cleaner and better. But he regrets that people suffer because of this and is sorry that people are hurt when told so. A bit strange, no? In effect, there is an apology here but no retraction of anything he said. At most, he simply does not want to hurt. In practice, there is no apology here but rather a completion of what was lacking in his previous article: the acknowledgment of suffering. If he were to write an updated article now, it would contain exactly the same things (since he did not retract any part of the content of his words), only adding expressions of sorrow and sympathy for their suffering and hurt.
Fine, so let us imagine for a moment the corrected article. It is the original article, with additional expressions of sorrow and sharing in the suffering. Let us now examine what exactly such an article claims, and whether it differs in any way from the original and is less deserving of condemnation. I will ask which of the failings I pointed out were corrected by this apology. After that I will address why such an apology must, in fact, be almost empty of substance.
The Corrected Article: An Initial Look
In that column I explained that his words rest on the assumption that everything that happens in the world is the work of the Almighty’s hands.[1] In addition, for every such act we have the ability—and even the duty—to interpret it (despite the customary “were it not that I fear” disclaimer that we do not know the calculations of Heaven) as an act of correcting and cleansing the world (mainly for our sake). All this remains unchanged, and the necessary upshot is that the deceased are our enemies who were justly punished, just like the Egyptians who drowned in the sea. Therefore it is clear that he still believes we must praise and laud the Almighty for this.
Everything he wrote in the first article stands, except that now he also adds displays of empathy for pain and suffering. He also explained there that we should not share in the Egyptians’ sorrow. Such an approach is appropriate for angels, not for us. And in general, as I wrote there, if the Almighty does this, then it is the right action; therefore we, too, should in principle act so (assuming we know the full accounting, of course).
But if so, I do not understand three things: (1) What exactly are they supposed to be hurt by? (2) For what exactly is he asking forgiveness? (3) Why indeed should we share in their pain?
Consider a terrorist who murders Jews and is injured or suffers a heaven-sent disaster. Would Rabbi Eliyahu not tell him that he is our enemy and that he rejoices at what happened to him? Perhaps there is a lack of tact, but would such a statement be, in his eyes, an improper hurt for which he would apologize? Alternatively, would such a terrorist truly be hurt by such statements? After all, he is indeed our enemy. And if for some reason he were nonetheless hurt, should that matter to me? The three difficulties above would certainly not arise here.
Well, you are probably saying to yourselves that there is a difference: the infants who were killed in agony in Turkey are not really terrorists. But I do not understand that either. Why, then, did they deserve what they received? Does the Almighty render judgment without justice? Rabbi Eliyahu explained that it is punishment for enemies, the work of God’s hands. So whichever way you look at it: if they are enemies, the description above regarding a terrorist applies— they will not be hurt, there is no need to apologize even if they are, and certainly not to ask their forgiveness. And if they are not like terrorists, then it was not deserved; in that case it is unclear why the Almighty did this to them.
The claim that we do not know the calculations of Heaven is irrelevant, because Rabbi Eliyahu argued that we must try to understand nonetheless and even proposed an interpretation that seemed to him right and demanded. That is, in his view it is plausible that the Almighty acts this way. What remains is only the lack of tact. In other words, everything is true, but it is impolite to say it out loud. As I said, the apology is only for the lack of tact. That was one of the failings I pointed out, but to my mind it is the least of them. This is the place to return to my critique of his words.
My Critique
I had the impression that almost all of the rabbinic critics of his remarks truly share his theological assumptions. They criticized him within the accepted theological framework—some for lack of tact and some on more substantive grounds. They offered claims that try to distinguish between the justice of the matter and our duty to rejoice. In fact, he himself speaks about this in his apology. But as I explained, within this picture it seems that Rabbi Eliyahu is indeed correct. If these are the acts of the Almighty, then what ought to be done was done, and whoever suffered deserved to suffer. There is no reason to share in their sorrow (aside from the matter of tact). He even appears more honest than his critics, for he is willing to draw and state the necessary conclusions of their shared theology.
In contrast to those critiques, my critique attacks the theological framework of the discussion—that is, the content of his words and not just their lack of tact. Therefore my critique is directed also at his critics, and I insist on continuing to discuss the matter because the discussion testifies a thousandfold to my claims. This is not a random error, a slip of the pen, a lapse that can be corrected by an apology. There is a deep problem on the theological plane, not just a simple lack of tact. This critique remains valid even more so with respect to the corrected article.
In fact, the corrected article contains an inherent contradiction: Rabbi Eliyahu’s conclusions truly flow from his theological assumptions. So how can someone who shares those assumptions criticize the conclusions? We must understand that we have grown accustomed to this agreed-upon falsehood, as if one can believe that everything that happens here is the work of the Almighty’s hands—and of course that all this is pure morality—yet nevertheless we are not permitted to act thus and are not even allowed to rejoice in it. But this is simply an inconsistent view. It is living in contradiction. It is roughly like the lie of “bitachon (trust) and hishtadlut (effort)” that I have addressed more than once (see, for example, Column 279).
Sharpening the Point
If everything that happens here is the work of the Almighty’s hands, and everything He does is supremely moral, then what happened to every infant there is justified. According to Rabbi Eliyahu’s interpretation, the justification is that he is our wicked enemy who threatens us. If he is not such, then the Almighty is not acting justly, and that, of course, does not fit Rabbi Eliyahu’s theological assumptions.
If so, then we ourselves should behave in exactly the same way: slaughter, with torment, every infant and every elder who perished in the disaster—just as the Almighty did. True, we lack complete information and would not know whom to slaughter; but assuming we had the information—and the Almighty certainly has it—then all this is entirely justified and that is how one ought to act. Is anyone prepared to stand behind such a conclusion?
And regarding rejoicing versus sharing in pain and sorrow, the situation is very similar. If our enemies are struck, there is no reason to share in their mourning and pain. On the contrary, one should rejoice as over the Egyptians’ drowning in the sea. One may, of course, regret that human beings use their free will to act so wickedly and therefore merited annihilation (with torment), but that is true of terrorists as well as of Hitler. Alternatively, if they do not deserve this fate, why did the Almighty do it to them?
You might say it is to achieve other goals (perhaps to deter adults from starting up with us), or to repair the eternal Sephirah of Hod. To that I say that I see no moral justification to butcher infants in torment in order to achieve those aims. Let the Almighty, who is omnipotent, correct matters directly without going through the slaughter and torment of infants. Is anything too wondrous for the Lord?!
We are so accustomed to these questions that no one even tries to re-examine the theology that leads to them. We prefer to remain with “requires further study,” to mumble that we cannot understand the Almighty’s ways, and so on. But this makes no sense. Clearly I cannot understand the Almighty’s ways—so what? Even if I cannot understand them, it remains clear that if He butchers infants there is some moral justification. I don’t know why, but they deserve it. So what’s the problem? Why must one share in their sorrow? How are they different from terrorists who were killed—only that in the terrorists’ case I understand why they deserve it and why they are wicked? And I have not yet raised the question of how it is even possible that infants deserve such a fate. Did they choose evil or do anything wrong?
One cannot hide behind empty statements that we do not know the calculations of Heaven. Such a statement may suffice to answer questions, but not contradictions. If I do not understand why we lay tefillin, you can tell me there is some correction I do not grasp. But here we are dealing with contradictions, not questions. There is a terrible injury to those who did not sin. How can one say that there is a moral act here but I do not understand why? This is simply empty verbiage. It cannot be a moral act. Only if you say that the Almighty could not have corrected what needed correction in any other way. But is anything too wondrous for the Lord?!
No wonder the discussion—the original article, the critique, and the apology—is empty of all content. On the assumption that one adopts this theology, the initial article candidly and courageously presents the necessary conclusions flowing from it. All the rest is denial and repression, nothing more (aside from the tact issue).
The Theological Alternative
So what is the alternative? To truly retreat from the malicious nonsense written in the first article, there is no choice but to relinquish the theological assumptions at its foundation—attention, please, both to the critics and to Rabbi Eliyahu himself. One cannot scold him for his conclusions or apologize for lack of tact and be done, for given their theological assumptions these are the conclusions that follow. The only alternative is what I have written here more than once (see Column 214, here and here, and in great detail in the second book of the trilogy), and I will not spell it out again here. In brief, my claim is that evil in the world is not the work of the Almighty’s hands. Natural evil is the product of the laws of nature, and human evil is the product of people’s choices. The only difficulty regarding the Almighty is why He does not intervene to prevent these terrible outcomes. But here one can propose explanations that are not forced. This is a question, not a contradiction.
Regarding natural evil, such as an earthquake, I explained that there is no system of natural laws that could bring the world to the ends assigned to it by its Creator without elements of suffering. This is simply logically impossible, and therefore even the Almighty is constrained by it and cannot overcome it. He can, of course, freeze or suspend the laws of nature, but if He decided that the world should operate according to natural laws, He has no way to intervene and prevent suffering and pain. Why does He want a world run by natural law? That is already a question, not a contradiction, and there are even good answers (for example, that without this we could not manage in this world, nor understand what we ought to do in any situation. See the references above).
Clearly I, too, rely on unproven assumptions regarding the world’s goals and its natural laws, and regarding the “corrections” and benefits of the commandments (which, in my view, are not aimed at moral ends). But here we are offering an answer to a question, not to a contradiction. That is precisely the difference. My not knowing the goals does not pose a special difficulty. It is an outcome of observing the commandments and reality. In contrast, the claim that everything that happens here is the work of the Almighty’s hands, coupled with the assumption that He always acts in an exquisitely moral way, creates a frontal contradiction with reality, not merely a lack of understanding. A contradiction demands resolution, and one cannot accept the demand to live in contradiction. Not only because we cannot do so, but because there is no such thing. I cannot believe X and simultaneously ‘not-X’. One cannot settle for the answer that the Almighty’s ways are beyond our ken (see this article on this).
The Ethical Alternative
Exactly the same holds on the ethical plane. According to the conventional theology, people are forced into peculiar statements that require us to live in duality. The duality Rabbi Eliyahu describes—between rejoicing and thanking the Almighty and sharing in sorrow—says that even if an act causes suffering, if it was justified we may rejoice and give thanks for it while also sharing in the pain. But if a wicked person is struck for his wickedness, there is no reason to feel his pain (and if he is not wicked, why didn’t the Almighty save us without harming him?!).
According to this demand to live in duality, we would seemingly also have to offer praise and thanks to the Almighty for victims of terror attacks among us. That, too, the Almighty did not do for nothing. If they were killed, it must have been deserved (see the bizarre comment by the cousin of the victims of last Friday’s attack. This is truly a pinnacle of that foolish duality. He explained that the Almighty would have killed his cousins anyway, because that is what had to happen). Moreover, the fact that we feel their pain and disaster, as we recall, should not prevent us from thanking the Almighty for having brought justice to light. Exactly as in Turkey. So after every attack we must thank the Almighty for cleansing and repairing the world. A few more superfluous people have been gathered from here, to our joy. True, to us they seem righteous and undeserving of death, but that is only because we do not know the calculations of Heaven. The truth is that they were evil villains, and we presume that the Almighty judges truthfully. Does this sound serious to you?
