The Midrash of the Four Sons from a Philosophical and Logical Perspective: ‘Between One Who Serves God and One Who Has Not Served Him’ (Column 294)

Why does the rabbi constantly identify the is-ought problem with the naturalistic fallacy? The former is deriving a value from a fact, while the latter concerns the definition of the good…

I don’t identify them. I’ve commented in the past about the terminology, but that’s the accepted term for this problem.

1. Regarding education by the logical route: why don’t you include religious commitment as part of the first booklet? Then anyone who isn’t prepared to accept the logical leap is someone with whom nothing can be done anyway. And anyone who does accept it has presumably already discovered that he is a believer and may even be waiting for revelation. (I remember asking you this on the eve of Yom Kippur this year).
2. Maybe as a follow-up post the rabbi could write a bit more about how the logical leap and the naturalistic fallacy can be bridged. That is, how God’s will creates values. And why do they obligate? At least regarding the most basic value of gratitude, or whatever. I mean, not to explain why one should fulfill God’s will because He created you. But to set aside why one should listen to the one who created you; rather, why accept this basic value itself.
I don’t recall that you’ve written about this at length, only a little here and a little there, mostly that nothing can be done about it, and the wicked remains wicked or the deaf remains blind…
3. After reading this post, I don’t understand why the rabbi doesn’t like teaching Tanakh 😉.

I wanted to comment on the parallel the rabbi draws between “there is a divine command—therefore there is an obligation to fulfill the command” and the move “a certain act is moral—therefore there is an obligation to do it”: this is not an exact parallel, because to say “a certain act is moral” already includes, inherently, the conclusion “there is an obligation to do it” (*the definition* of the word “moral” is: an act that one is obligated to do). Even if one can say—with some justice—that a further step is still needed to connect “this is an act one is obligated to do” to actually doing it, in the sense of “it’s turtles all the way down,” that is different from “God commanded it,” which leads to “I must do it”; because if, for example, one conceives of God as just one more force operating in the world, there is no necessity to obey Him, just as if Herzl said something you don’t have to do it, and the gap between the premise and the directive is much greater. The more exact parallel would be, in my opinion, a move like “hitting someone causes pain” to “it is forbidden to hit.”

2. I didn’t understand what there is to explain here.
3. What does what I wrote here have to do with Tanakh? To the best of my judgment, this is not even the intention of the midrash, and certainly not the intention of the verses. This is an aggadic midrash I made on an aggadic midrash of Hazal.

Anyone who conceives of God as a force does not understand what God is. Anyone who understands what God is also knows that His commands are to be fulfilled.
Likewise, anyone who understands morality as an evolutionary construct does not understand what morality is. Anyone who understands what morality is understands that it is binding. The similarity to morality is complete.

A fairly side comment regarding the meaning of the prohibition of hametz and the obligation to eat matzah. It actually seems that the Torah sees the eating of matzah and the avoidance of hametz as something highly essential. In the Temple too there was no hametz (except for the two loaves). That is not accidental.
This is connected to the place of bread and the bread industry in Egypt at that time. Generally speaking, in Egypt of that period, bread-eating and the obsessiveness and intensity surrounding it had negative aspects in two senses: a truly idolatrous-cultic aspect, and an aspect of excessive gluttony and general indulgence (in contrast to the Exodus from Egypt, which included detachment from the corrupt culture of Egypt—“And He afflicted you and let you hunger, and fed you with manna…” The detachment from Egypt includes an element of deprivation, and I won’t elaborate). By the way, there is no difficulty in the fact that hametz was not forbidden all year long. It is the eating of matzah that “qualifies” the eating of hametz during the rest of the year, in the language of the Zohar: “the bread of healing.” This is said in that context, in the parable brought there (II 183). Matzah is a kind of medicine that makes it possible to eat hametz during the rest of the year.

If the rabbi has time and the subject interests him, then this lecture is very highly recommended in order to understand the background to the attitude toward hametz in the Bible from the historical context – https://youtu.be/gOhTHxNe224

3. This could also be done as aggadah on Tanakh portions.
In any case,
2. How is it that God’s wanting something turns it into something binding? If it is because of the will, then why is the will of an ordinary person not binding? Rather, perhaps you will say that it is not the will as such but the entity behind it. But the entity as an object may perhaps be necessary, unlike us (existent), yet still—how can one derive the ought from it?

That is exactly what I wrote there is no answer to. Whoever does not understand this cannot have it explained to him (and therefore, in my estimation, most people do understand it). That is exactly what I also referred to in the article on gratitude

Even if you are right, why are we obligated by this? For us, bread is really not an object of indulgence. They should have forbidden cakes. Historical explanations of this kind always seem dubious to me.

Ah, so when you say “a certain act is moral” the intention is “a certain act gives me a good feeling and that is merely an evolutionary construct”? In that case there really is no connection between the statement “a certain act is moral” and the conclusion “one should do it,” and again there is no connection between the examples. One can play here with definitions (what is “God” and what is “moral”), but it seems that for the sake of the total parallel there is no practical difference between your definition of “moral” and your definition of “God said” (that is, in both cases the meaning is “there is an obligation that is transcendent to man”), and then the parallel is nothing more than saying the same thing in different words.

You turn it into a definition outright, and then it becomes an empty tautology. That is what Chaim Perelman argues about claims like “you should do x because x is moral.” In his view this is a tautology. I see it as a synthetic a priori statement, not a definition.

The history that accompanies the explanation is only part of it—it is impossible to ignore the fact that in the Torah “matzah” and “hametz” have deep significance that goes far beyond the question of the Israelites’ menu on the fifteenth of Nisan. All the meal offerings in the Temple come as matzah except for two exceptional cases that the Torah takes pains to emphasize as unique. Matzah and hametz had meaning for the people of the period—the historical explanations are an attempt to understand that meaning, but one cannot deny its existence. The fact that the Israelites were commanded to eat matzot with the Passover sacrifice only strengthens this point. These are straightforward biblical meanings that cannot be ignored.

