Reward and punishment
I saw you say that there is no reason to believe in reward and punishment in the next world, and in this world you are quite sure that there is no reward and punishment. How do you explain and know that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and mercy with those who love him and keep his commandments, his commandments, to a thousand generations: and he repays those who hate him to his face, to his destruction; he will not delay to repay those who hate him to his face?
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The problem is that God is described in this verse as the faithful God, meaning that if He changed His leadership, He would know its limitations. And it is said, “The perfect rock acted, for all His ways are justice,” and it does not mean that all His ways will be only in a certain generation. God is faithful and there is no injustice. And if there is no distinction between the righteous and the wicked, how can there be injustice? And it is written in Malachi, when prophecy ceases, and you return and see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not serve Him, for behold, the day comes, burning like an oven, and all the wicked and all those who do evil will be stubble, and the coming day will burn them up. And the sun of righteousness will rise up for you, you who fear the sky, with healing in its wings. Remember the Torah of Moses, my servant!
The reward in this world is a national reward. How will you see us? And are we today in a state of apostasy? Will you hear all these judgments and keep and do them?
The times when the people of Israel were worthy of this were few, even according to Chazal, and in all the days of the Second Temple this did not happen except once. We find that in the days of Shimon ben Shetach, rain fell on them on the nights of the fourth and on the nights of the Sabbath until wheat became like buds, barley like olive kernels, and lentils like gold dinars. And they gathered from them an example for generations to inform how much sin causes, as it is said, "Your sins have turned these away, and your sins have withheld good from you." And that from our point of view, who is it that should be gathered for generations, to show what happens as a result of listening, and that the current situation today is only because we do not listen.
If you want to see reward and punishment in this world, see what happened to the Jews of Europe who rebelled against it, and I lived among them and forsook me and broke my covenant that I had made with him, and my anger was kindled against him on that day and I forsook them and hid my face from them and he became a prey, and many evils and troubles found him, and he said on that day, "Is it not because my God is not among me that these evils have found me? And I will hide my face on that day for all the evil that he has done."
Now that's empirical! Interesting... Blessed is he who sees what my blind and feeble eyes fail to see.
A good tactic is to use words that you have to Google to understand their meaning before you understand the response. That sounds really high-level.
As a matter of fact, I also don't see the wheat as kidneys and the lentils as gold coins, even though they were collected for generations. They were probably lost at some point. But it's enough for me that the sages testified that there were such wheat and lentils. I didn't see what happened in the European Holocaust either, and it's enough for me to hear what people say they were there. But of course, hearing is not the same as seeing.
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