Is it not far more reasonable to say that what happened to the victims of terror attacks or natural disasters happened because of the laws of nature, and not as a decision of the Almighty? In such a case it is clearly cause for sadness and sorrow, and this requires no theological explanations nor interpretations of the calculations of Heaven (which, as we recall, we do not know). In such a case it is also clear that although the outcome is morally horrific (and there is no need to presume that the slaughter of infants in torment rests on some hidden moral considerations), it was not the Almighty who decided it and carried it out. At most He did not prevent it—but for that there are explanations, as above.
On the Meaning of the Apology: Living in Contradiction
An apology means saying that what I did was wrong. In light of what I have described, Rabbi Eliyahu’s apology dealt only with the matter of tact; regarding the content, there was and could be no apology (unless he repents of his theological views. That does not seem to be the case here). How should I judge a person who holds theological positions that contain a contradiction: on the one hand, God is good; on the other, He Himself, by His own hand, commits malicious acts that admit of no justification?
I don’t know. More than once I have spoken about people who live with such a contradiction—those who believe in the binding force of morality but are materialists, or those who believe in the binding force of morality but are atheists. I have shown in the past that the two conceptions I have described here are inconsistent (see, for example, Column 456), and now the question arises whether such people are moral. Seemingly they are committed to morality, but that commitment rests on an error. It seems to me that this depends on the following question (which also arises in that column): assuming a contradiction, we have two ways to interpret someone who holds such a view:
- Such a position expresses a hidden (unconscious) faith in God.
- Such a position expresses a mistaken commitment to morality—namely, the commitment is psychological, not philosophical.
Interpretation A indeed reflects a moral stance and a moral person who has a philosophical error, whereas Interpretation B reflects a non-moral person living in error. He is moral “by accident” (for the moral motivation is part of what defines the act and the person as moral). Incidentally, in my opinion, in most cases and people Interpretation A is the correct one.
We must understand that conventional theology demands that we live with several contradictions. One is the belief that God is good and that everything that happens in the world is His doing (and that we must thank Him for both evil and good). Another is the belief that everything proceeds naturally and yet God can intervene (without violating the laws of nature). Another example is that “all is foreseen, yet freedom is granted” (foreknowledge and free will), and so on. Therefore the question of how to relate to a person who lives in contradiction is a very important one for judging and evaluating those who hold the conventional theologies.
In Conclusion: What About My Apology?
Anyone who thinks that my last column was written to say there was no anger in my words, only a calm presentation of my stance (I simply went to the Milog dictionary and chose the only words suitable to the situation: fool, parasite, idiot, corrupt, liar, and the like), has not understood me. Clearly I was angry, and clearly the harsh expressions were an expression of that anger. What I claimed is that this is a sharp way of presenting arguments, not name-calling (expressions that relate to the person irrespective of the arguments). I certainly chose this phrasing because of the anger, and that goes without saying.
Up to now I have explained why the anger is justified with respect to a theology that leads to such a malicious worldview. This is truly slander of the Almighty. What about the critique of a person who holds such a theology? It is clear to me that Rabbi Eliyahu genuinely intended to apologize because he intuitively realized that there is something defective in what he wrote. But so long as he has not changed his theology, that apology is empty of content (aside from the matter of tact, as stated). My words here are nothing more than an attempt to minimize harm to people (those thousands of Turks who subscribe to Olam Katan, or to its translations into colloquial Turkish, and read the words while still lying under the rubble).
Rabbi Eliyahu holds a contradictory theology. The problem is his conception, not the words he wrote and the hurt that arises from them. It is a malicious conception, even if the person is not aware of it. He does not examine the picture in which he was raised and educated, and thus holds a malicious picture. There is some degree of culpability in this. I truly do not think that everyone who holds such a view is necessarily a bad person. Certainly not. It is a person who does not think correctly and is unwilling to examine his positions (and the positions he was educated into) critically. The discomfort that led him to apologize indicates that he is likely a good person who does not want to hurt others. But if he has already caused hurt, the source is the positions that still harm them. What good is such an apology? It resembles someone who curses his friend and then adds, “Well, I mean it in friendship.”
There is a point closely tied to the distinction I have made here. In one of the talkbacks to the previous column, it was pointed out to me that I classified a person as an idiot, whereas I should have related to the statement and not to the person. In my response I wrote that there is seemingly something to this. Now we can understand what this is about. If it were a random slip, human error, then we are all human—no one is infallible. But as I have shown here, this statement is not accidental. It is an inherent result of the theology that Rabbi Eliyahu holds. On the contrary, those who do not draw his conclusions are the ones who slip, randomly and unconsciously. Rabbi Eliyahu has reiterated these theological positions several times in the past, and it is clear that this is not an offhand remark that does not represent his views. In such a case, it is indeed appropriate to relate to the person and not only to his statement.
The reservation one can raise is that although the statement is malicious, the person himself is merely mistaken (living in contradiction). This I certainly accept. A person does not understand that his statement is malicious; thus, even if he believes it and says it with complete faith, he is not necessarily a wicked person. For example, people who believe in a woman’s right over her body and permit abortions believe in malicious principles. To the best of my judgment, they permit murder. But it is clear to me that not all of them are bad people. They hold malicious views, and they bear some blame for not critically examining the values within which they were raised and educated and within which they live. And yet it is hard to say they are wicked. For this—and only for this—I certainly apologize to him. But I still expect him, as I expect his critics, to examine themselves and free themselves from these malicious conceptions that are rooted in an uncritical adoption of intellectual and theological principles. So long as they do not do so, they bear some blame for the malicious statements that follow from them.
[1] Many will say that one can also hold that some things are His doing and some are not. Involvement does not necessarily mean that everything is His work. But if so, how do we know that the earthquake is the work of the Almighty? Perhaps it belongs to the realm of natural occurrences? All those who seek meaning in every event—including terror attacks and earthquakes—are in fact assuming that everything is His work. Even those who justify the judgment and say that we do not know the calculations of Heaven, without offering bizarre interpretations like Rabbi Eliyahu’s, are in fact assuming that indeed everything is the Almighty’s work. They are no different from him at all.
Discussion
I think that in cases like these, an apology serves as a kind of concluding softening of the remarks. It’s not taking back what was said, but it is also different from expressing exactly the same thing more politely. It is a concluding qualification of the remarks. Yes, I think this is a punishment they deserved, and so on. And on the other hand, I share in their grief (perhaps among other things he says he shares in their grief in order to emphasize that alongside the wicked, who in his view are the majority, there may also be a few normal people who do not want to destroy the Jews. Or perhaps they are all like that, but among them there are certainly some who fall under the category of “captured infants” and are not so evil).
Another thing that I think motivates the qualification is this whole matter of stressing that the joy at their disaster does not come merely from crude gut-level nationalist emotions, but from the thought that this is part of the divine order. And then of course there is room for both feelings at the same time—for if at root I rejoice over the destruction of the wicked mainly because that is what the Holy One, blessed be He, commanded, then I can rejoice over their destruction and express sorrow at the same time, since “His mercies are over all His works,” the thirteen attributes, “and you shall walk in His ways,” and so on.
I don’t understand you.
On the one hand, the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to the system He created—so let’s say I go along with you and agree that He cannot prevent earthquakes, because that is how He created nature (I don’t agree with this, but for the sake of argument…).
On the other hand, you yourself have written more than once that the Holy One, blessed be He, can intervene through miracles, but He does not do so.
That is, He can, at least for the thousands of Turkish children buried under the rubble, perform some miracle and channel oxygen to them (and food and water), and nevertheless He does not do it, even though here we all agree that He is not bound and He can perform miracles (and in fact did so in the past).
So why does He nevertheless not perform miracles for innocent Turkish babies buried under the rubble?
These matters were explained at length in the sources I referred you to, and others. Here I am focusing on the failure in the common conception and its implications.
What I found was the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not intervene so that we will learn to manage on our own.
I can’t understand this. Let’s make a comparison with what we see in our own world (reasonable, no?):
Suppose a father teaches his son to swim. He also expects his small child to learn to manage on his own together with the floaties and the methods he taught him to swim with (equivalent to the laws of nature with which we are supposed to manage).
But would a father who sees his son (an innocent child, of course) drowning not run to save him?
Why tie together “managing on our own” with “not saving”?
To me that sounds horrifying.
Dror
Absolutely true!!
I wrote that to explain His general policy of not intervening in general. Why He does not save in especially severe cases is because there is no reason not to intervene in every distress, and then once again we are back to suspending the laws of nature. But this is explained in detail in the second book. If it really is not found here in an orderly way, maybe I’ll write a proper post about it in the future.
Wait a second/minute 😉
I want to go along a bit further before future articles (and maybe you’ll also address what I’m writing now).
You hold that in the past the Holy One, blessed be He, did intervene.
That is to say, if say 3,000 years ago (the biblical period, in which according to you there was divine intervention) there was an earthquake (there certainly were) due to the laws of nature which, as stated, (the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to them), then the Holy One, blessed be He, would intervene and perform miracle after miracle, and thus all the children and innocents (or at least most of them) buried under the bricks that fell from the walls would survive miraculously—is that understanding you correctly?
Another point: presumably according to your view, if we go back about 2,500–3,000 years (again, the biblical period), we would find that there was essentially no infant mortality in childbirth or crib death, God forbid (or almost none).
For you maintain that presumably the Holy One, blessed be He, would intervene miraculously (within the laws of nature to which He too is subject) and save every infant who choked or suffered distress during birth or in the crib.
Have I understood your view correctly?
Dror
In connection with the issue under discussion: how does the Rabbi understand the Sages’ demand to bless over evil joyfully just as over good?
No. Even when He did intervene, that does not mean that every event was His handiwork. There were events that were His handiwork and there were those that were not. Back then too there were prophets, and they could say what was His handiwork and what was not.
As for the question whether in that period there was no death without reason, I do not know. Still, not intervening is different from causing the thing. Intervention requires a very good reason, since it involves destabilizing the natural course of events.
Incidentally, He is not subject to the laws of nature. He chooses not to intervene, in varying degrees.
I assume the intention is to accept the divine judgment. True, they probably saw everything as the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He, but I do not agree (at least in these generations).
You were angry about what Rabbi Eliyahu wrote—that if the Holy One, blessed be He, supervises and intervenes in reality, then it is problematic that babies are buried alive. That I understand.
Suppose that 3,000 years ago there was an earthquake in which infants were buried alive. An earthquake that was not the handiwork of the Holy One, blessed be He, but a product of nature.
According to your view, back then the Holy One, blessed be He, was in intervention mode. If so, how did He choose which infants to save and which not to save?
According to your view, did He save all of them or only some?
And if He saved only some (or did not save any, because say it was a natural event), then what is the difference between what you are claiming and what Rabbi Eliyahu is claiming?
For if even 3,000 years ago babies were buried and suffocated to death under the rubble while the Holy One, blessed be He, supervises reality, it turns out that you hold exactly what Rabbi Eliyahu holds.