Exactly so; that was my claim from the outset—that the word “moral” by definition includes the meaning “one must do this,” and therefore in my view the parallel was problematic and it would have been better to find another parallel. In my opinion this differs from the parallel of “God said” and “one must do this,” because here the required bridge (the definition of “God” in this context) is much vaguer; on the other hand, once one defines God in the appropriate way, here too the leap disappears and becomes tautological, or almost tautological. In both cases the definition can already include the required bridge (and then in any case become tautological)—my claim is that in ordinary language, the word “moral” inherently includes the bridge for most people (there are not many people who would define “morality” as “something that gives me a good feeling in my belly and arose through natural selection”), whereas the word “God” does not, and therefore it would have been better to give a sharper example.

I don’t see what that proves. So what if hametz also has significance in the meal offerings? Maybe the meal offerings too are connected as a remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt… I don’t know.

2. Most people do understand this, but it sounds like as long as there is no rational basis for God being able to command whereas others cannot, there is no reason to heed that inner voice.

If so, there is no explanation for anything. Everything begins from primary intuitions. If they too require an explanation, this is empty skepticism.

That doesn’t sound right—the plain meaning of the Torah gives matzah and hametz an intrinsic significance, independently of the prohibition of hametz on Passover. It is hard to assume that every prohibition of hametz in offerings is a derivative of the historical story of the Exodus, and much more reasonable to assume that the connection is the reverse (again, especially in light of the fact that the Israelites were commanded to eat matzah with the sacrifice *before* they left Egypt). What exactly the nature of the connection is—that is already open to interpretation, and in my view every interpretation should also take into account the role played by bread, and especially leavened bread, in ancient Near Eastern culture; but the point of departure is that according to the plain sense of the Torah, there is almost no doubt that hametz and matzah have significance beyond the historical story. To my mind that is a clear and unequivocal plain meaning. And the rest—go and learn.

We are obligated in this because of the halakhic norm.
But when the Torah speaks about hametz and matzah, it assumes that this means something to the listeners, as emerges from the plain sense of the verses and from the scholarship on the period, as David noted.
And therefore the derashot about hametz as a symbol of pride and the like are not empty homilies. They express a conception that passed through the collective memory of the nation since the Exodus from Egypt. I’m not sure I would have said this were it not for the scholarship, but once the scholarship reached the conclusions it did regarding the place of hametz in ancient Egypt, the repeated derashot also become clear.
In any event, it seems to me that no Bible scholar would dispute the meaning of the prohibition of hametz and its clear connection to the Exodus—at least in broad outline. So that is a starting point from which we will need to solve the other problems.

As for your point that for us bread is not an object of indulgence. Again, the Torah wants us to eat bread (under the conditions it set—gifts to the poor and the like, which may also come as an antithesis to Egypt’s corrupt food culture), but that it not be given an excessive place. Therefore once a year it requires us to eat matzot. Exactly in the manner of inclining to one extreme in order ultimately to arrive at the middle path that Maimonides speaks about.

A few comments:

I think the answer to the wicked son, “blunt his teeth,” is the claim that he does not bridge between facts and obligations, and advances something like deterministic claims: everything is accidental, nothing obligates, and therefore the blunting of his teeth—and, as a result, his anger over this act—proves beyond any doubt that he does see the connection between the performer of the act and the consequences that follow from it. And after his teeth are blunted, he does see room for revenge against the one who struck him, and does not see it as a mere blunting that simply happened that way for no reason (if he believes that everything is matter, then there is no room to be angry at matter, and of course it plainly was not the matter that did this to him, but rather it simply happened).

As for the implications for serving God, what you wrote there in no. 3—
in my opinion there is no connection between the fact that the Holy One is present in each and every thing and the claim that I am supposed to infer from that some far-reaching conclusion. That is a factual matter: for physics to work, there has to be metaphysics. But what does seem apparently clear is that when there are exceptional things (not an interpretation of what is exceptional, but things that are a consensus, like corona and the like—even though they do not depart from the laws of physics like the splitting of the sea and the other plagues), it is still obvious that they contain a call to us. (Of course, if we say there is no metaphysics and everything operates by physiological laws, then there is no room for drawing conclusions, since mishaps can occur, like a bacterium reaching a person; even though Torah normatively it should not have happened, it certainly could happen, and it has gone beyond human control.)
Therefore it seems that a believing person, who holds that metaphysics means a higher power—which in simultaneous religious translation means the Creator of the world—then it is obvious that He wants to convey some message in unusual events (somewhat like Ramban in Parashat Bo regarding the open miracles, etc.).

It is also clear that the world is a world of difficulty, and not every tragedy or hardship can be interpreted by a person as to why it came, and so on. But as is known, the Gemara (I don’t remember where, or about whom it was told) about a person who was mauled by a lion at some distance from so-and-so, and he inferred that it was because of him—the point is that for a believing person, what happened does not serve as proof of God, but as a believer he must think about what is wanted from him.

“The assumption that everything that happens in the world is non-natural is a thesis without basis and without sense.”

That is not what supporters of divine involvement (99.9999% of believing Jews) say.
What they say is that there is a divine will that operates in the world. Not all the time.

The sweet taste I feel when I eat chocolate is apparently pure nature.

But the fact that I have a thought/memory exactly a few minutes before minhah time, to get up and pray—that is apparently divine will.
After that, the actual getting up to pray is my free choice following the divine will that gave me the initial push.

It is definitely possible to combine free will with divine involvement.
I still have not seen any serious explanation from the rabbi as to why this is impossible (that the divine will occurs at the RP stage, for example).

“To see the hand of God where there is no indication that it appears is irrational behavior”

What counts as an “indication”?

The rabbi, after all, holds that ultimately everything we see is explained by statistics.
That is, even if I myself were to experience the story of the “ride in Gedera,” in the rabbi’s view to think that this is the hand of God is idolatry.
Thousands of Jewish communities surviving independently in exile for 2,000 years,
as against almost no community of any other ancient people that survived in exile—that too is not an indication.
Operation Focus (the Six-Day War), which ended in an inconceivable victory of the people of Israel, in which the Arabs had an enormous quantitative and qualitative advantage over us—that is not an indication.

So that I should not suspect the rabbi of being a “tautologian” (forgive me, I do not know whether there really is such a word) of the “non-intervention” thesis,
I would be glad if the rabbi could give one example of an indication about which we could indeed say that the hand of God is involved.
I would truly be very grateful.

