Q&A: Several Fundamental Questions
Several Fundamental Questions
Question
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* What is the Rabbi’s point of certainty in life? That is, what is the criterion for your life and your actions? And what is that certainty based on?
Do you hold any other certainties? And if so, why specifically yours?
And if you would say that you have no point of certainty, then why would you obey any command, commandment, or hold any view at all?
* The revelation at Mount Sinai and divine speech — how do you reconcile the absurdity that the transcendent God intervenes in the immanent? One who is separate from time suddenly enters into it. Philosophers already struggled with this difficulty, and I have not found a Jewish answer that satisfied me enough.
* How do you prove that the Torah is from Heaven? Because one thing is clear to me: if it is not, then there is no place to speak of God who brought the Jewish people out of the house of bondage with signs and wonders, and consequently no place to speak of Judaism at all. More broadly, if there is no proof for the truth of Torah from Heaven, then there is no proof for the personality of God.
* The question of suffering and evil in our world.How does one reconcile this scandal?
Premise 1: The Holy One, blessed be He, is not evil, for He lacks nothing, Heaven forbid, so evil does not apply to Him.
Premise 2: The Holy One, blessed be He, decided that He wished to bestow of His goodness upon another, and therefore emanated a world with creatures in it.
Argument 1: Creation operates on the basis of a volitional-moral formula emanated from the Creator, and its purpose is not to do evil.
Data: The history of human creatures (at the very least) has known pure evil.
Argument 2: Argument 1 is undermined.
Argument 3: Argument 2 is stronger than Argument 1, for it has a stronger proof on which it relies, one readily clarified by our natural senses.
Argument 4: Premise 1 and/or Premise 2 are incorrect and/or lacking.
And to put the difficulty more simply:
No one knows better than the Rabbi how much humanity has suffered, and the Jews in particular.
The suffering of the great sages of Israel in the period of the Mishnah, the Bar Kokhba revolt, the expulsions by the Arabs and the pogroms carried out against the Jews, the Inquisitions, the decrees of 1648–49, the Holocaust of European Jewry.
Horrifying degrees of suffering, evil that is hard to describe; it is hard to identify any good that could have existed in this world in the face of such terrible and dreadful situations.
Where is the beneficence? Where is the mercy? Or at least the proportionality of the evil? Where is the moral formula?
So one may answer: man was given free choice, and he is the one who brought about the evil, and by his deeds diminished the good.
For me that is not strong enough to be convinced of God’s supreme goodness, according to which He emanated His world, unfortunately.
How do you deal with all this?
And if you say that this is the best possible system of laws in which free choice could also be applied to man, then what do we do with the benevolent intervention at Mount Sinai? After all, He could have intervened once again if He truly wanted to do good and for His people not to be harmed in horrifying ways beyond words.
Answers in the manner of Ramchal in Da'at Tevunot could be good, if you explain them.
* Books of faith like The Guide and Beliefs and Opinions bring strong ontological, philosophical, and scientific proofs for the study of divinity. Why did you write that they are not relevant?
* Free choice versus determinism —
How does one deal with deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics (many worlds)? I read that according to this interpretation, one must include the observer in the wave function, not only the measured system. Thus, at the time of measurement, the observer and the measured system become entangled, and each eigenstate of the observer sees a corresponding eigenstate of the measured system. This interpretation does not require the idea of collapse of the wave function, which does not exist in the formalism of quantum mechanics. As for the De Broglie-Bohm Theory (or Pilot-Wave Theory), I understood that it claims that Schrödinger’s equation does not describe the system fully, but occupies the same place as thermodynamics and statistical physics — it describes the statistics of the system, the macroscopic quantities, and ignores microscopic quantities (such as the position and momentum of a particle). In this way, the De Broglie-Bohm interpretation is a deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, and like MWI it too does not require the idea of collapse of the wave function (and thus bypasses the many paradoxes found in that idea) found in the Copenhagen interpretation.