In my view, babies buried under rubble without ever having sinned are a very good reason to alter nature for their sake, are they not?
Dror
A small (big) correction to my message—there is a big difference between you and Rabbi Eliyahu.
Rabbi Eliyahu says that the Holy One, blessed be He, is the one who causes the earthquakes (including the last one). You hold that He does not.
And still, the question to you still stands—do you hold that the Holy One, blessed be He, should not help rescue innocent babies who are suffocating to death because of an earthquake that stems from the nature He created?
Dror
What does it mean, “I don’t agree”?
This is not some pious extra or something optional.
It is a סעיף in the Shulchan Aruch. Settled halakhah. One must bring oneself to a state where one is able to thank God גם for evil.
I have neither the time nor the interest to engage with the question of providence that you elaborated on in volume 2 of your dreadful trilogy. (I read it in full during the coronavirus lockdowns—may it atone for my sin.) But there is one matter about which I cannot remain silent.
The Holy One, blessed be He, “kills and gives life; He brings down to the grave and raises up” (1 Samuel 2:6), but in no way is He a murderer, a butcher, or a criminal, for a simple reason—He is the owner. He created life, and He can and is permitted to take it whenever He sees fit. He owes no accounting to anyone, not even to you! And not only because He is stronger than you, etc., but because quite simply He is allowed to. It is His! As the Romans said, Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi (What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to an ox). Only a human being can murder. The Holy One, blessed be He, can kill, but that is never murder, because murder is forbidden killing, and for the Holy One, blessed be He, it is permitted. In any case, the “question” of why the Holy One, blessed be He, “murdered” babies is a non-starter from the outset. He simply did not do that (whether He created the earthquake or whether it was “merely” a natural event that He did not prevent). So why? Just because. I assume He has His own considerations, and not everything we are supposed or able to understand, and even of what we can understand, not everything He is obliged to explain to us.
And although I said I do not want to deal here with your “thin” theology (in my eyes—positively anorexic), they asked you above why the Holy One, blessed be He, did not prevent disasters when He was “young” (so to speak) and intervened in the world at every step? Why did He “slaughter” the babies of the generation of the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and the families of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (see Rashi there)? How can He command us, “Do not stand idly by the blood of your fellow,” while He Himself is “indifferent” to terrible disasters? What does your theology help here? So you “explained” that He changed His policy. Bravo. Once He really could not tolerate the “slaughter” of babies, and one day He got tired of preventing it. Now everything is understood and there are no contradictions/questions, and a redeemer has come to Zion.
But, as I said, I do not want to deal with this here… (Contradiction/difficulty or question about me—I really don’t care…).
We are entering here into a discussion I did not want to enter into, because it requires laying out the full picture in a post devoted to it. I will answer briefly.
I see no difference between 3,000 years ago and our own time. In both cases the Holy One, blessed be He, can intervene. What changed is only His policy. Therefore the question why He does not intervene exists today just as it did then.
I argued that not intervening is different from doing. There are considerations that can explain non-intervention (because He wants the laws of nature not to be violated). But that is an explanation not on the moral plane but because of other purposes (which is why He created rigid and fixed laws of nature). If He were to intervene every time someone suffers, then why not intervene in the suffering of a single individual? And even in small suffering? There is no limit to the matter, and therefore it makes sense to say that He does not want to violate the laws of nature and that the world follows its natural course. But to say that He Himself commits immoral acts—there is no possible explanation for that, apart from what I am about to say.
One may assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, does something morally bad because of other reasons (as I explained regarding immoral laws), except that then I still do not say that His actions are moral, as Rabbi Eliyahu claims.
Beyond that, He could achieve His other goals without harming babies, since He is omnipotent. And if you say that there are things prevented from Him (there are goals that even He cannot achieve otherwise), again the whole theological structure that justifies every one of His acts on the moral plane collapses. The immorality may indeed be forced upon Him, but the action still is not morally justified. That is precisely what I claim: that evil is forced upon Him, and this is contrary to the accepted position that no evil comes down from above, that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent and nothing is impossible for Him, and therefore everything that is done is good even if we do not understand it.
So what? I don’t understand. If something is mistaken, it is mistaken.
Mordechai, for someone who doesn’t want to deal with something, it seems you overcome that reluctance in a very vigorous way. Blessed are you.
As for your claims:
1. The Holy One, blessed be He, is measured by His own standards. He Himself said that He acts morally, and that is the accepted way of thinking. You are conflating levels of discussion. This is not a question of rights, but whether this is in fact what it is morally proper to do. You are conflating levels of discussion. The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself tells us that He acts morally, and Rabbi Eliyahu certainly assumes this. So to defend Him by claiming that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not subject to the laws of morality is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A Pyrrhic defense.
2. Regarding the question why He does not prevent disasters, see my discussion here with Dror: https://mikyab.net/posts/79959#comment-70946
In short, perhaps during the coronavirus period you couldn’t concentrate; it might be worth going back and reading again. 🙂
In your books you elaborated on “weakness of will,” and I am a classic test case… And while you send me to read your triple horror again (why God did not prevent that disaster, and for how many sins must I still atone?), you did not even bother to read my shabby little talkback…
I did not claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not act morally or immorally, and I do not presume to know what the Holy One, blessed be He, refused to reveal even to Moses our teacher (according to certain interpretations). What I did claim is that even if the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject (or subjected Himself) to morality, this does not mean that we can judge Him and determine whether His conduct is moral or not, because the laws and moral rules that apply to us are not necessarily relevant to Him. By way of illustration: at this moment I am engaged in writing (and replying to you during short breaks I take at work). Am I allowed to throw into the trash a draft I wrote and do not like? Yes. Am I allowed to throw into the trash a draft you wrote and I do not like (and there are probably not a few כאלה…)? No. The difference is that one is mine and one is yours. Only the owner may decide what shall be done with his creation. Life and the whole world are the creation of the Holy One, blessed be He. He is allowed to do with what is His as He wishes, and He does not have to justify it. But that does not mean there is no justification, and the fact that we cannot explain every one of His actions or omissions does not mean that it is immoral. It is moral by definition, because He is the owner. Therefore the claim “Why did God murder children” is insolence toward Heaven. He is permitted, because He created them and He (alone) is entitled to decide when to kill them for reasons kept to Himself. (“Who created you in judgment … and will kill you in judgment,” and He alone may judge alone).
And still, one may ask questions and seek explanations (as Moses our teacher did), one just has to remember that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not owe us an answer and we are forbidden to question His attributes.
And all this has no bearing on the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, caused the earthquake Himself (“He looks upon the earth and it trembles”) or whether it is the product of some natural process that He “merely” did not prevent. Either way, it is not murder and not slaughter, because He is the owner of the souls as well. But if a human being could prevent a death without endangering himself and refrained from doing so—he certainly is standing idly by the blood. Why? Because a human being is not the owner. He is here as a created being bound to keep his Creator’s commandments, and he does not have the privilege of weighing other considerations (which may be relevant for the Holy One, blessed be He, but not for us; see Yevamot 79, and much more could be said).
So why did this happen? I am too small to answer.
The question, Michi, is very simple, and I wasn’t able to understand your answer. In your view, can God “murder,” or is anyone who attributes that to Him simply making a category mistake? The issue interests me personally because I have devoted quite a few philosophy lessons to it (I teach in a school). The question I posed to my students was whether there is a distinction between murder and killing.
There is not the slightest thing in your words except distilled heresy against the principles of faith under the guise of complexity of thought and criticism. You are incapable of critiquing the logical failures of your own view, which stems from severe pruning of the saplings. You remind me of Elisha the Other and the backward, dark, and horrifying process of spiritual regression that the man underwent.
The Holy One, blessed be He, cannot cancel earthquakes? Is He not above the laws of nature that He Himself created and ordained and stipulated with all the works of creation? Surely all these things depend and stand upon the deeds of all creatures, and especially the deeds of the people of Israel, for good and for ill. It is appalling and horrifying to read such empty statements.
The world absolutely does not have to reach its destination and purpose by means of human suffering at the hands of the forces of nature. This claim is both heresy and a miserable, horrifying slander against God, as though suffering were deterministic and preordained. The Creator prepared the forces of nature beforehand only in a potential way, for every variation and possibility. It is in our hands to determine whether the destructive forces of nature will come into effect or not. It is shocking that such a thing even needs to be explained.
Why do babies suffer? Why were children killed? If you deny reincarnation, then indeed you have no good explanation. But then you find yourself, at best, on the margins of present-day Orthodox Judaism—not the earlier Judaism that for a certain period did not recognize reincarnation. For one who believes in reincarnation, the answer is simple: if a person did not sin at all in this incarnation and he suffers, it comes upon him because of his sins in previous incarnations.
“There is no death without sin and no suffering without iniquity” — Shabbat 5a.
In order to deny the principles of faith, you must constrict your concepts and terms and the range of spiritual possibilities—therefore denial is so backward, intellectually stunted, fabricated, and contrived. It begs the question and establishes distorted and baseless premises—and on their basis it denies and cuts down the saplings. The very life and nourishment of heresy come from an artificial narrowing of concepts and from a backward denial of entire spiritual systems.
Your very tendency to be drawn after conjectures that involve abandoning individual providence and a degenerative, backward, crippled, wing-clipped, ignorant and blind subjugation to the natural forces of the universe—in sharp, jarring, screaming contrast to the entire Tanakh and the words of the Sages, some of which I will quote here—and there are hundreds and even thousands of verses and sayings like them, as you well know—is distilled heresy and dreadful Hellenization of consciousness. This is real spiritual backwardness.
Nothing you said has anything to do with Judaism at all—but rather with heresy against the principles of faith. At least be honest enough to admit it. There is not a single biblical, Torah, rabbinic, and Orthodox source that supports what you are saying.
Your criticism absolutely does not stem from depth and excess of thought and complexity, but from a deep and dreadful spiritual darkness in which you personally dwell. You are incapable of critiquing your own criticism and seeing and recognizing that it stems from a narrow, crippled, and backward conception of spiritual realities.
From the following sources one sees clearly that the blessed Creator wants us to take personal moral instruction when terrible natural disasters occur, and to strengthen ourselves in whatever needs strengthening, and to know that the matter came from Him, may He be blessed—even if it happened to gentiles, and even if gentiles have only general providence and not individual providence, as Jews do, according to Maimonides’ view, from which the Baal Shem Tov differed. There is no contradiction in this, since one way or the other the matter came from Him, may He be blessed. The verses prove this unequivocally, and how far the spirit of your words is from the words of the prophet… This itself shows that you are mistaken and misleading others regarding the principles of faith, in a horrifying, shocking, and embarrassing way.
Zephaniah 3:
“Woe to the rebellious and defiled city, the oppressing city! She has not obeyed the voice, she has not received correction; in the Lord she has not trusted, to her God she has not drawn near… I have cut off nations; their corner towers are desolate; I have laid waste their streets, with none passing through; their cities are ruined, without a man, without an inhabitant. I said: Surely you will fear Me, you will accept correction.”
“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He.”