A suggested indication:
A. A strong and clear violation of the laws of nature, such as the splitting of Egypt

B. An advance prediction that clearly comes true, such as Moses’ threats to Pharaoh

Beautiful and insightful distinctions.
I wonder whether that one who does not know how to ask perhaps does not even understand the simple actions that we are doing. It may be that he understands the fact of the Exodus from Egypt (or not—that is not relevant), but it seems as though he does not even understand what they are doing right now in the Passover service, since we are speaking, for example, of a very small child. And one answers him generally, so that he understands: “These are actions corresponding to something that God did for us,” in a general way without details, as one answers a child.
According to your claim, it is not clear why the one who does not know how to ask is not placed after the wicked son; it sounds more like they proceed downward in level of understanding and knowledge, and in your view he knows more than the simple son. It seems that the last and lowest stage is the one who does not know how to ask, for whom one is actually commanded from the very beginning to “open for him.”

To Rabbi Michi, a kosher and joyous Passover.
1) Regarding the naturalistic fallacy in obeying God—it should be noted that there is another problem here, namely identifying the concept of “good” with the concept of “God.” Evidence for this can be seen in the fact that people who have the intuition of obedience to God also have the intuition that tells them that God could not command the performance of evil acts that have no good consequence whatsoever. For them this is contradictory. As opposed to people who do not have this intuition and hold that in principle it is entirely possible for God to command evil and that this is not a contradiction. It follows that what a person with the intuition of obedience has been educated to think is “good” determines the answer to the question “is it possible that God commanded this?” And as you said well in the article, we are channeled by our moral education to call specific things “good” or “bad.” If so, the intuition of obedience to God’s command and the intuition of moral “good” are one and the same. No distinction should be made, as you do. And there are many practical consequences to this.

2) In addition, I do not understand at all the puzzling statement “in a large majority of cases, one who is born in a religious home becomes religious and one who is born in a secular home becomes secular.” Nowadays the percentage of religious people (religious Zionists) who go secular is almost 50%. That is really not “a large majority of cases.” By contrast, the percentage of secular people who remain secular is 90%. And it is certainly more plausible to say that the direction of the flow is from the place where there is more “conditioning” to the place where there is less “conditioning,” and not the reverse. Those who drop out have decided and formed a position—and chose specifically to be secular. True, if we look at the Haredim, we will see that among them too over 90% remain Haredi. But how can one compare at all a public in which there is vast knowledge that one is forbidden to consume (under “heresy,” “the prohibition of modernity,” etc.), who marry off their children at a young age so that one cannot leave without a very heavy price, to the other sectors in which one can consume every kind of knowledge and truly make a decision, and one can choose a different lifestyle from the one in which one was educated with almost no consequences?

Hi Ofir,

A. An open and unmistakable miracle would severely undermine free choice in our day (especially in a materialistic world like ours).
How could a person not believe after seeing such things (as opposed to the past, when the concept of idolatry performing things above nature was possible and probably plausible). Likewise, Judaism does not hold that in our day we are supposed to see open miracles.

B. Prophecy does not exist in our day (at least not in the way it used to).

In short, if Judaism claimed that in our day we are supposed to see open miracles and that there are prophets who are supposed to predict them,
then the rabbi’s claims would be justified (because indeed we do not see open miracles and there are no prophets).

Therefore, in accordance with these two limitations, we will wait for the rabbi’s answer as to what he would want to accept as an “indication.”

Hello Rabbi,
Have you written about the question whether we live for the mitzvot or whether mitzvot are a framework for life?
And in general about the model of society you mentioned in the above answer.

If not—we would be happy to receive a detailed post, in the way you know how to write.
We will both agree that this is an essential point in a lifestyle with a religious outlook, and in any event an important topic to write about…

I recommend that you go over post 247, where the rabbi explains very well the dispute between a religious and a secular person about religion and so on (the main point of the post is about an argument between colleagues). The religious person has an advantage in the debate over the secular one, because he knows what secularity has—more precisely, what it does not have (that is, the religious person listened to the argument and nevertheless decided for his side). In contrast, for the secular person, the religious argument is something whose significance cannot be brought out in the debate; moreover, to understand the depth of religion you have to grow up there for several years, otherwise the nuances and codes will never penetrate you. Consequently, among secular people, most of whom do not really understand what religion is (and no one expects them to understand), there is no reason for them to change their way of life (in order to understand the religious person). Especially since in his short-sighted view religion is something primitive, not worth spending time on.
The phenomenon that exists in the religious-Zionist public stems from a lack of connectedness to religion—more accurately, from an almost perfect connection to secularity. Religion serves as a metaphor (not generalizing, but certainly among many who wear the knitted kippah, religion is folklore!!).

In summary:
1. To be religious with all the limitations but without the experiences is difficult, almost impossible, so fifty percent among the religious-Zionists is a success.
2. Secularity, besides being very comfortable (it is easier to live without religious restrictions), does not really listen to religion’s true arguments. (Studying Torah without the religious experience is like trying to explain to someone who has never experienced heat what heat is; through countless words it will not be conveyed as it is.)
3. The drop-off among religious-Zionists does not, for the most part, stem from thinking about divinity, but from difficulty with the challenges of religion. (The Gemara in Berakhot gives a parable about a father who placed his perfumed son at the entrance to brothels—what is the boy to do and not sin!).

If we define divinity as metaphysical, that means nature truly owes every last one of its tiny details to a higher power in order for it to function without glitches.
The fact that you conceive of divinity by comparison to yourself, and it sounds implausible to you that God would intervene for you in a cube of chocolate, is because you have an error at the root. God is not you in a more sophisticated form!
And to say that His intervention comes as a reminder to pray minhah is, in my opinion, no less implausible than your conception, perhaps even more so. That is, according to you, God follows things like the most bored of beings and reminds humanity about their choice for good or evil. That sounds absurd!!

If you do not believe, it certainly seems that only things like the splitting of the sea can serve as proof to the unbeliever that there is a Master of the universe.
By the way, history has proven that even those did not help the unbelievers, so perhaps that can teach us something about the self-interested factor in denial of divinity. After all, at the end of the day, it is binding. True, this sounds like a demagogic argument, but what can one do when reality is sometimes stronger than everything and one cannot deny the motives of human nature.

