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Infanticide

שו”תCategory: faithInfanticide
asked 3 years ago

In honor of Rabbi Michael Avraham
Are you explicitly ignoring that there are many places in the Bible where God, when He punishes, punishes even infants, and furthermore, to punish adults, He kills their children?


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0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 3 years ago
Even if adults are punished by killing their children, it is not like this. Here the babies themselves suffered torment. If they were killed carelessly without suffering, then the suffering remains only for the adults who lack them. Beyond that, it is difficult to accept that all the children who die are precisely those whose parents owe punishment. Beyond that, if you refer to the column on the words of Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the discussion there is not about the question of whether God is moral, but about the question of whether Rabbi Eliyahu is right. He assumes that God is moral and explains His actions morally, and I argue that there is no explanation there. Now you can discuss whether He acts morally or not.

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פנחס replied 3 years ago

Children who ask for bread means they suffer and not just get killed
You cannot ignore the fact that God testifies to Himself that His leadership is in the form of punishment, but in the form of general punishment that even the innocent suffer.
Our father Abraham also claims, "Will You destroy the righteous with the wicked?" He says that he thought that would happen if he did not plead with the Creator of the world, "Do not do this."
This is regarding the words of Rabbi Eliyahu.
Regarding the question you mention at the end, what do you really understand? How can God be considered moral?

מיכי Staff replied 3 years ago

My starting point is that if God acts morally, then such conduct is impossible. After all, these verses, if that is indeed their meaning, contradict “and His mercy over all His works” or at least empty it of its content (if you insist on defining this as His moral conduct itself). And so with “The iniquity of the fathers visits upon the children” and ”A man shall be put to death for his sin”.
If we accept the principled view that any global event is the work of God (which in my opinion is not true, at least not in our generation. But when there was prophecy, there was someone who could tell us that this was the case, and then it was probably true), it must still be that harming babies (meaning their suffering, not necessarily their death) is out of the question.
Although we have become very accustomed to living in this contradiction, it is a contradiction and therefore unacceptable. Therefore, in my opinion, we should do here what the Sages and the commentators do everywhere else, reconcile the verses in a way that does not contradict morality, even if it is not in the simple way of readings.
Here are some possibilities that I have thought of:
1. Perhaps there is room to say that this is a threat about what is to come in order to deter and illustrate the magnitude of the expected disaster, and not a description of what was. The Sages attribute the scroll to Jeremiah (although some have written that it is his lament after the events).
2. Perhaps this is an exaggeration of a lament text written after the fact in order to emphasize the suffering and disaster.
3. There too, it can be said that the war and the occupation led to the suffering of infants and God simply did not intervene. Alternatively, He stopped protecting the public and thus allowed the enemy to win. A public that sins cuts itself off from divine providence, and the results are what humans and the forces of nature will do. And yet things are still the same.

Finally, because of such interpretive problems, I don't usually engage with the Bible and the legend. It won't change my moral concepts, and interpretation will at most change my interpretation of the text. So what's the point of all this, if the conclusions are already known to me from the beginning?! They can certainly tell me: Where did you come from. In other words, here is the evidence that perceptions can be changed due to studying the Bible. But in my opinion, even among those who disagree with my theological perceptions, no one really changes their moral concept. I don't think there is a sane person who would advocate collective punishment of babies because of these biblical passages. At most, they would say that God has his own considerations, etc. Their moral concept will not change (unless it was distorted from the beginning).

פנחס replied 3 years ago

I don't know what to say about your excuses
One thing I find them very strange
And it seems that you have never thought about these questions how to settle them and you have already jumped on others and called them stupid
They are stupid because they did not think that killing babies is immoral and you are also not very smart
Because the excuses you wrote in that column. How does he not distinguish between a prophecy and a situation without prophecy? Irrelevant
What to do? The Bible explicitly says many times that there is such a reality
It is true that his interpretation is very problematic
But you are also not the height of honesty. Indeed, the issue is complicated, but your conclusions seem problematic
This iron rule cannot be learned from the Bible. Moral truth may be true, but apparently it is possible to learn about God's attitude towards morality

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