The harsh judgment of God Almighty
Hello Rabbi.
Is it impossible to understand the harsh judgment of God, according to the Sages? After all, we assume that God is righteous, and created the world to do good. But many sayings in the Sages are about harsh and bitter punishments for all kinds of banal or common sins, such as the one who says, “Amen, an orphan, her children will be orphans,” and anyone who transgresses the words of the Sages is liable to death, and in the Zohar it is said that anyone who prays with tefillin in the turban is liable to death, and anyone who opens his eyes during the Shmuel is liable to death, and the Gra writes in his letter, “And every slingshot is all in vain, the mouth of vain talk, and for every vain talk, one must be slingshot from the end of the world to its end.” And all this with excess words. But in forbidden matters, such as: evil speech, jesting, oaths, vows, disputing, and cursing, especially in the synagogue, on Shabbat, and on a holy day, for these one must descend to hell very far, and it is impossible to imagine the magnitude of the torment and hardship one suffers for one word (Zohar).”
These are not many examples, but I think that if someone were to invest in collecting all the death penalty laws in Judaism, they would come up with hundreds of sentences along the lines of “Whoever does [insert random and banal act] is liable to death.” Even if you simply do not accept the words of Chazal and the sages of Israel throughout their generations on this subject, it is impossible to ignore the fact that all the moralists of the Jewish tradition attribute a very difficult and impossible judgment to God. How can we understand this?
- None of these are necessarily fatal. These are expressions that should be taken as metaphors, if at all.
- Even if the speaker thought it was a factual claim, the person who said all this could not know that this is indeed the case.
- You can’t always tell what is a significant sin and what is not. These are not moral sins but religious ones (Do you understand why desecrating the Sabbath requires death?).
- It also depends on the context. The various speakers also sometimes saw a problematic phenomenon around them, and in order to preach against it they used these descriptions. This does not necessarily mean that in their opinion this is the most serious sin.
We are accustomed to reading in the name of the pages of the prophecy that one book wrote (perhaps the Zohar) that whoever goes by the words "I will die in the morning without washing his hands is guilty of death," and the prophecy wrote next to it, "What are the things said when he killed the soul?"
And the fuel
What's the problem? If you did one of these common things that the one who commits them deserves death, then you later do one of the common things that the one who does them “remits all his sins”.
Your Honor, if I intend to take the Zohar seriously, really seriously, to the point where I call it the Holy Zohar, I must expect that it will not write things for nothing. In section 4 you suggested that it was just an educational method, so what educational method is it to tell someone who puts on tefillin in the turban (according to teachers of the law in Israel) that he deserves death? And if, as you say in section 3, we do not know the seriousness of each offense, then this only shifts the entire weight of the question to God (and makes the question worse). Why impose such punishments for things that seem so easy? Why plan the world in advance in such a bad way?
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