Dear Tam, you missed the point. Rabbi Michi used the “datum” that “most people born into family X remain X” in order to illustrate the “conditioning” claim and say that it can equally be made on both sides. I argued that this datum is simply not correct. I brought data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics showing otherwise. And I argued that the flow is toward the secular side. If we continue along the same philosophical line, then it is more plausible that the “conditioning” is actually found in religious society. You come and offer all kinds of psychological explanations for why this happens, etc., but that was not the issue. In addition, the statement that going secular “for the most part does not stem from thinking about divinity, but from difficulty with the challenges of religion” shows a basic unfamiliarity with the formerly-religious world. True, there are those who go secular simply because it is hard for them, but in a very large percentage of cases going secular comes בעקבות thought and arriving at the conclusion that the religious education they received is founded on error. Obviously, you can now say: “They merely found a philosophical excuse when the real reason is that it is hard for them,” but one can bring such deep psychological motivations to both sides; perhaps those who remain do so because it is convenient for them?

No. In my description, the one who does not know how to ask is the smallest and most initial one. But as stated, this is more homiletics than an interpretation that gets to the intention of the midrash itself.

The main points are written here. Maybe one day I’ll write a post.

1. In my opinion, a large majority of people do not have such an intuition. Many people who heard from me about normative duality (that the evil command is intended to achieve other values—not moral values but religious values, though no less important) admitted that this sits perfectly well with them (even better than their original view). The identification of the Holy One with the good stems, in most cases I think, from the fact that people are not aware of this option, and therefore it is obvious to them that the Holy One cannot command evil.
2. I am really not sure about the statistics. It sounds very exaggerated to me. I saw other statistics (mainly in the debate around the position paper of the LIBA organization). Perhaps the question is who was defined there in the statistics as religious.
Beyond that, there are impulses (it is more convenient to be secular, and the barriers to secularization have become much lower in recent years). Tam’s considerations are also relevant, because the numbers have to be weighed together with the non-ideological motives. A very easy and very convenient transition that is made by only 50% may perhaps be equivalent to a difficult transition made by 10%. And so on.

And let us say amen.

It has nothing to do with determinism. The claim is that he can recognize the hand of God and still not accept that normative obligations follow from that.
All the rest are just assertions. I of course do not accept them.

From personal acquaintance with these two societies, this seems very exaggerated to me (the data), since the concept of “going secular” or “formerly religious” is also not always well defined. Don’t forget that there are cases where a person openly throws off the kippah and it is not out of ideological conclusions but because he no longer feels connected / it is hard for him (and therefore in some cases he continues to keep basic things, and even regarding the light-religious, sloppy types who keep Shabbat but are complete secularists the rest of the week, I’m not sure they are not included in those surveys as having left). And don’t forget that every few years there is a wave of people returning to religion.
I’m not getting into psychological motives and saying that everyone who leaves does it out of convenience—but rather that in most cases, those who leave do so because they no longer feel connected, and not because they arrived at philosophical conclusions that there is no God.

Hi Tam,

First of all, it does not sound implausible to me that God would intervene in my chocolate cube; I simply don’t think that the divine will would do that, but technically of course it is possible. If there are reasons that the divine will would want to intervene beyond the natural way I experience the chocolate (for example, that it should taste sweeter to me so that I will be happier), then that too is possible.

In any case, we know that nature itself is entirely from God, so indeed every act of eating chocolate is in a certain sense from God, even if specifically the divine will plays no role here, but only nature.

The Holy One indeed tests kidneys and hearts, and apparently everything. Without getting into what exactly that phrase means, I remember once hearing a certain rabbi (I don’t remember who) say that a God who is understood and grasped in the human intellect cannot be God, and that is not what we believe in.
So perhaps there are things that seem implausible and illogical, but no one expects us to understand God completely.
I think that specifically to you it sounds implausible that God “reminds me” to pray minhah, because you do not really grasp what I mean when I say “divine will.”
You imagine some being sitting in heaven with some long white beard, following every single thought in the human brain, and that is what causes you to think this is absurd. That is really not what I mean when I say “the divine will,” but it is honestly hard for me to express what I mean when I say “the divine will,” beyond the change that occurs in my brain that reminds me to pray minhah.

Hello Tam,

Here I completely agree with you.
A person can see amazing miracles upon miracles and be influenced, but it will be entirely temporary.
The Israelites continued to complain in the wilderness after seeing the splitting of the sea, manna, the plagues of Egypt, etc.
Faith is first and foremost self-work on one’s character and ongoing speech with the Creator of the world.

But that is less important for our matter. What is important is to know what indication would give Rabbi Michi
faith/knowledge that there really is active divine involvement here.

Some statistical miracle?
Or does one really need to see an actual miracle in our own time, like the splitting of the sea?

Rabbeinu, how about a bit of lomdus and “Toyreh” in honor of the Festival of Matzot, for those who already know the theory of the naturalistic fallacy etc. from dozens of posts and booklets and classes that dealt with the subject? We loved Rashi’s approach in “be killed rather than transgress” with respect to theft.

For anyone interested, there are four “Towards Passover” classes in the video recordings here on the site. They were given on Zoom before this Passover. One of them is based on an article that you can also read, on the sciatic nerve and hametz on Passover.

?

Dear R. Ehud, not only did I not disagree with you in what you attacked me over—on the contrary, that is what I meant; perhaps I did not formulate it properly.
It is certainly obvious that a person cannot grasp what divinity is: “Had I known Him, I would have been Him.”

All in all, I wanted to relate to what you wrote: “the assumption that everything that happens in the world is non-natural is a thesis without basis and without sense,”
and what you wrote afterward, that in your opinion the divine will comes when you need to pray.

What I wanted to claim, and in that I agreed, is that whatever does or does not happen in the metaphysical realm, there is no way to know through the physical, and every speculation is ridiculous and meaningless. Anyone can throw out speculations as he sees fit. A believer in Yeshu, of course, will claim that he feels him when he needs to go to the place of their abominations. Likewise believers in ISIS and the like.