And this is the language of the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot 9:2): “Elijah, of blessed memory, asked Rabbi Nehorai: Why do earthquakes come into the world? He said to him: Because of the sin of terumah and tithes!
One verse says, ‘The eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it,’ and another verse says, ‘He looks at the earth and it trembles; He touches the mountains and they smoke.’ How are these two verses to be reconciled? When Israel does the will of the Omnipresent and brings out its tithes properly, ‘the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year,’ and it suffers no harm at all. When Israel does not do the will of the Omnipresent and does not bring out its tithes properly, ‘He looks at the earth and it trembles.’ He said to him: My son, by your life, that is a reasonable explanation, but the essence of the matter is this: when the Holy One, blessed be He, looks at theaters and circuses sitting secure, tranquil, and at ease, while His Temple lies in ruins, He wants to cast down His world to destroy it. This is what is written: ‘He will roar mightily from His habitation’—for the sake of His habitation. Rabbi Aha said: Because of the sin of homosexual intercourse. The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘You made your limb tremble over something that is not yours; by your life, I will make My world tremble because of that man.’
And the Rabbis say: Because of dispute!!! In the Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 59a) they brought only the reason indicated by Elijah the prophet, that it is as a result of the destruction of the Temple and the exile of Israel, and thus it is written in the Gemara: ‘What is this earthquake? At the moment when the Holy One, blessed be He, remembers His children who dwell in distress among the nations of the world, He sheds two tears into the great sea, and His voice is heard from one end of the world to the other, and that is the earthquake.’”
“A person does not stub his finger below unless it is announced about him above.”
There is no contradiction between God’s being good and merciful and disasters and horrors that happen in the world—the Tanakh itself says that the Creator is merciful and good and abundant in kindness, and in the same breath the Tanakh describes terrible disasters and determines that they are the hand of God. Your interpretation of good in relation to God is childish, inferior, simplistic, and distorted. Good does not mean only caressing and pampering and granting visible and apparent kindness—but that all His acts are for the good, even the severest human sufferings and agonies. Everything is directed toward the good. To say that evil is forced upon the Creator is absurd, horrifying, utterly foolish, and detached from any Jewish—and even spiritual—textual context. It is simply childish and inferior.
It is said that God “creates evil,” and evil and suffering too have a good purpose—to refine, purify, wash, and cleanse from sin and iniquity—both Jews and gentiles. Vengeance and grudge-bearing as well come for the sake of justice, uprightness, and truth, so that everything is directed toward the higher moral goals of recompense for sin and punishment, and of cleansing, washing, and scrubbing away the filth of sin—and this is explicit in the following verses in Isaiah:
“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before My eyes.”
Is a father who punishes his son, rebukes him and scolds him, in order to educate him for his own good, in order to bring him to the straight path—an evil and wicked father? It is so childish to think so. In order to deny the absolute goodness and kindness of the Creator, you have to prune concepts and uproot spiritual systems such as reincarnation.
Here are two verses for you that prove unequivocally that God punishes and afflicts with good, moral, compassionate, fatherly, and merciful intent.
“And you shall know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.”
“For whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father the son in whom he delights.”
This is the ABC of Judaism—a Judaism with which you have lost all real connection. And that is the problem—that people associate you with Judaism. You are perceived as representing an Orthodox outlook—and you do not. You do not even represent a Reform outlook—but a heretical one. Your words testify very well about you. You bring no source and no Torah proof for your words—simply because there is none.
Therefore your words are no different at all from those of a secularist or atheist. The problem begins when people treat your words as though they represent Judaism—they do not. You represent heresy.
“They said of Elisha the Other that books of heresy would fall from his bosom and Greek song never ceased from his mouth”—these are lines for your portrait.
And this was said about you and your like:
Zechariah 1:
“And those who turn back from following the Lord, and those who have not sought the Lord nor inquired of Him… And I will punish the men who are settled on their lees, who say in their hearts: ‘The Lord will not do good, neither will He do evil.’”
You have no way to deal with the verses I brought, such as “A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He”—something that utterly contradicts, destroys, and refutes your words about immorality or evil connected to the blessed Creator, Heaven forfend.
You have no way to deal with the verses that prove unequivocally that God punishes and afflicts with good, moral, compassionate, fatherly, and merciful intent.
“And you shall know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.”
“For whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father the son in whom he delights.”
There are no verses that stand in contradiction to these verses—and in truth one could quote hundreds of verses here in a similar spirit.
Therefore let not your mouth utter vanity. These are nothing but distilled and horrifying words of heresy. There is no depth here, no complexity, no substantive argument or any relevant reason whatsoever for your words. Nothing at all. And no wonder, for the moment you turn to the Torah texts—they strike you on the skull from every side. You do not have even the slightest Torah thread to cling to.
You are a living, shocking, and horrifying embodiment of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s words about one who is not fit to study external wisdoms and nevertheless does so, and slowly undergoes a terrible process of spiritual decline.
If you have decided to deny those verses—fine. Here will be buried your Orthodox mask and your cloak of Judaism and Torah.
I’m opening a new comment here because there is not enough room in the previous reply thread that I opened.
In preparation for the future article that will deal with the matter of divine intervention, I prepared a little shoemaker’s mat.
I would appreciate your addressing the following points in the future article:
(:) I read the blog and I do not see it defined exactly what divine intervention in the past looked like (beyond general statements about miracles and prophecy).
So I would appreciate a technical description and elaboration, as much as possible, of how you think divine intervention was in the past.
I understand that we are very limited in our ability to know what it looked like, and still I would appreciate reading a “description,” even if for you it is in the realm of a guess.
If some description has been presented, then if there is any possibility of presenting references supporting this thesis that would be very nice indeed (though not obligatory, because there probably won’t be references).
For example, if you claim that babies did not die in earthquakes or that there was no crib death, it would be nice if there were somehow sources for that.
(:) You wrote that one of the reasons the Holy One, blessed be He, stopped intervening in the world is so that we would progress.
Even 3,000 and 4,000 years ago humanity progressed as well (this is based on countless findings and pieces of evidence), together with the divine intervention that there then was (according to your view).
If you agree that it indeed progressed then as well, that means divine intervention does not stop humanity’s progress.
If so, does that not completely undermine your explanation that the Holy One, blessed be He, stopped intervening so that we would progress?
(:) Regarding the past, you wrote—
“Intervention requires a very good reason, since it involves destabilizing the natural course of events.”
On the other hand you write:
“If He were to intervene every time someone suffers, then why not intervene in the suffering of a single individual?”
So here is a very good reason—
an earthquake with thousands of babies buried and dying is a very good reason to violate the laws of nature in days when it is known that the Holy One, blessed be He, intervenes.
Someone getting a splinter under the big toe of his left foot or his horse being a bit sick and that causing him distress—that is not a reason to violate the laws of nature.
So again the request is to you—define the situations in which, in your view, there is a “very good reason” (your words) to violate the laws of nature and perform a miracle.
(:) Back to your statement that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants us to manage on our own and therefore does not intervene.
We see in reality that any father can teach his son to manage on his own, but when the son is in real distress (certainly if the son is buried under rubble and struggling to breathe),
any sane father would run to help his son, even if that involved spending a million dollars (for the sake of argument, violating the laws of nature by an open or hidden miracle).
I still do not understand why you connect “a father who wants us to learn” with “not saving even in extreme situations with thousands of babies buried and suffocating”?
Our experience in reality teaches that the connection you make between these two concepts makes the Holy One, blessed be He, blatantly immoral (with all due respect to the excuse of “not breaking the laws of nature”).
(:) Back to our own days, in which according to you the Holy One, blessed be He, does not intervene at all—
you maintain that in terms of potential, the Holy One, blessed be He, is not subject to the laws of nature and could, if He wished, do anything. For example, prevent an earthquake.
And therefore, as a result of this, the Holy One, blessed be He, is also “subject” to the suffering caused by the laws of nature that He created and allows to operate freely.
First, I would appreciate receiving some boundaries. If tomorrow it is discovered that a giant asteroid is soon expected to hit humanity (say, 40 kilometers),
and humanity would be helpless in dealing with it—would the Holy One, blessed be He, in such a situation as well let hundreds of millions of people die, or here would He intervene?
(:) As someone who criticized Rabbi Eliyahu so strongly, is it not the case that your own view is at least as problematic as Rabbi Eliyahu’s (if not much more so),
when in major events involving many thousands of innocents who are suffocating for many days under the rubble, the Holy One, blessed be He, chooses not to intervene when
it is quite clear that there is not really any possibility of “managing on one’s own” for someone who is currently buried under dozens of tons of concrete?
Dror.
“The accepted conception”—that is deceptive laundering of words. These are principles of faith, not an accepted conception. It is like saying that the truth of the Torah, its divine origin, and the existence of God are “an accepted conception.” These are principles of faith, for the entire Tanakh is full of them—the whole Tanakh is full and saturated with verses that explicitly say that everything is from Him—every disaster, every calamity, every suffering, every pleasant and joyful thing. Every salvation. Everything whatsoever. And the moment your words so sharply and essentially oppose the Tanakh and its spirit—you testify about yourself that you do not believe in the Tanakh. Leave the Oral Torah aside—you do not even meet the elementary threshold of faith of the Tanakh itself.
Our own human reality itself clearly embodies a parental model between parents and their children, in which parents can rebuke, become angry, punish, scold, and chastise their children—with good intention, compassion, love, concern, and a desire to teach and help—even if the Tanakh did not exist, one could learn from this human model about God’s relation to us.
Beyond the proofs from the Torah—this is after all a matter of simple human rational logic that makes a simple projection from our human parental model—which is a microcosm—to the divine relation toward us.
Therefore I wrote that your model of divinity is childish and inferior—even twisted and frighteningly foolish, and above all gut-driven and emotional. There is not a spark of rationality or logic in it. You and the little child who screams at his father for rebuking and chastising him for his own good are equal in the measure of your intellectuality and rationality.
The very question of what children and babies sinned is blindness. Their very suffering shows that they sinned in one incarnation—that they suffer is a divine sign in every respect.
Perhaps you are inclined to deny reincarnation? Good for you. If so, the moment you remove such a significant and so Jewish and Torah-based spiritual possibility from the list of understandings and explanations—your complaint falls away. You have said nothing. You have lost every right to complain about God’s ways the moment you constrict spiritual possibilities and abolish spiritual systems—for by doing so you constrict countless variations in which His providence is manifested.
You cannot claim, “Why did such-and-such happen to so-and-so,” if you deny some spiritual possibility. Some spiritual insight. The question and the claim themselves begin from a distorted premise and starting point—that there is no reincarnation. Therefore it is a rigged game.
It is like a judge who is unwilling to hear the accused person, and the suspect claims that he was not at the scene of the crime at the time, because at that time he was engaged in meditation. The judge does not believe in meditation, and therefore the defendant’s argument is unacceptable to him…
You cannot convict a person without considering, in a substantive way, all his arguments and reasons. Philosophically and morally, you cannot omit and uproot a defendant’s argument because of your own personal belief.
