Q&A: Who Needs the Holy One, Blessed Be He?
Who Needs the Holy One, Blessed Be He?
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I would appreciate your thoughts on the following point:
We can plainly see that it is possible to manage quite well in this life without observing Torah and commandments, without belief in God, without thoughts about reward and punishment, etc.
Moreover, humanity keeps progressing in every area:
Diseases are cured, there are solutions for mass nutrition, ways of coping with weather damage, and so on and so forth.
In this reality, I find it hard to answer myself and my children the following question:
What do we need God for?
What do we need the Torah, commandments, or prayer for, when,
to put it delicately,
we can manage not badly on our own?
Yes, I am actually referring to your faith-based theological answer
to the question of the “God of the gaps.”
This question became sharper for me after I attended a lesson in which an interpretation was presented by Rabbi David Shlomo Eybeschitz (1755–1813) on the verse “If you walk in My statutes, etc.,” where he explicitly writes that wealth and abundance distance a person from God, and that in fact this blessing also contains a curse of distance from God…
I should note that I did not really receive any substantial answers to these questions in the lesson itself..
And in general it seems that there is no real central engagement with this issue.
Thanks in advance
Answer
- Who said the Torah was meant so that we could get by in life? It is the truth, and therefore it should be followed. Someone who does all this because of some personal benefit or another—it indeed has no point, in my opinion as well.
- I understand that your assumption is that there is a God and that He revealed Himself and gave commandments (otherwise there is no need even to enter the question of why to keep them and what benefit they have). If so, then first of all there is an obligation to do so regardless of benefit. Beyond that, I also assume that there are various benefits to observing the commandments, though I do not know how to point to most of them; otherwise, why were the commandments given?! Note that moral laws too are binding not because of the benefit in them (even though they do have benefit). See the fourth notebook here on the site.
- By the way, in parentheses, you apparently live in a perfect world unfamiliar to me. In my estimation, without faith (though not necessarily commandments), humanity does not manage all that well in terms of life’s meaning, the philosophical basis for morality and for norms and values, family structure, and more.
- And one more thing. What does what you are saying have to do with the “God of the gaps”? That concept refers to a philosophical argument that proves the existence of God (not His necessity) from gaps in scientific knowledge, and such a proof is a fallacy. If what you are saying is connected at all to the God of the gaps, then your argument itself falls into that very fallacy. You assume that God is needed because of a gap (not in scientific knowledge but in human well-being), but that is not so.
Discussion on Answer
1. The Torah nowhere says that observing the commandments is for the sake of reward and punishment. On the contrary, it writes that there is an obligation of gratitude to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, and therefore one should serve Him. See my article here on the site about gratitude as the basis for observing commandments. Beyond that, you assume something and then raise a difficulty. Don’t assume, and don’t ask. You assume that observance is not because it is the truth, and then you object. I suggest that it is because of the truth, and that resolves it. So you insist on asking anyway, in the spirit of, “and one can raise a forced difficulty”? That is not reasonable. It is also not true that you have seen that reward and punishment do not exist, neither in this world (the benefits I listed in the previous message) nor in the next.
2. Indeed. See the fourth notebook, part 3.
4. See the third and fourth notebooks. I answered this there at length. Science does not make anything unnecessary.
Thank you, Rabbi, for the answer.
1. The Torah describes, quite a number of times, a system of reward and punishment in exchange for observing the commandments or not observing them. It does not say in the Torah to perform commandments because that is the truth. Maybe we tell ourselves that we keep commandments because that is the truth only after we saw that in practice reward and punishment do not exist?
2. If I understood the Rabbi correctly, is it the case that in order to live a moral life one must be a believer in the existence of God?
4. What is the difference between the fact that science explains many things to us about phenomena in the world, which in practice “make God’s existence unnecessary,” and systems of values, morality, and secular law, which also in practice are not based on the existence of God or on some Torah that He gave?