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God’s mandate

שו”תCategory: philosophyGod’s mandate
asked 7 years ago

Hello Rabbi, a little following your last column (which I haven’t read to the end yet), and in honor of the recently released film Avengers: Endgame, I wanted to ask a question that came to my mind while watching the previous film.
Thanos is a character who aspires to solve the world’s problems. He tries to obtain a gauntlet that will allow him to seemingly painlessly thin out the world’s population so that he can impose order on the world that will end our troubles.
And the question became more and more clear to me (perhaps childish, perhaps immature, perhaps stupid, but I matured late), what is the difference between Thanos and the Creator of the Universe? A few differences occurred to me:

  1. The Creator of the world derives his mandate from the fact that he created the world and therefore it is his ‘right’. It is difficult for me to agree with such a statement, of course. It is possible that we have no way of discussing God’s morality and are simply doomed to accept.
  2. The Creator of the world knows what is good for us and therefore it is okay. Perhaps we must say that He does what is good for the whole, and if there is harm to a righteous individual, he will be rewarded in the hereafter, and then there are two factors here, His knowledge and His ability to reward good for everyone in the final reckoning.
  3. When I presented the question to a friend, he told me that it was a question that stems from a fulfilled understanding of God, but I had already come to the conclusion that my intellect was probably not subtle enough to perceive God not as a supreme power but as something that encompasses the world, etc., as we already discussed in a previous question.

thanks!

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מיכי Staff answered 7 years ago

I think it is difficult to equate God with any other entity. First, He created us. Second, He is a creature completely different from us, and therefore it is difficult to determine things about Him.
I wrote in my article on gratitude that whoever creates something has rights to it. To read there (and at the end of the fifth notebook briefly).
Regarding his being different from us, if I make decisions for my children, it seems reasonable to everyone. Because I want their good and I know better than them what is good for them. Our relationship with God is similar. Therefore, he is unlike any other creature of our kind, and we can wonder whether he has the right and whether he really knows something that we don’t know and whether this knowledge is certain.

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