My main claim is that if and when you believe as a starting point that there is a Master of the universe, then apparently in things that are not routine there is some reason and purpose why they occurred, and they did not happen because of statistics. (This is not a way to prove divinity, but a way to serve divinity.)
Another point: I do not really understand what difference it makes whether the Holy One intervenes only in the splitting of the sea or in every action in nature, down to the sensation of sweetness in chocolate. After all, in the end it does not change your religious obligations one whit (even if your small mind cannot grasp the question of God’s knowledge together with free choice).

Hello Tam,

“****My main claim is that if and when you believe as a starting point that there is a Master of the universe, then apparently in things that are not routine there is some reason and purpose why they occurred, and they did not happen because of statistics*****”

Right, with that I completely agree. One can philosophize about the concept of “not routine,” but I won’t get into that now.

“***And what you wrote afterward, that in your opinion the divine will comes when you need to pray.****”

Not with everyone, and not always even with the same person, but only when God wants.
There are great rabbis whose desire to serve God is so great that no divine will is needed to lead them to prayer.
On the other hand, there are wicked people who have committed severe transgressions (“the wicked, even during their lifetime, are called dead”), and perhaps the Holy One will not help them to pray (unless they merit salvation). And perhaps this is what is meant when people say there are sins for which there is no repentance: even if a person has the desire, God will not aid him . . .

But again, it is important for me to emphasize something: I am not saying that the divine will always leads one to pray. That was just an example. Only when there is divine will for that or for anything else (for God’s own reasons). It is roughly like the fact that I do not always want to eat ice cream at 14:00 on a regular basis, even if it happened that way for three days in a row.
Why does God want?
It is impossible to know. We believe that God leads everything toward the good.
That is, the fact that God popped into my mind the thought to pray minhah on time may be because precisely my prayer was important in heaven in order to bring healing to the Jew who is now very ill, and he healed me in a previous reincarnation, and now there is some reason that if specifically I pray “heal us,” my blessing will come upon him . . .
Just an example . . .

“****I don’t really understand what difference it makes whether the Holy One intervenes only in the splitting of the sea or in every action in nature*****”

This Rabbi Michi explains in his book (“No Man Has Power over the Wind”), and here I agree with him.
If every single thing in nature is really divine will, every leaf that falls from a tree, every tiniest gust of wind, every . . .
then what, exactly, is the meaning of the laws of nature?

In summary, I say the following:
1. There is nature (the laws of physics).
2. There is human free will, which is above the laws of nature.
3. There is divine will, which is above the laws of nature and above man.

All integrated together, of course.
That is, if someone now performs a mitzvah, that does not affect only some “higher metaphysical-mystical world,” but also affects this world here, even if indeed one cannot see that effect scientifically/empirically.

Rabbi Michi, unlike me, thinks that there is no divine will (divine involvement) in our day. He says he does not see it.
Likewise, there are mitzvot that in his view do not affect this world here, but only on the metaphysical plane—for example, Torah study.
According to him, it does not affect here. May the Merciful One save us.

My friend Ehud, you quoted a rabbi, so allow me also to quote a rabbi . . . and a few Gemaras.
The Ramban at the end of Parashat Bo (13:16) explains the importance of remembering the section, and the reason for most mitzvot established in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt:
“And now I will tell you a general principle regarding the reason for many commandments. Since the days of Enosh, when idolatry came into the world, opinions in matters of faith began to be corrupted: some deny the principle and say that the world is eternal; they denied the Lord and said, ‘He is not’ [Jer. 5:12]; others deny His particular knowledge and said, ‘How does God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?’ [Ps. 73:11]; and others admit knowledge but deny providence, making man like the fish of the sea, such that God does not supervise them and there is no punishment or reward for them; they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land.’ And when God desires a community or an individual and performs for them a wonder by changing the custom of the world and its nature, the nullification of all these false opinions becomes clear to everyone. For the wondrous miracle teaches that the world has a God who created it anew, who knows, supervises, and is able. And when that miracle is decreed in advance by the mouth of a prophet, there is thereby made clear also the truth of prophecy, that God speaks with man and reveals His secret to His servants the prophets, and with this the whole Torah is established.
Therefore Scripture says concerning the signs: ‘so that you may know that I am the Lord in the midst of the earth’ [Ex. 8:18], to teach providence, that He did not abandon it to chance, as they think. And it says [ibid. 9:29], ‘so that you may know that the earth is the Lord’s,’ to teach creation, for they are His, who created them from nothing. And it says [ibid. 9:14], ‘so that you may know that there is none like Me in all the earth,’ to teach ability, that He rules over all and none can stay His hand; for in all this the Egyptians denied or doubted. Thus the great signs and wonders are faithful witnesses to faith in the Creator and in the whole Torah.
And because the Holy One, blessed be He, will not perform a sign and wonder in every generation before the eyes of every wicked person or heretic, He commanded us that we should always make a remembrance and a sign of what our eyes saw, and transmit the matter to our children, and their children to their children, and their children to the last generation. And He was very strict in this matter, as He imposed karet for eating hametz [Ex. 12:15] and for neglecting the Passover sacrifice [Num. 9:13], and He required that we write everything that was shown to us through signs and wonders upon our hands and between our eyes, and further to write it on the doorposts of our houses in mezuzot, and that we mention it with our mouths morning and evening, as they said [Berakhot 21a], ‘True and firm’ is biblical, from what is written [Deut. 16:3], ‘so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt all the days of your life,’ and that we make a sukkah every year.
And similarly many commandments like these are in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. And all of this is so that we should have in every generation testimony to the wonders, so that they not be forgotten, and so that the denier should have no opening to deny faith in God. For one who buys a mezuzah for one zuz and affixes it to his doorway and intends its meaning has already acknowledged the creation of the world, the Creator’s knowledge and providence, and also prophecy, and has believed in all the foundations of the Torah, besides acknowledging that the Creator’s kindness is very great toward those who do His will, who brought us out of that slavery to freedom and great honor in the merit of their fathers who desired the fear of His name.”