And a side question, regarding the time machine paradox (a person travels back in time and kills his grandfather before he managed to marry): in quantum terms this is described by a superposition, and there is not necessarily any paradox at all.
* The business of the choosing of the people of Israel and their being a chosen people —
I do not buy the story that God went to every nation and asked it, and in the end only we agreed; and even about us it is said that the mountain was held over us like a barrel. And perhaps is there something that can prevent God’s will in the refusal of the nations? What is really going on here?..
* The concept of time —
A concept that interests me מאוד and I try to investigate, and of course you have engaged physics with particular intensity, and I would be glad if you would give some explanation of it, and with a Jewish flavor — all the better.
* The question of divine foreknowledge and free choice —
Of course this is a question that many of our great thinkers also wrestled with, and to this day in philosophy it seems like a question with no serious answer. How do you explain that God is all-knowing and yet this still leaves us free choice?
If you explain it also from a philosophical-physical perspective, that could be interesting.Thank you very much.
Answer
Well, I understand that you expect me to write an encyclopedia here of my views on every point and aspect of the universe, but unfortunately I do not have time for that, and I am not sure the network servers have enough memory for all of it.
A large part of these points has been spelled out in my books and on the site, and the rest is in my books that will, God willing, be published (the trilogy); take it from there.
If you want, you can raise one point here, and when we finish with it you can raise another. For every point you raise, please clarify the question well.
All the best
Discussion on Answer
Forgive me if I begin with something I usually do not do: a rebuke. There is a good deal of chutzpah in what you wrote. You do not have the energy to read/buy books that I took the trouble to write and invested quite a bit of energy and time in, and therefore you demand, defiantly, that I rewrite them for you personally on the internet, in full scope and to order. Doesn’t that seem a bit excessive to you?
I opened the site for the benefit of those who want to ask and think I have something to contribute to them, and I try very hard to answer everyone. It takes me a great deal of time, at the expense of my private time. If I had to write an encyclopedia for each person as you expect, this site would have closed long ago.
I must remind you that I do not work for you (as far as I recall, you did not pay me for the service).
You also did not clarify the questions you sent as I asked, and they are still bundles. You simply could not be bothered to elaborate and just copied them again. If you want an answer, I will gladly try to respond, but you will have to make do with one question and not bundles, and trouble yourself to explain and clarify what exactly you are asking. From what you wrote I am able to understand these questions.
In addition, the question needs to be focused on some specific point, and not a request that I write a book in response to Kant (that I already did, but as you recall you do not have the energy to read it).
As our sages said, no free lunch
Well, it is a shame to waste the precious time of both of us. I will correct your words — strength, thank God, I have, enough to turn days into nights in my life, and I am never lazy — but there are priorities and constraints that do not allow me to delve into your thick books (I would prefer to invest the little free time I have, for example, in The Guide of the Perplexed, naturally) in order to dig around for answers to certain questions I have. Did someone say, “insolence will increase in the generation of redemption”? Did someone speak about broken vessels that are not prepared and repaired to contain the divine abundance at the beginning of redemption? Did someone speak about the thirst for the living God in the generation of redemption and its connection to “insolence will increase”? And in any case, this does not mean I do not examine other books and the views circulating in the world that may answer my questions — but again, at the moment I do not have the time to dig through your books to find answers. Besides, truth and the love of it are above every ideal and above every material compensation, and if I knew I possessed the truth, I would ride a donkey and proclaim it to the world without charging a single penny, if only from the joy in the wisdom of truth and the thirst for it, as Rabbi Kook of blessed memory writes.
On a donkey our exalted and elevated master Maimonides wrote the charter of his Jewish laws and ways of life so that they would be a help and support to the Jewish people on its winding path; I have not heard that he asked for any coin, Heaven forbid (except that after his business with his brother collapsed, he went and became the private physician of the Arab king, to such an extent that only on the Sabbath did he have time to lie on his bed and study Torah) — rather, they wrote, “Do not make them a crown with which to glorify yourself, nor a spade with which to dig,” and the words of the Great Eagle on this matter are already known to all, and they are what brought the bandits to burn his holy books, but this is not the place to expand on that. In any event, these are very critical foundational questions in our generation, and if they receive clear answers — that is part of what will hasten an intellectual revolution and thereby redemption, and then we will easily contemplate and understand the historical outline as Rabbi Kook foresaw, in “The Generation,” in Lights of Rebirth and Faith. I at least know that when, with God’s help, the answers come in their full force — I will spread them throughout the world in all their splendor.
