Q&A: God and Love
God and Love
Question
How can one love and fear the God that Rabbi Michi proposes?
Answer
What God am I proposing? How is He different from other gods? And why is there no problem with them?
Discussion on Answer
Let me guess what Michi’s answer to you will be.
He’ll say something like this: you’re not looking for God, but for the fulfillment of your inner longings (feelings of love and fear).
If he says that, it’s quite possible he’s right.
But the door is open for you to go in a different direction, which in my opinion Michi is missing.
Doron,
Rabbi Michi is certainly an important side in the battle for truth, as he has written several times that today, if a young man raises questions about leaving religion, they shower him with warmth, love, and holy feelings in the hope that these will burn up the intellect. It seems to me that Rabbi Michi, out of his opposition to them, has gone to the other extreme: there is no place at all for feeling and warmth, only for cold, alienated analytic intellect (or more precisely, synthetic intellect). In my humble opinion, this is a mistake. Just as if I love with all my soul the “wrong heavens,” that has no value, so too if I know the right heavens but am unable to fear and love them—they remain alien to me—that too has no value. Who do we have like our teacher the Ra’avan, who in Sefer HaMiddot showed us countless times how the middle path is the finest of paths.
We probably agree completely about the middle path, and also agree that Michi has gone too far in one direction. Even so, I argue that going in his direction may be rationalistic, but not really rational. Emotions, in my view, are a necessary religious value—even if less important than the abstract truth that I grasp with the intellect—and therefore a worldview that sees them as merely a nice addition is first and foremost a theoretical flaw: a failure to understand what religion is and what is included in the concept of a personal, revealing God (with will and intentions, etc.). I think it is reasonable to assume that such a God expects from us not only to recognize the truth (as far as we are capable), but also to feel love, fear, and the like. In short: the appeal to the heart too is itself rationality.
A philosophical concept, a technical idea that plugs logical holes. It’s like asking me to love a Band-Aid (if I’m understanding the Rabbi’s inferences correctly). This isn’t a living God who speaks to me, just some concept that is false to me, just as, to distinguish, I have no emotional connection to deconstruction or to modus tollens.