The Ramban concludes there:
“And from the great, publicized miracles a person comes to acknowledge the hidden miracles, which are the foundation of the entire Torah, for a person has no portion in the Torah of Moses our teacher until we believe that in all our affairs and happenings they are all miracles; there is no nature or ordinary course of the world in them, whether with the public or the individual. Rather, if one performs the commandments, his reward will make him succeed; and if he transgresses them, his punishment will cut him off—everything by decree of the Most High, as I have already mentioned [Gen. 17:1; Ex. 6:2]. And the hidden miracles become publicized in the case of the many when there come the Torah’s promises concerning blessings and curses, as Scripture says [Deut. 29:23–24], ‘And all the nations shall say: Why has the Lord done thus to this land? . . . And they shall say: Because they forsook the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers’—so that the matter should become known to all the nations that it is from the Lord in punishing them. And it says concerning fulfillment [Deut. 28:10], ‘And all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the Lord is called upon you, and they shall fear you.’ I will explain this further, with God’s help [Lev. 26:11].”

The Ramban teaches us something new: that the ultimate purpose of everything is to believe in the hidden miracles as well, which are also effected by the Holy One. That is an additional reason why the Holy One does not perform a miracle in every generation and for every individual: in order to place before humanity the challenge of recognizing His providence and governance in the natural world.
It is brought in the Gemara, Shabbat 53b:
“Our Rabbis taught: An incident occurred with a certain man whose wife died and left him a son to nurse, and he did not have wages to pay a wet nurse. A miracle was performed for him and breasts like a woman’s breasts opened for him, and he nursed his son. Rav Yosef said: Come and see how great this man is, that such a miracle was done for him! Abaye said to him: On the contrary, how inferior is this man, that the order of creation was changed for him!”
The point of disagreement between the sages is whether there is an advantage to one for whom a miracle is performed, or the opposite—how inferior is that person, since nature too is a hidden miracle; and if the Holy One performs a miracle for him, it implies that He does not trust him to recognize His providence, blessed be He, when He gives him sustenance by the natural route.
They said in the Gemara, Pesahim 118a:
“Rabbi Yohanan said: A person’s sustenance is more difficult than redemption. For concerning redemption it is written [Gen. 48], ‘the angel who redeems me from all evil’—an angel, merely; whereas concerning sustenance it is written [ibid.], ‘the God who shepherds me.’ A person’s sustenance is more difficult than the splitting of the Red Sea.”
And Rashi explained there: “The practical difference is that one should pray for it,” for certainly it is not difficult for the Holy One to perform miracles or give sustenance. The difficulty is on our side: to exert ourselves in prayer and in faith that He has it in His power to give food to all His creatures. And that is more difficult than the splitting of the sea, which is an open miracle and everyone feels that the Holy One performed the miracle.
Likewise see Berakhot 5b:
“Four hundred barrels of Rav Huna’s wine turned sour. Rav Yehudah the brother of Rav Sala the Pious entered before him, and the Rabbis; and some say Rav Adda bar Ahavah and the Rabbis. They said to him: Let the master examine his deeds. He said to them: Am I suspected in your eyes? They said to him: Is the Holy One, blessed be He, suspected of exacting judgment without justice? He said to them: If anyone has heard anything against me, let him say it. They said to him: Thus have we heard, that the master does not give vine-shoots to his sharecropper. He said to them: Does he leave anything of mine? He steals it all from me! They said to him: This is what people say: Whoever steals from a thief tastes the taste of theft. He said to them: I accept upon myself that I will give it to him. Some say: Then the vinegar turned back into wine; and some say: The vinegar became expensive and was sold at the price of wine.”
And the point of dispute regarding the salvation he merited after his repentance is whether it is preferable for one that a miracle be performed for him—in which case the vinegar turned into wine—or whether salvation by the natural route is preferable, and therefore it is better to say that the vinegar became more expensive and was worth the price of wine.

Let everyone make his own calculations, when there is a dispute among the great authorities as to whom it is more correct to heed . . . and enough said.

1) Rabbi Michi, a command that causes something bad but sustains religious values—what does that even mean? You yourself admitted in the (excellent) interview with Dr. Roi Yuzevitch that you definitely believe that ultimately every divine command somehow causes good. As I understand it, this is connected to the fact that the very concept of “value” cannot be detached from “good.” Therefore, the attempt to say that there exists an action that causes evil but is nevertheless valuable is very strange. In addition, can this belief (that every command causes good) somehow stand the test of the critical scrutiny whose importance you repeatedly emphasize? How much suffering would some command have to cause before we agree that it cannot be a value and probably was not given by God? (It is impossible to deny the tight connection between the concepts “good and evil,” “value,” and “suffering.” A person who sees value in equality cannot simultaneously hold that equality causes suffering.)
2) This is also addressed to “Rational (relatively)”: I never disputed the existence of sociological and psychological motives that cause going secular. I am only saying that with regard to the “conditioning” claim that appears in the post, in light of the data one cannot say that this is a balanced relation and be surprised that the conditioning claim is said only about the religious. The flow is mostly one-directional, and therefore philosophically to make the claim against the religious (whose conditioning turns out not to be especially successful) seems more justified. In addition, Rabbi Michi, if you permit me to quote you from post 36: “This reminds me of the parable I have already used more than once, regarding a ba’al teshuvah. His secular friends attribute his step to some crisis or other. That is, they look at the matter from the psychological angle. By contrast, his new friends, the religious ones, explain that he discovered the light and the truth. They analyze it on the philosophical plane. And lo and behold, when a person goes secular, his religious friends explain his step by saying that he wanted to permit sexual immorality to himself. That is, they now take hold of the branch of psychology, whereas his secular friends explain that he understood the foolishness of his previous path; i.e., they have become philosophers.”
We are now engaged in a philosophical discussion, and your necessary conclusion in that same post says: “There is no reason at all to deal with the psychological plane. It is relevant only to the psychologist who may be asked to help that young man. For us, as other people who speak with him and judge him and his path, only the philosophical plane is relevant.”

Mr. Seidler, does Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise cause you to stop moving?!
What I mean is: not everything that cannot be explained on the philosophical level is a reason to draw conclusions. One has to look reality in the face in a rational and practical way. Yes, it is easier to live free from the mitzvot than with the restrictions of the mitzvot (again, when there is no connection, i.e., mere conditioning). Any philosophizing about it is throwing sand in people’s eyes.

Mr. Tam, you are welcome to direct that pointed question also to the rabbi who wrote post 36 (a post worth reading). But it is unrelated both there and here.