“Without the insolence of the footsteps of the Messiah, it would not have been possible to explain the secrets of Torah in complete openness. Only through the thickening of the feelings brought about by insolence will it be possible to receive very lofty intellectual illuminations, and in the end everything will return
to complete rectification.”
Site editor and Rabbi Michael, please filter trolls and mentally ill people of the above sort out of the site, to preserve the level of discussion…
Censorship here is used only in extreme cases (so far it has not happened, except for advertisements and the like). The advisable advice is simply to ignore it.
I protest on behalf of the honor of the Torah
It seems he is trying by force to fulfill Rabbi Kook’s “prophecies”… ridiculous
Hello Maimonides — I also love Maimonides, but while reading I found many “inaccuracies in his words,” and sometimes (maybe you will laugh) I found explanations in his words that “allow” for those inaccuracies.
I will not go into details, but have you already caught on to Maimonides’ secret? Or part of it?
What do you think of Maimonides’ oath regarding one who discovers the secret, if he should find it?
As for your jumbled questions, I know only an answer to the last one:
The question of divine foreknowledge and free choice —
Of course this is a question that many of our great thinkers also wrestled with, and to this day in philosophy it seems like a question with no serious answer. How do you explain that God is all-knowing and yet this still leaves us free choice?
If you explain it also from a philosophical-physical perspective, that could be interesting.
Answer: I will explain from my personal perspective, okay? (:
It is written, “Choose life,” so God knows everything, even our thoughts at every moment… and therefore He gives us the choice between evil and good ourselves. If we choose good, He will reward us with good, and if we choose evil, we will pay for it. A person who manufactures something — that thing is supposed to work according to the design; so too we are supposed to do only good, but that is impossible because there entered into us a combination of spirit and matter, and matter, because of its materiality, clings to its desires, while the spirit must cling to its intellect, so there are “tensions” here between matter and spirit, and to help the spirit overcome the matter, the Torah comes.
Whoever’s spirit defeats his materiality will merit good from the Holy One, blessed be He (I believe in the World to Come and in other things that the Rabbi does not believe in). If there were no free choice and we were forced to do only good, then for what would you receive reward? Therefore the possibility called free choice was implanted in us, and although the Holy One, blessed be He, knows our choice in advance, He does not prevent us from having free choice.
The best example of this is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and his people, who were punished with the ten plagues as if “for nothing,” because God hardened his heart, so why punish him? The answer: in order to show you My power… Pharaoh did not acknowledge God, and the Holy One, blessed be He, chose this path to “teach” him, but of course Pharaoh was wicked and deserved everything that happened to him, and perhaps something even worse, and God left him alive — Pharaoh admitted and said, “The Lord is righteous, and I and my people are wicked.” Questions?
I am asking questions here because I do not have time to read thick books in order to get answers to them, and if I were interested in buying books and investing time I do not have in them, then I certainly would not be asking here. Besides, if you did not open this option for the sake of asking questions, then for what?
So let’s kill a Turk and rest:
* What is the Rabbi’s point of certainty in life? That is, what is the criterion for your life and your actions? And what is that certainty based on? Do you hold any other certainties? And if so, why specifically yours? And if you would say that you have no point of certainty, then why would you obey any command, commandment, or hold any view at all? What more needs clarifying here? What is your starting point in life? How do you know you are not in my dream your whole life and deluding yourself? Kant already said that everything is subjective — so in a world where all speakers are subjective, is there any truth to hold on to? Is there a point of certainty from which one can derive the rest of our actions and conceptions?