You cannot claim the slightest thing against God—also because if you believe in the Torah and in the Tanakh, you are obligated to know that God is good, merciful, and abundant in kindness, and that all His acts—including punishment, recompense, vengeance, and grudge-bearing—are connected to the foundations of justice, morality, spiritual cleanliness, and purification from sin.
And also because after belief in reincarnation was accepted in Judaism, the moment you do not accept it—the moment you are inclined to deny a spiritual insight that enables you to receive answers—and that is founded on the words of supremely holy men and rooted in the holy mountains, and whose source is the spiritual revelation granted to those great men—namely the holy Ari, according to his own words—by that you faithfully testify that you are seeking pretexts and excuses to leave the place, because deep resentment dwells in your heart. Like the Israelites in the wilderness who said, “Is the Lord among us or not?”—that is exactly you. And that is utterly loathsome and hateful to God.
Bottom line: in order to deny God’s absolute kindness, mercy, and goodness, one must prune, uproot, and constrict concepts, essences, systems, and whole spiritual possibilities. Therefore that denial is so narrow-minded, inferior, intellectually clipped, crippled, and spiritually backward. Beyond that, it constitutes straightforward heresy against the principles of faith in Judaism. And this denial, like every denial, serves low personal aims and earthly desires. It exempts a person from giving an account for his deeds and grants him wonderful instinctive credit—for according to this inferior, blind, and backward framework of denial one may even sin as much as one pleases and not be punished, because the Holy One, blessed be He, is not so active on the ground, Heaven forfend. There we descended and there we ascended—the end of denial lies in desire-driven thought at the beginning.
“The Israelites knew that there was no substance in idolatry, and they worshiped it only in order to permit themselves public sexual immorality.”
Deal with it.
“And the work of the Lord they do not regard, neither have they considered the operation of His hands.”
(Isaiah 5)
.
Mordechai.
I’m not here in order to defend Rabbi Michi’s position or represent it,
but rather I’m responding because the point you raised seems puzzling to me.
After all, none of those who criticized Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu criticized him from a position of criticism toward the Holy One, blessed be He. In fact, no serious person presumes to write criticism of the Holy One, blessed be He, but rather criticizes another person who claims, regarding the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, did such-and-such, that it is not plausible because of a certain logic. The fact that for the sake of the discussion this supposedly subjects the Holy One, blessed be He, to the laws of logic does not mean that we have criticism of Him.
After all, even in Jewish-Christian polemics and in all the books of Jewish thought, when they argue for proofs of the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, or the truth of Judaism, they supposedly subject the Holy One, blessed be He, to human logic regarding what He should do, or claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is in principle obligated to some certain external factor. Rather, they mean that based on the information we have, it is not plausible that He would choose to act one way or another.
After all, all religious recognition of Torah and commandments begins with accepting a certain logical or theological claim regarding the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, and that is decided by reason. And human reason is indeed subject to a certain logic. To claim that any conjecture about the plausibility or implausibility of certain acts of the Holy One, blessed be He, is insolence toward Him—that is a claim from which one cannot emerge. Because by the same logic, putting on tefillin, praying for the Temple and the restoration of sacrifices and the resurrection of the dead, and that in the end every Jew will be redeemed and repent because none will be banished from Him—all that too is insolence toward Heaven, because who said that He is obligated toward us?
After you understand what I wrote above, I’m sure it won’t be hard for you to understand that there are those who take that logic one step further, and also conjecture that it is not plausible that nowadays the Holy One, blessed be He, would punish in a collective or indiscriminate way. And therefore they refrain from and are reluctant to attribute that action to Him.
First they decide that those children and babies did not sin and did nothing—and were not killed by divine decree, Heaven forfend—contrary to the words of the whole written and oral Torah—and from there they get entangled in unnecessary questions?
If they died, that is a sign that they sinned in other incarnations, and here in this incarnation the creditor found a place to collect his debt. God decreed the earthquake and the dead. It is His handiwork. And it is perfectly just. For all the children and babies who were killed there paid for their sins from previous incarnations. That is all. To say (in Michael’s words) that God does not intervene in creation and lets disasters happen is simply heresy, because that contradicts the whole Tanakh. And I showed that in a small sample in the three messages here. There is no trace or foothold for it in Tanakh or in the words of the Sages.
The complication begins when one prunes spiritual concepts and denies reincarnation, and on the basis of that backward and blind distortion asks irrelevant questions because they stem from the false premise that those children did not sin. And I am not saying this to you but to the words of Michael Abraham.
One does not challenge or question distorted and false starting points. It is impossible to provide a straight and plausible spiritual answer to a distorted premise. Distortion produces distortion.
There is no Torah source showing that God lets the laws of nature operate by themselves and claim innocent victims, Heaven forfend—see my three comments to Michael Abraham, where I proved to him his terrible error and the awful heresy inherent in it. Any philosophical discussion not backed and grounded in sources and verses is mere nonsense.
“The judgments of the Lord are true; they are righteous altogether”—divine justice in principle can be understood only when one takes everything together into account—the “altogether”—the full range of spiritual possibilities and the beliefs of Judaism as a whole, including belief in reincarnation. Without that, nothing even begins.
Of course, even without belief in reincarnation one must believe in God’s goodness and kindness, because the Tanakh itself obligates us in that, as I proved in my messages here. But in order to understand logically why infants and sucklings are punished and suffer—for that, belief in reincarnation is needed. And the greatest sages knew in great detail the incarnations of human beings, and therefore their consciousness in this matter reached the most individual levels, as one sees for example from the writings of the holy Ari, and did not remain only on the abstract principled plane.
See my words to Michael in the three messages.
A partial quotation from my words to Michael—
From the following sources one sees clearly that the blessed Creator wants us to take personal moral instruction when terrible natural disasters occur, and to strengthen ourselves in whatever needs strengthening, and to know that the matter came from Him, may He be blessed—even if it happened to gentiles, and even if gentiles have only general providence and not individual providence, as Jews do, according to Maimonides’ view, from which the Baal Shem Tov differed. There is no contradiction in this, since one way or the other the matter came from Him, may He be blessed. The verses prove this unequivocally, and how far the spirit of your words is from the words of the prophet… This itself shows that you are mistaken and misleading others regarding the principles of faith, in a horrifying, shocking, and embarrassing way.
Zephaniah 3:
“Woe to the rebellious and defiled city, the oppressing city. She has not obeyed the voice, she has not received correction; in the Lord she has not trusted, to her God she has not drawn near… I have cut off nations; their corner towers are desolate; I have laid waste their streets, with none passing through; their cities are ruined, without a man, without an inhabitant. I said: Surely you will fear Me, you will accept correction.”
“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He.”
You have no way to deal with the verses I brought, such as “A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He”—something that utterly contradicts, destroys, and refutes your words about immorality or evil connected to the blessed Creator, Heaven forfend.
You have no way to deal with the verses that prove unequivocally that God punishes and afflicts with good, moral, compassionate, fatherly, and merciful intent.
“And you shall know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.”
“For whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father the son in whom he delights.”
There are no verses that stand in contradiction to these verses—and in truth one could quote hundreds of verses here in a similar spirit.
Therefore let not your mouth utter vanity. These are nothing but distilled and horrifying words of heresy. There is no depth here, no complexity, no substantive argument or any relevant reason whatsoever for your words. Nothing at all. And no wonder, for the moment you turn to the Torah texts—these strike you on the skull from every side. You do not have even the slightest Torah thread to cling to.
Yaakov, reincarnation is not mentioned in the Tanakh or the Talmud, so what will you do with the views that did not accept reincarnation, foremost among them Rabbeinu Saadia Gaon? Are you placing all your weight on the matter of reincarnation?
“Fathers shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for fathers; each man shall be put to death for his own sin”—another foundational basis for the idea that there is no suffering without sin and no death without iniquity, whether for Jews or for gentiles.
“Ah, Lord God! behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and by Your outstretched arm; nothing is too hard for You; showing kindness unto thousands, and recompensing the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them; the great, the mighty God, the Lord of hosts is His name; great in counsel and mighty in deed, whose eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give each according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds; who set signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day, and in Israel and among men; and You have made Yourself a name, as at this day.” (Jeremiah 32)
From these verses one sees that after the verses saying that God repays the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, immediately nearby comes the next verse: “whose eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give each according to his ways and according to the fruit of his deeds”—it does not say the ways of Jews, but “the sons of men”—including gentiles—to tell you that even when children are punished for the father’s iniquity, it is on condition that they themselves sin and deserve it because of their own evil deeds in the present incarnation or previous incarnations. Gentiles are obligated not only in the seven Noahide laws, but also in all that stems from them and their derivatives in everything relating to man and his fellow man.
There is King Saul who asked, “What sin did the babies commit?” regarding Amalek, and they explain that there was an obligation to kill everyone because God knew that Amalekite seed would come from them—but that is true specifically in that case. And here too we are speaking of a command to kill—not of something done by God.
“Out of the mouth of the Most High does not come evil and good” refers to the good and evil choices of human beings—in keeping the commandments or abandoning them. And in accordance with the nature of the choice, so is the nature of divine providence, for good and for ill.
“Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children”—and not upon babies and infants—and this is said when the children hold fast to the deeds and sins of their fathers.
“For the sin of vows a man’s children die”—this too is said on condition that the children themselves sin and do not change from the deeds of their fathers; it does not say babies die, but his grown children.
The practical conclusion from our words is this: when babies and infants groan, are sick, suffer, and are killed, this must be interpreted as just and necessary divine recompense for sins and crimes from previous incarnations.
And there is also no negation of this belief in the sources you mentioned. So this is not a belief that has some theological problem in bringing it under the wings of Judaism, Heaven forbid. And today this is an accepted belief across the spectrum of Orthodox Judaism. Rabbeinu Saadia Gaon today, after the revelation of the holy Ari, would presumably have accepted this belief. This belief was less known among the masses in his time, like the esoteric tradition in general.
And even without belief in reincarnation, I have already shown here that the Tanakh itself requires that God is utterly merciful and wholly involved in every detail of creation, and that every suffering and every death, every pain, and every abundance, blessing, and success—are His decree. It is only that without belief in reincarnation the matter remains without a resonant spiritual explanation capable of straightening the crookedness of the heart and its perplexities. I completely cast my lot with everything that comes under the beliefs of Judaism and is rooted in the holy mountains and is the fruit of revelation granted to holy men.
If you do not cast your lot with it—you will cast away from yourself purity of heart and clarity and lucidity of soul regarding “to declare that the Lord is upright; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.” If you seek to uproot spiritual systems—the responsibility for the cloudiness of your heart concerning the goodness of the Lord rests upon you, especially after this belief has already spread among Judaism.
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There is negation when the greatest prophets and Job wonder how it is that the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper.
Rabbi Mordechai, perhaps you have not yet recovered from corona. When one writes a thing and its opposite, that indeed hermetically prevents all criticism.
Moral criticism of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not a matter of rights. If He is committed to moral action, then I examine His consistency. Whether that is His right or not, let Him plead it in court.