1. Not only is it possible to deny this, but I do deny it. In my view there is no necessary connection between moral good and general good. Spiritual improvement of the world is not necessarily connected to morality.
2. I did not understand the comment from post 36. In a philosophical discussion there really is no point in dealing with psychology.

Hi Ohad,

A. At the beginning of your remarks you explain that an open miracle would leave no room for free choice, and in the following response you agreed with Tam that one can choose to deny even in the face of an open miracle—there is a contradiction here…

B. Agreed that prophecy does not exist nowadays—that is exactly the point

What form is that spiritual improvement supposed to take? Can your belief that these actions have some kind of good consequences stand any kind of critical test? If we remain with such vague concepts, then in principle we can justify injustices and evil under the claim that this is “spiritual improvement.”

Dear Mr. Seidler, I will join your claim, and let us take as an example the wife of a priest who was raped, whom one is obligated to divorce.

You can assume that if I had any idea, I would tell you.
If the assumption is that the Holy One is good, then the necessary conclusion is that there is some spiritual improvement here. Whoever does not accept that is, of course, exempt from that conclusion.

Mo’adim lesimhah! Regarding the wicked son.
A. The point that he is hurling a challenge and not expecting an answer is also hinted at in his question—“And it shall be when your children shall say to you,” whereas elsewhere it says, “your son shall ask you.”
B. There is a question why the Torah establishes that we must answer even the wicked son (“And you shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Passover”), while the midrash instructs otherwise—to blunt his teeth. I thought to say, and now with the explanation in the article the matter is sharper for me, that the Torah’s answer is in the time of the Temple (“And you shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Passover”)—a period in which there is prophecy and not only wisdom. In such a state the concern arising from the wicked one’s words is not so great, because there is a channel of connection to faith not by way of intellectual understanding. But in the period of exile the midrash holds that one must react forcefully to such statements (a philosophical disconnect between God and the mitzvot), because there is much greater danger in a world where faith arrives only through wisdom.
C. I understand what the difference is between saying that the mitzvot are the reason in the “mystical” context, but I did not understand the difference between saying that the reason is the Exodus and the mitzvot are the result, and the simplistic connection you presented. According to both, the main thing is to remember the Exodus and not that there is special significance to the manner in which it is done.

1) And in what sense, according to the assumption, is the Holy One good? Are we talking about a kind of moral good or spiritual good?
2) You assume that God is good, and therefore you infer (rightly) that there must be some kind of improvement as a result of His mitzvot. But when you looked at the world, you did not see improvement (within the framework of moral good), so instead of abandoning one of your assumptions (that God is good, or that the laws in our hands are His commandments), you invented a vague and unfalsifiable concept of “spiritual improvement.” Perhaps you are not very different from the Haredim whom you criticized in post 290…

1) Both. But for our purposes, if He is morally good, then when there are mitzvot that do not aim at morality, the conclusion is that they are founded on other values (religious values, not moral ones). From this the conclusion follows that He also demands spiritual perfection and not only moral perfection. Now you can call Him morally perfect as well as spiritually perfect.
2) I have explained more than once that one’s point of departure dictates the theses one will adopt. Indeed, I assume that He is good, and I also see that He strives for good. But I see that His Torah contains additional mitzvot, and therefore I infer that He has additional goals. If you call that Haredi, then I am Haredi. In my view I am being logical, whether that is Haredi or not.

Sweet Seidler, it seems that you are being disingenuous. After all, the concept of good is a matter subject to dispute. Even consensual good is a social conception, and this can change after a number of years as society progresses (once they did not see slavery as something bad, for example).
If I understand correctly, the rabbi means spiritual good, that is, absolute good, and only the One who created the world can determine what absolute good is, even if you do not fully grasp His mind. And that is what is called spiritual good.
(At first I thought the rabbi meant tangible good here in this world.)
2. The assumption that He is good is because otherwise why did He create me—to harm me?!

Dear Tam (and sweet?),
I do not know whether Seidler is sweet or not, but I do not see any connection to the discussion with him. That was an unnecessary and condescending form of address.
As for the matter itself, you are mistaken. I mean spiritual good that is not connected to morality. Morality, in my view, does not change. What changes are conceptions of morality in different places and times, but there is only one morality, and in my estimation we are getting closer to it as the generations pass. Spiritual good deals with values of another kind, not moral values. A value such as the sanctity of the priesthood, which has no moral implication, neither absolute nor relative. And yet it is a value in some religious and spiritual sense.

I accept the criticism (the smell of condescension came as a response to what seemed to me a pathetic attempt to squeeze another word out of the rabbi about the Haredim, maybe another distancing from them, but indeed the criticism is in place).

As for the substance, if spiritual good has no implications, then seemingly it would have been more correct not to call it good but right. Like the sanctity of the priesthood, which is spiritually right. The term good is misleading in my opinion.
Regarding your statement that we are drawing closer to morality as the generations pass, this is subject to dispute. What in the eyes of the religious person is moral is perceived in the eyes of the free person as immoral. Were the instructions in the Torah intended for certain periods in humanity? As with the example I brought from slavery, that seems less likely to me. And to say that true morality can be more than what is written in the Torah also does not seem likely to me, especially since things that are not subject to change, like eating meat—which is not an obligation—will remain with us, such as circumcision. Shall we say that it is immoral but we perform it for lack of choice, because it is spiritually right (good)?

Does the intention mean that there were things that the Holy One could not foresee? Or that this was not the main goal, but the knowledge did in fact exist?
The question is about the rabbi’s phrase “were not planned in advance.”

To Tam,
A very apt question in your previous message (“the assumption that He is good, because otherwise why did He create me—to harm me?!”)—10 points to the philosophy teacher. Indeed, the implication of an evil god is that He created you in order to harm you. I recommend a nice thought exercise of turning statements like “the nature of the good is to do good” and “He created His world to do good to His creatures” into their opposite statements: “the nature of evil is to do evil” and “He created His world so that His creatures should suffer in it.” And lo and behold, they are equivalent (and on the face of it, a neutral god is preferable). As for “even consensual good is a social conception,” I already addressed that in my first message here (what a person is educated to think is good, etc.), and on the contrary—that is the basis of my question. After all, you call God “good” when what is meant is good in terms of your social concepts, etc.
P.S. There was no “pathetic attempt” to squeeze out a word about the Haredim. It was just a wink.

