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Q&A: Knowledge

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Knowledge

Question

Hello Rabbi,
A. In the past we spoke about divine knowledge, and I said that I saw it written that His knowledge is His essence. My question is whether the Rabbi holds differently, and if so, then there is no unity of God, since there is Him and there is His knowledge (Maimonides, Foundations of the Torah 2:10).

Answer

I don’t understand this type of question. Knowledge is not an object. Therefore the discussion about the relation between His knowledge and His essence is unclear to me, and so are the difficulties about divine unity. Is my own knowledge my essence or something else? It is neither my essence nor something else. It is not a thing at all. Knowledge is a state, not an object. I am in a state in which I know something, just as I am in a state in which I am walking and not standing. Is the walking me myself, or something else?

Discussion on Answer

Sh. (2018-02-21)

Hello Rabbi, a friend of mine suggested a solution to the question of knowledge and free choice, and I wanted to hear your opinion.
He phrases it like this: "things that I choose from the future." It’s hard to understand how this resolves the difficulty, because it’s still the future—it still hasn’t happened yet—so where exactly is the solution here?!
Rather, I would say that since God is not limited by time in the way that we are limited by it, it follows that He כביכול stands in the future, after all the events, after we have already made our choices, and therefore He knows what we chose without that affecting the choice.
In other words, you could say: what is future for us is, as it were, past for Him.
Think of it like a person who is on the last day of the world and knows what was done and what we chose; so too the Holy One, blessed be He, already in the present knows it (but the fact that it is present and not past—that is from our perspective. From His perspective it is already past).
I hope I managed to make myself clear.

Michi (2018-02-21)

That’s the "explanation" people always bring up. In my view it’s nonsense. It makes no difference at all where He stands or who He is. The question is from my perspective, as someone living on the timeline: does He now know what I will do in the future? If yes, then I have no freedom to choose tomorrow. Why should I care where He "stands" and what His relation to time is?!

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