Nor is this anything new, of course. Starting with Abraham our father, who for some reason did not accept your broad view and argued that the Judge of all the earth would not do justice, and continuing with many others.
Therefore your comparisons to whether it is my creation or not my creation are irrelevant.
The claim too that He owes us answers was apparently taken from the vapors of corona. It was not raised by me and never entered my mind. That is Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu’s assumption, not mine. For some reason, he does not suffice with asking questions, but explains to us in the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, what is happening and why. Perhaps after the vapors dissipate and the shadows flee, you will remember what the discussion here is about.
Good luck.
What does “can” mean? If you assume that by nature He is good, then “God murders” is an oxymoron. But what does this have to do with our discussion? Are you also staying in Mordechai’s steam room?
Indeed there is no way to argue with such a long collection of irrelevant claims.
Don’t forget mourner’s Kaddish.
Yaakov,
I don’t deal with reincarnation.
I come tabula rasa, to hear what the claimant has to say. I don’t put words in his mouth.
He is the one making the special and strange claim, and therefore the burden of proof is on him.
As far as I’m concerned he can use reincarnation, hocus-pocus, Mickey Mouse, or gravity.
I’ll judge his thesis according to the quality and plausibility of the arguments.
Dror
Now I’m completely confused.
Is there not here an issue of formal authority that the Shulchan Aruch has over us?
After all, there is no factual issue here. The Shulchan Aruch is simply addressing us so that we should do inner work, to know how to accept evil as we accept good. And that is halakhah in every respect.
What I am trying to understand is that if indeed we are dealing here with formal authority (you are welcome to disagree with me), which does not stem from any factual argument, and likewise this is not some halakhic matter relevant only to a given time, then is it legitimate to say that you/I/whoever do not agree to implement this in our lives?
That is exactly the point. Abraham our father tried to save Sodom and for that purpose marshaled arguments that he thought would help him. In the end Sodom was destroyed with its men, women, and children (among whom there were presumably more than fifty innocents). Did he question the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be He? (The Sages say that when the Holy One, blessed be He, rebuked Moses, He mentioned the patriarchs who did not question His attributes.) And it definitely is a matter of rights. When you act according to your right, you are moral. The Holy One, blessed be He, is the owner of the world, and therefore by definition He cannot be called a “murderer” or one who “slaughters children,” even if He Himself shook the earth. It is His right, and therefore one cannot claim that He is immoral (apart from the insolence in doing so). It is beyond me what is not understood.
The question whether He Himself shook the earth or whether the tremor is “natural” and the Holy One, blessed be He, “merely” did not prevent it is secondary and unrelated to the discussion I tried to raise here. As I wrote in my first comment, I am not interested in entering it because it is an endless loop and from my perspective also has no practical difference.
The same applies, of course, to all great figures who “argued” with the Holy One, blessed be He. They asked politely and sought to understand מתוך humility, and did not “judge” the Holy One, blessed be He. Not His morality and not His consistency. Those who tried to judge—were rebuked at best (see Job’s friends). Generally, by the way, the Holy One, blessed be He, indeed did not provide answers. Again, because that is His right.
Is the Holy One, blessed be He, subject to morality? Rabbi Lichtenstein argued that He is, and I was not persuaded by his arguments.
Is the Holy One, blessed be He, subject to logic? Rabbi Michi argues that He is, and I was not persuaded by his arguments either.
But—and this is the big but—I do not have a systematic doctrine of my own. I simply do not know.
On another occasion I could explain why in my opinion these two questions are simply insoluble, but none of that concerns Rabbi Eliyahu’s words, nor Michi’s attack on him, nor the rest of the discussion that developed בעקבות the matter.
There is no formal authority whatsoever to the Shulchan Aruch. His ruling, and certainly one that depends on a worldview, is not binding. See Orach Chaim 240:8 and may you be filled with holy delight.
I have already answered everything, but you are digging in to your position. It is not beyond your understanding but beyond your tendentiousness. Good luck.
Job was not a prophet, to the best of my knowledge.
2. It is not necessary that Job knew the secret of reincarnation.
To the best of my memory, no prophet claimed “the righteous suffers,” but rather “why does the way of the wicked prosper”—and the prosperity of a wicked person who fares well in this world is not a question whose answer is necessarily connected to a previous incarnation, such as reward for commandments in a previous incarnation, since it may be that God repays him for certain commandments he fulfilled in his current incarnation, or that he falls under “He repays His haters to their face, to destroy them from the world to come,” as the Gemara states.
In Ecclesiastes the matter is mentioned that there are righteous people who get what befalls the wicked, and vice versa.
“There is a vanity which is done upon the earth: that there are righteous men unto whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked men unto whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous; I said that this too is vanity.”
He does not raise a question there, but simply says it and adds that this too is vanity. There is here an abstract verse that leaves ambiguity regarding Solomon’s intention—and he too was not a prophet.
From his words “this too is vanity,” it sounds as though he comes to say that human beings’ question about this is itself vanity, because man is too small to ask such questions, and only a prophet initiated into the counsel of God and the mysteries of souls knows the answers to them.
One who does not believe in the heavenly revelation and disclosure granted to singular figures such as the holy Ari, Rabbi Nachman, and the like—it may be presumed that had he lived in the days of the prophets and the time of the Tanakh, he would have denied their prophecy to the same extent. It is a spiritual pattern that repeats itself… and I am not saying this to you, but in general.
In the next hour I will give another response to what Michael “answered” me; you are welcome to look.
Belief in reincarnation is far broader than the different streams of Judaism; it is a broad and universal belief. It is shared not merely by several religions but by humanity as a whole—it is a widespread belief. The spiritual logic of reality itself leads to it; the principles of Jewish faith themselves lead logically to it, just as the promises of the Torah lead logically to belief in the survival of the soul and the life of the world to come. For who would trouble himself to fulfill commandments whose reward is only temporary? And how will we explain the fact that the wicked live long lives, and vice versa?
The spiritually crippled fool will say that there is a contradiction between the Torah’s promise to the righteous and its warning to the wicked, and the reality in practice, for such is the way of blind people clipped of thought—to find artificial contradictions from a backward place of pruning concepts and spiritual systems, such as denial of the survival of the soul.
And the enlightened person will understand that on the contrary—from here the survival of the soul is proved, in light of the Torah’s promises. And instead of contradicting what cannot and should not logically be contradicted—the wise person will establish from here a strong pillar and a firm foundation from reality itself, based on the Torah’s promises, and will see in them a proved derivative of the survival of the soul. Reality itself dictates that the Torah’s promises are mainly spiritual, for the life of the world to come.
That is what we said regarding reincarnation—the artificial contradictions exist where one narrows concepts and possibilities, and from an especially narrow framework and a lack of spiritual contexts.
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Please, Michael is welcome to state his view on the matter of reincarnation. I would not bet that he believes in it. I did not decide for him whether he does or not, if you read me with reading comprehension…
And what does it mean that you don’t deal with reincarnation? You deal with theology, right? That is what the discussion revolves around… You are not babbling here about the weather, but about theology—belief in reincarnation, as I understand it, is closely connected to the subject.
As for the plausibility of his arguments—without Torah, without Tanakh, without the principles of faith, one can pin almost anything one wants on God. And one can refute any argument, as you noted, according to its level of logic. But once he draws inferences detached from basic Judaism and in sharp contradiction to its great canons, then the argument with him is not within an intra-Jewish religious arena—but an argument between an Orthodox Jew and one who is not such, knowingly.
My claim is that reality itself leads to a logically necessary inference regarding reincarnation. Therefore this belief is very widespread among peoples and religions.
The moment a holy man like Rabbi Yitzhak Luria merited revelation on the matter—if I deny his words and cast doubt on them, I am no better than those who mocked the prophets of the Tanakh and scorned their words and prophecy, dismissing them as tellers of parables and dreamers of dreams—as is explicit in the Tanakh itself.
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The response does not honor you—not me. It is very irrelevant and unsubstantive to claim irrelevance without proving why. That is evasion par excellence. It is an expression of helplessness and argumentative distress. Everything I said is very relevant and very substantive. If such basic and central Torah sources are irrelevant for you, then that is exactly what I am claiming—that you have no connection at all to the Jewish religious faith. Not even to the Karaite or Conservative versions, and perhaps not even the Reform one—for all of those would not claim that God has abandoned the earth and no longer intervenes in what happens here. They say other empty things, but not that, to the best of my knowledge.
The very notion that once God was involved and today He is not is completely contrary to the Tanakh. There is not the slightest foothold for it in any verse.
As the prophet Ezekiel said in chapter 8:
“He said to me, ‘Have you seen, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, each man in the chambers of his imagery? For they say: The Lord does not see us; the Lord has abandoned the land.’ He also said to me: ‘You will yet again see greater abominations that they do.’”
And as I already emphasized elsewhere—the desire to free oneself from the burden and obligation of struggling with the evil inclination, on the way to the release and outlet of one’s desires, is significantly bound up with the imported philosophy for that purpose, namely: “the Lord has abandoned the earth.”
You are deeply lying to yourself when you presume to conduct a theological-spiritual discussion and draw conclusions from it without being able to ground your words by even a hairsbreadth in a Torah source. It is a contradiction so glaring the Satan himself did not create it. Your strength begins and ends in an abstract and vague discussion detached from any Torah text—and in raising forced and contrived questions that stem from highly false premises. The moment verses begin to be drawn out—your arguments are stopped up and the nonsense is exposed in its nakedness.
Yaakov, it is a shame that you rely on the best of your memory. The question of the righteous who suffers is indeed asked in the Tanakh (in books composed by prophets), even if you interpret the verse in Ecclesiastes in various ways. In Psalms: “Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure, and I was plagued all day long.” In Habakkuk: “Why are You silent when the wicked swallows one more righteous than he?” Job, admittedly, was not a prophet, but his words were not written in the Tanakh for nothing. And the Holy One, blessed be He, did not answer him in terms of reincarnation (though there are interpretations that the answer to Job’s claims is the secret of reincarnation). The Tannaim in Berakhot 7 attribute to an ancient prophet named Moses son of Amram the question of why there is a righteous man who suffers. This aside from the fact that one should be very skeptical of the reasoning in the claim that matters of reincarnation contribute to explaining reward and punishment in this world. In general I suggest that you presume less and think more.
Beyond the fact that the concept of souls is a distinctly Torah concept, and there is no problem or logic in assuming that a soul comes to the world once and may return to it again and again if necessary—for in any case souls will return to bodies at the resurrection of the dead—the reality in which babies and infants who have not sinned are killed and suffer must logically lead to belief in reincarnation.
It is very illogical (and of course heretical and frightfully destructive of the saplings) to break the strong pillars of the Torah because of that and decide that God does not intervene or that evil or wickedness is in some way connected with Him, Heaven forbid. It is not logical because the Torah says otherwise—that Torah whose truth is proven historically and logically.
It is logical, however, to infer belief in reincarnation from the very human suffering of one who has not sinned. It must lead and bring one to that on the logical and philosophical level.
. And when a holy and heavenly man like the Ari grants us and shows and explains that belief, following a spiritual revelation to which he merited—then we have spiritual bread in the basket of our spiritual faith.
But in this case the Shulchan Aruch draws in the clearest possible way from an explicit Mishnah that says one is obligated.
In the סעיף you referred me to, that is a pious practice of Rabbi Eliezer which the Shulchan Aruch noted.
According to what is written on Wiki, you do give authority to the Talmud and all the more so to the Mishnah. So if something is mentioned so clearly in the Shulchan Aruch (which relies on a clear obligation in the Mishnah and not on a pious custom), what does that mean in your view?
To Yaakov,
with all due respect,
I think your message represents a certain irony.
On the one hand, you write that denying that earthquakes and disasters come into the world directly from the Holy One, blessed be He, and by His will is heresy, because God’s ways are hidden, and because there are cases written in the Tanakh in which the Holy One, blessed be He, does indeed punish collectively, and there is no reason to assume that this is not also the case today.
On the other hand, you yourself rather commit the very sin you cry out against when you write that it simply must operate through punishment for previous incarnations, because otherwise there is no justice in the world. But in the Tanakh, in the Sages, and in the Rishonim, nothing is written at all about reincarnations. When Jewish babies or gentile babies died, our Sages really did not feel the need to explain divine conduct by saying that they were reincarnations or soul-roots of people who sinned. Rather, they saw it as the result of collective punishment that also comes upon a baby or a woman who did not sin personally. Nowhere is it written that the firstborn who died in the plague of the firstborn merited the world to come or some reincarnation that would grant them the world to come. And the Canaanite children who died when the Israelites entered the land were not promised any special heavenly compensation either.
I also think you interpret the Ari in the way most convenient for you. From what I have read, he speaks of a cosmic doctrine of reincarnations whose purpose is to repair all the deed of Adam the First, in that every soul has soul-roots and soul-sparks related to one another and needing rectification. And from what I remember reading, he speaks about generations and about great people, wicked and righteous, in whom there are all kinds of sparks that need rectification. And many times I also remember reading there about reincarnations of figures like Balaam and Haman—which clearly shows that there is not necessarily some mechanism here meant to express heavenly compensation, but rather a process meant to redeem distortions of certain spiritual forces that exist within great wicked people or great righteous people.
I do not know what caused you to think that I presume and do not think—is it not presumptuous on your part to say so? I certainly set the wheels of thought in motion before I move my pen here. My words are not characterized by pointless terseness, are they?
The sources you brought do not in any way come to contradict belief in reincarnation. The fact that a person returns in reincarnation and is supposed there to pay for his evil deeds in another incarnation is one mode of governance—and not the only one. Divine governance is integrated and complex, and reincarnation is not the whole picture. It certainly constitutes a significant layer, but the divine consideration takes additional matters into account.
A person can rectify his sins from a previous incarnation through many commandments and merits, and especially through a corresponding repentance for what he did in previous incarnations. The commandments and merits can sweeten, delay, postpone, and even cancel what was decreed that he should suffer as a result of sins in other incarnations.
Not every person has the opportunity and merit to rectify the sins of his incarnations through commandments and merits.
So all the questions of the great figures of the Tanakh do not in the least contradict belief in reincarnation, for divine governance is dynamic, fluid, integrated, complex, and profound.
Incidentally, David too was not a prophet—and even a prophet has a glass ceiling in terms of the sum of his revelations and knowledge—each prophet according to the height of his rank. Not every prophet is shown everything. Not every prophet merited to know all the secrets of creation and of souls to their ultimate end.
I am completely of the opinion that the prophets certainly knew the secret of reincarnation, except that their questions arose from an expectation that decrees would be sweetened, even though it had been decreed that a person suffer because of deeds from a previous incarnation.
God answered Job in this spirit: you are too small to contain and encompass the investigation of creation and the foundations of the earth. That is the bottom line and the message there—it fits like a glove with what I said in the previous paragraph.
It was the Sages who said, by way of homily, what Moses asked, and it was they who gave whatever answers they gave. The Sages concealed the secret of reincarnation, and the Sages themselves said that one does not reveal the secrets of Torah to just anyone, only to a person on a high spiritual level.
As for the fact that the Sages did not explain spiritual matters according to the doctrine of reincarnation, this is what I answered another commenter here: “The Sages concealed the secret of reincarnation, and the Sages themselves said that one does not reveal the secrets of Torah to just anyone, but only to a person on a high spiritual level. This was said regarding the Account of Creation and the Account of the Chariot, and it is also said in tractate Pesachim that one does not reveal the secret to an ignoramus. There are many mysteries and secrets that the Sages knew and did not reveal—as the sages themselves say. Therefore your question regarding the words of our Sages falls away.
By the way, in the Zohar, in Saba de-Mishpatim, it says explicitly about reincarnation, and likewise in the Zohar on the commandment of levirate marriage it says explicitly that the deceased returns in the child that is born… so this already begins with Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai…”
3. “God’s ways are hidden” is not a verse known to me; rather “the hidden things belong to the Lord our God.” It is similar in idea but not necessarily identical. There are nuances here that we will not get into; the verse itself does not really belong to our discussion, but I had to note it.
4. Show me a single verse in the Tanakh whose meaning is collective punishment and that the Sages interpreted in such a way that contradicts “each man shall die for his own sin” and all the other verses I cited in my responses to Michael. It was the Sages who said there is no death without sin and no suffering without iniquity, and just as He repays the iniquity of fathers upon children only when the child has sin in hand, so too in the plague of the firstborn and in every other calamity. Every punishment that appears collective contains within it providential individual punishment for sins, and there is no contradiction between these two elements; everything is integrated and synchronized perfectly by the Divinity.
The Sages tell us stories of personal divine providence regarding Titus, Nebuchadnezzar, and many other gentiles.
The Sages said that in a time of severe decree, the attribute of justice does not distinguish between righteous and wicked, and indeed begins with the righteous, as happened in the destruction, according to our sages. But still everything is managed by individual providence, because even this lack of distinction between those with many merits and those without them is by God’s decree and determination, and it is another layer in the totality of His modes of governance with His creatures. And the harsh judgment stretched specifically over the righteous is exacting individual providence, and what happened there too came because of sin—because the righteous did not protest against the sinners—so that everything always begins and ends in divine providence.
The Ari explains that all those from Israel who were enslaved harshly in Egypt were reincarnations of the generation of the Flood who corrupted their seed, and now were enslaved harshly to rectify this sin. And likewise he explains about Adam’s sin and its consequences regarding the nature of each and every person’s rectification, according to the degree of his enjoyment from the sin.
Where did I speak of heavenly compensation in punishment that comes for sins from previous incarnations? It is necessary divine recompense—not compensation and not pizza.
The Ari speaks about individual people constantly, just as he speaks about general principles in the matter of reincarnation in the book Sha’ar HaGilgulim, and not only there but throughout his writings.
I have written here more than once that it is impossible to speak of authority with respect to facts and with respect to worldviews. Formal authority exists only with respect to halakhah.
But when we are dealing with laws that depend on a worldview, then it is impossible to speak of formal authority regarding them—neither that of the Talmud nor of anyone else, including the Shulchan Aruch. If in my view that worldview is not correct, or at least not correct today, there is no way to be obligated by the halakhah derived from it.
There is certainly room to distinguish, however, between laws that derive from a worldview indirectly, regarding which one can say that they should be observed even if one does not believe in the worldview underlying them. For example, laws that derive from a socialist worldview. But blessing over evil and over good is not an indirect derivative of the worldview; it is a halakhic anchoring of the worldview itself. As for laws of that kind, one cannot be obligated if one does not believe in the worldview.
And after all that, the Talmudic instruction to bless over evil and over good can be interpreted differently from the Shulchan Aruch, and therefore here we are really dealing with the Shulchan Aruch, not the Talmud.
Reincarnation may be a true secret that was revealed, but it is not at all plausible to think that there is some heavy difficulty that cannot be answered without the secret of reincarnation, in such a way that all Judaism hangs by a thread. For there were great and worthy men—prophets, Tannaim, Amoraim, Geonim, and Rishonim—who did not know (or did not hold by) the secret of reincarnation, and they too had complete and good Judaism. Your statements regarding the prophets do not seem plausible to me, and I see no point in discussing such strained claims; think as you wish (though see Ramban in Sha’ar HaGemul—the great father of the reincarnation view—who in the book of Job too finds hints from Elihu’s words that his answer is the secret of reincarnation—what the prophets say on the matter and what they cry out about it). Why in your opinion does God not answer Job simply and plainly as you answered—there is reincarnation, and it is very simple, and therefore everything is fully and fully just and lawful?
Above the issue of authority over facts was mentioned; I just saw an amusing news quotation:
“At the end of the discussion, the committee chairman MK Moshe Gafni read out a summary, according to which: ‘There is no connection whatsoever between the judicial reform and harm to Israel’s economy, and any attempt to link the two is a political attempt.’ The committee held a declarative vote on the matter, while opposition members objected to its being held and argued that it lacked authority and was unlawful.”
And by the reasoning of our teacher Rabbi Gafni, may his light shine, a vote on reality is an indirect vote on policy steps— all the experts and future decisions, insofar as they are subject to the policy decisions of the Finance Committee, are obligated when determining policy to assume the factual premise that there is no connection between the reform and harm to the economy.
Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev pales with envy. 🙂
I agree that Judaism does not depend on this, and I did not say that without this belief a person is considered a heretic or that his Judaism is suspect, but rather that without knowledge of this secret, many questions necessarily cannot reach the fullness of their solution.
Here you have this very discussion: without knowledge of the secret of reincarnation, no answer truly satisfies or sits well on the heart. A believing Jew does of course know and believe even without knowing the secret of reincarnation that God is good and all His acts are directed toward good and mercy—but he remains without an answer that smooths out and properly resolves everything on the principled level regarding children and babies who died. Job too felt that God is good and merciful after God’s words to him—but he still could not understand the secret of his sufferings.
God did not reveal to Job the secret of reincarnation, just as He did not reveal to him the secret of the world to come, according to the verses in Job, nor even the secret of the sefirot.
There is no reason that that same Tanakh, which does not speak explicitly about the spiritual world and the survival of the soul, should speak about reincarnation. That is not the style of the Tanakh, for various reasons that we will not get into. It is a topic in its own right.
Although the survival of the soul and the spiritual world are mentioned in Saul’s going to the necromancer and the raising of Samuel’s soul—and surely Saul’s very going to raise/lower a soul shows and proves unequivocally that belief in the survival of the soul was current and known in the time of the Tanakh among the people of Israel—and other verses also show this, except that the Torah does not make the spiritual world textually present in an orderly way, like the Mishnah, or as a divine statement that admits of no two meanings.
Still, in the story of the necromancer there is a significant presence of this world, and of the prevalent belief about it, in the period of the kings and prophets.
It is really difficult to infer a system of beliefs from the questions of the great figures of the Tanakh.
Who guarantees to us that Job was not initiated into the secret of reincarnation and that nonetheless his mind did not depart from him in his suffering and he did not speak harshly toward Heaven? Is everyone who believes in reincarnation immune from speaking harshly in times of pain? Not really. Pain removes the mind, the Sages said.
And indeed, according to the Ramban you mentioned, God hinted to him in His words the secret of reincarnation.
The secrets of Torah and creation are a precious thing, and not every person merits them.
Would that it be like those who engage in pilpul (they say from Parashat Derakhim onward) about Vayzata and Balaam’s she-ass.
Speaking of Rabbi Aviner: his current position (it is forbidden to rejoice; innocent people were killed) did not stop him from hastening to write a truly foolish column a year ago about the war in Ukraine:
https://www.srugim.co.il/650151-%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%91-%D7%90%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%A8-%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%94-%D7%90%D7%95-%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%99%D7%A0%D7%94-%D7%91%D7%A2%D7%93-%D7%9E%D7%99-%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%97
A lot of the trilogy was cooked up or already ready in the period of Atzakh, where Michi wrote that in order to accuse the Holy One, blessed be He, regarding disasters etc., you need to prove that He could have created the world with more beneficial laws of physics. Words that were not understood then and are not understood today either.
Whether he has remained in that position since then I do not know. I haven’t read his books; they’re not sold in Ohr Hachaim or Feldheim bookstores.
Michi used to be called one who purifies the impure and renders the pure impure. Still balanced?
I propose another possibility that I do not know how to rule out (nor to confirm)—the Holy One, blessed be He, stands behind everything that happens.
Since we do not know the calculations of Heaven, we should not look for the reason for events, even if sometimes it is tempting or seems trivial to someone.
The joy and sadness we are supposed to express in reality should correspond to our ability to understand, without involving providence, which we have no ability to grasp (perhaps sometimes we do, but we have no indication when we are right).
According to this view—we are sad when someone is wounded/dies in a terror attack because we judge reality without trying to understand the involvement, even though it exists.
In the earthquake in Turkey we are sad because that is how we perceive reality (innocent men, women, and children are harmed), again without thereby negating (or supporting) the existence of divine involvement.
Incidentally, I think our feelings are rational even on the assumption that there is providence, and one might seemingly argue that everything is directed and there is no reason to be sad.
In the end, our emotions are based on our reading of reality, and we cannot feel emotions regarding what is not located on any level we are capable of grasping.
I assume this is very simplistic, but I would be glad to hear your opinion on this direction.
Thanks
You are talking about facts (psychological ones) and I am talking about norms. You are describing when we are sad, and it is trivial that this happens according to our understanding of reality. For that we do not need theories and explanations. I am speaking about the question when we ought to be sad, and that is a normative question (that is, when something bad happens). The discussion here is about norms, not facts.
This still does not point to the problematic aspect in the view I am proposing (the part concerning divine involvement before the reference to emotions).
To rejoice that a baby died is of course insane on the psychological level, but in my opinion not insane on the normative level.
This may sound terrible, but again, on the normative level I am proposing divine involvement that we do not grasp.
The example you brought—that theoretically we should have killed whoever died there, except that we cannot know whom—does not contribute to your thesis in my opinion, because by definition we cannot know or justify such behavior, and therefore it is not merely a technical obstacle but a kind of world that operates in parallel, and we have no ability whatever to understand it, and therefore to interact with it or act according to it.
The meaning of what I am proposing (at least de facto) is that providence is not supposed to affect our conduct in the world.
I didn’t understand. Are you claiming there is a moral explanation, only we do not know it? That is what everyone says. What is new here?
Some explanation, not necessarily a moral one. Even if that is what everyone says, I do not see the problem, because for me that does not entail Rabbi Eliyahu’s conclusions (which in your view should indeed follow from his position). We do not rejoice over disaster not because of tact but because there is no point in the question of what we are supposed to feel normatively according to an approach that says we have no grasp whatever of providence. It is a question with no practical implications. (A possible practical implication is rejoicing over a dead baby—that is supposedly the “desired” emotion according to the thesis I am proposing, but this returns to the point that we cannot develop emotions about what we cannot in any way understand.) Perhaps to explain the point better: imagine for a moment that prophecy is given to you for a moment, and an understanding of the divine plan, and assume for a moment that the dead baby constitutes part of that plan. Would you not rejoice? Would it not be right to rejoice in such a case? In my opinion it would be right to rejoice, because you understand the need and what it serves. Returning to our reality—emotions are not supposed to rest on norms that we do not understand. We are left with psychology (which rests on norms that we do understand—for example killing a terrorist).
If you assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not conduct Himself morally, then the discussion does not arise. If He conducts Himself morally, even if we do not grasp it—then again there is no room for sharing in the grief, for the one who died deserved to die.
I do not understand what you are trying to achieve in this strange discussion. To defend Rabbi Eliyahu’s position? You are presenting a different position. To present a position in which the discussion does not arise? Clearly there is such a position. To present a thesis with the same assumptions but without the conclusions—you have not succeeded.
Well, I think we have exhausted it, at least for here. Perhaps there will be room for this discussion in the next post that I am writing on the problem of evil. There I will try to present all the possibilities, and if you think your possibility is different—I would be glad to hear. At the moment I do not see anything new here and no answer to the difficulties.
Indeed I began by saying that I am presenting a different position (from yours and from his).
The new thing (or perhaps not) is that one need not assume that an event like the earthquake is not providential in order to be sad.
I’ll look at the next post and comment if I see that it relates to this same matter.
Well then, honorable Rabbi, there are 2 mistakes in your hands.
1. To think that he apologized to the Turks.
To think that he wanted to apologize for the substance of his words.
Well then, he holds exactly what he wrote at first, but because his readers were shocked since they do not have the “sensibilities” that he has, he apologizes to his readers, and since his readers live with this duality and all that bothered them from the beginning was only the tact, it follows that he apologized for the tact, because that is exactly what pained his readers… and understand this well.
[Well then, I am very happy and greatly enjoy the decisiveness, and I already thought that here I had an opportunity to receive rebuke. But I was mistaken. I have no such opportunity.
1. He writes explicitly that he apologizes to them. But you are indeed making noble use of the principle of charity.
2. I did not think that. On the contrary, I proved that in his words there is no apology for the substance of his remarks, only for the tact.
So there you are, you were mistaken. And ostensibly I have a doubt whether you were mistaken in two things or in one. But in conclusion it is obvious that in fact you were mistaken in three things: a. in saying that I was mistaken in two things (I was mistaken in 0). b. in saying that I was mistaken about the addressee of the apology (see 1). c. in saying that I was mistaken about the content of the apology (see 2).
Be strong and courageous.
Well, obviously you weren’t really mistaken.
What I mean is that “you expect too much of them.” All that interests them is an ideology that suits them regardless of reality. They wanted to teach their flock a certain “worldview,” and when this disturbed the readers’ delicacy, he immediately apologized precisely for what disturbed them. I am not saying that this is how he acts where he has influence (obviously if he were prime minister here, heaven forbid, he would send help to our cousins), but when it is only for the needs of “teaching,” he exaggerates a bit. That’s how it is in yeshivas: the gap between abstract “halakhic” reasoning and the belly-sevarot of a general shiur is only very great.
As someone who raised here in this post the issue of the “problem of evil,” I can say that what I want is to read a post explaining how, in your view, the Holy One, blessed be He’s involvement in the world looked in the period in which, according to you, He was involved in the world.
I am interested in hearing about events for which He is responsible—earthquakes He created (miraculous, supernatural earthquakes), and also earthquakes that came from nature (events He did not create). How was He involved in each of those cases according to your view?
This is very interesting because you were really angry at Rabbi Eliyahu for causing people to think about the Holy One, blessed be He, in an orderly way. And here—let us read and hear how you yourself think about that very God according to your approach.
To sum up: I have no interest in a general discussion of the “problem of evil,” only in the questions raised by your own words, as I presented them in this post in an orderly way.
Dror
*“in an orderly way” = in an ugly way
I am really glad to hear about your fields of interest. Perhaps you could expand on them further. I am sure the other readers here also wondered what exactly interests you.
When I work for you, I will of course act accordingly.
In my humble opinion, which is not decisive but is correct, he asked a serious and important question. You of course are not obligated to answer (you are, after all, the master of the place, and do with it as you please), but the question is certainly called for, and no answer is also an answer…
Rabbi Mordechai. Apparently you did not notice, but this discussion is already underway, and I already wrote above that I will devote a proper post to it and answer there.
It is certainly true that this is a question worth discussing, but here this was not a question but instructions for writing my intended post. The insolent way he presented it invited a response like the one I wrote. As for an answer, as I wrote, it will come soon.
Indeed, one should better respect your famous and extravagant sensitivity to tact and Victorian politeness.
Rabbi Mordechai (are you really a rabbi?), this is not only one question.
There are additional questions; I will mention a few (details of all the questions are found higher up):
(-) Why tie together “the Holy One, blessed be He, who helps everyone with every splinter that gets under the foot” with “the Holy One, blessed be He, who helps when there are clear cases of inability to act.”
A good example of inability to act is what happened to tens of thousands of innocent children in Turkey and Syria.
Why not learn from our experience, that every sane and rational father helps his son when the son is in mortal danger and terrible suffering (like the earthquake in Turkey), but indeed lets the son cope on his own when he has a mortgage debt or a splinter under his foot. Is it not reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, would be like that too?
(-) Why did the Holy One, blessed be He, stop intervening “so that we would progress,” if nobody disputes that humanity in any case progresses nicely even in periods in which, according to Michi, He was involved.
There is no need to stop intervening, because obviously humanity advanced also 10,000, 5,000, and 3,000 years ago.
Dror
I’m not a rabbi with anyone, except with Michi, who quarrels with me…
Rabbi Yaakov,
Your words are contradicted by your own words.
You write, “Once permission is given to the destroyer, he does not distinguish between righteous and wicked,”
and immediately after that—“but there too everything is managed by individual providence.” That is a contradiction.
Individual providence means—each individual is judged on his own—each righteous person on his own and each wicked person on his own—
You add that this lack of distinction is by God’s decree—but it is still a lack of distinction—
that when permission is given to the destroyer, he does not distinguish between righteous and wicked.
And in our matter—once the house collapses in the earthquake—it will fall on all its inhabitants, great and small alike.
And regarding reincarnations—“And you shall know in your heart that as a man chastens his son, so the Lord your God chastens you.”
Now that baby who was harmed and whose whole future life will be full of suffering—he will not know for what
he was punished. You will tell him: repent from the sins you committed in a previous incarnation—and he will tell you: tell me what my sins are. Where here is the “as a man chastens his son”?
Regarding what you wrote in the note: indeed, it’s impossible to know what is accidental and what is not. What is needed is to take possibility B into account as well, when it is relevant. This is not stating a certainty but making a normative decision (“If a person sees that sufferings are coming upon him, let him examine his deeds”). In my view, that is also what Maimonides says at the beginning of the Laws of Fasts.
Beyond that, you are absolutely right that for some reason the public is not prepared to contain the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not directly determine everything. It’s not clear why, because beyond the almost logical necessity, this is also the view of many of the Rishonim.