To Rabbi Michi,
Now you have really confused me. If at first I thought there was one plane on which I disagreed with you, now it turns out from your words that there are two. First, the idea that there is some ideal of morality toward which we are constantly striving and progressing seems very strange to me. To speak in the terminology of modal logic—I can certainly conceive of possible worlds in which morality develops differently and in entirely different directions. (And there is no need to go so far. Many books have been written about the differences in our own world between Chinese morality and Western morality.)
Second, the idea of acts that sustain “spiritual values,” to which you insist on attaching the word “good,” still seems very strange to me. There is no way to test their goodness or their effect, and they do not stand up to critical scrutiny. Is that not problematic in your eyes at all? And if you answer me in a naming fashion, “that is the thing I call good”—there is no thing here that can be pointed to at all, so it is not clear to me how you can say that.

Let me clarify once again, although the matter has already been clarified several times in the past.
My claim is that there are two kinds of values in the Torah: moral values and religious values. I also claim that halakhah, even in its “moral” sections, deals only with the second type. But the Torah (in its non-halakhic part) expects from us the first type as well (for example by force of “and you shall do what is right and good,” which is not counted in the enumeration of the 613, and more).
Religious values are norms that come to achieve spiritual and religious benefit (holiness), and not moral benefit (=repair of society). You can call this “good,” “proper,” “truth,” or whatever you like. This is semantics, and there is no point in nitpicking over it. But it is not connected to moral values, which are measured in terms of moral “good.”
Beyond that, I also claim, independently of the general discussion here (I only remarked on it here because of Tam), that in my opinion morality is objective. That is, the fact that there are several moral systems among human societies and people in the world is an empirically true fact. But that does not mean they are all right. I claim that there is an objective and binding morality; it is just that there are disputes about what it says. I also claim that over the course of history the world is getting closer to that objective system (as with the progress of scientific knowledge). This does not mean that every moral question necessarily has only one correct answer. There may be questions that have several correct answers. But there is still incorrect morality. Not everything that a group of people thinks (even if their intentions are good) is correct morality.
That is my view. One can of course argue about different parts of it, but that does not belong here.

B. Possible.
C. I did not understand the question. I distinguished between a thesis according to which those specific mitzvot were planned in advance, and history was built in order that we reach them (this is the mystical explanation), and the thesis that there was no specific thing that was planned in advance; what was planned was only that there would be mitzvot following the events. That is all.

Tam,
The question whether the Holy One foresaw them or not is not important. I was not dealing with that. My claim is that this was not necessarily His purpose. He may perhaps also foresee that a person will desecrate Shabbat (in my view probably not), but that does not mean that desecrating Shabbat was His plan from the outset.

The education of a child, religious or secular, is programming and conditioning in the strictest sense of the word. In computer science the concepts are known: software, hardware, and firmware. In terms of flexibility for change, firmware lies in the middle between software, which is very easy to change, and hardware, which cannot be changed. Firmware is physically burned onto the hardware component, and it is much harder to change. In this sense, the education of a child, especially in his early years (say until bar mitzvah), is not merely software-like but firmware-like; it is physically burned onto the hardware of his human brain. After that, flexibility for firmware changes decreases. This is why many of those who leave religion still refrain from eating pork or are unwilling to throw a Bible into the fire; that is the firmware. For my young child, lighting Hanukkah candles will be a familiar, understandable, natural act, but decorating a Christmas tree will be something alien, distant, and not really clear what it is about. A figure wrapped in tallit and tefillin will be fixed in the depths of his consciousness as a normal and belonging sight, but an Indian chief adorned with feathers will at most be a Purim costume. He will not look at waving a lulav and various fruits and vegetables on Sukkot in the same way that he would look at a shamanic ritual. Everything will evoke different feelings in him, because he absorbs all these things from age zero. And this is not only about esoteric practices. All the basic concepts are etched into his brain from age zero—specifically these and not others, specifically the God of the Bible and not the God of Spinoza. If this is not conditioning, then what is? How else does one condition a child if not in this way? And this is true (generally, with a few fine distinctions) also of secular education. It has no connection to the question of which system is correct and which is not; the correctness of the method is irrelevant. It is obvious that the years of education simply condition and normalize the child into the system. To claim otherwise stems mainly from the need to retreat to a comfort zone.

I understand that this is a statement to the press? I wrote against this position. Of course you may disagree, but I do not see any new arguments here.

I began reading the first book in the trilogy, and my wife “snatched” it from me, so I had to move on to the second. After reading most of it over the holiday, I found that the verse had been fulfilled in me: “For they have driven me out this day from being joined to the inheritance of the Lord” (= “the first existent”), “saying, Go, serve other gods” (= “thin theology”) (I Samuel 26:19), and now I am worried about what awaits me in the third book…

Although I have no pretensions as a logician, I found that your book (at least most of what I read) is full of logical fallacies like a pomegranate, and perhaps I will write about that on another occasion. Here I wish to focus on the “driving out” to serve “other gods,” in connection with this post, and even that briefly. Yet my brief response will in any event be incomplete if I do not mention at all your view that we do not derive the principles of morality from the Torah, which in my opinion is utterly mistaken. True, you are not original in this view (many years ago I read an article by Rabbi Lichtenstein in which he argued that even the Holy One is subject to absolute moral values; I do not remember where it was published), but for the sake of brevity I will suffice with a very short remark: both in the above-mentioned book and in your response to Seidler, you mention the verse “and you shall do what is right and good.” I once attended an event at which Yeshayahu Leibowitz shouted hoarsely and with a red face that this was a distortion and an illegitimate reading of the Torah, etc. I am far from being his devotee (I knew him well), but accept the truth from whoever says it. Indeed, the correct citation is “And you shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the Lord” etc. (Deut. 6:18). Also in the words of the prophets, when they come to assess the deeds of a king, they emphasize that the criterion is “what was right in the eyes of the Lord” or “what was evil in the eyes of the Lord.” Omitting the words “in the eyes of the Lord” and the edifice you build on this distorted quotation is truly outrageous.

According to your view, one who does not infer the “bridging principle” is wicked and there is nothing to discuss with him. (Should his teeth be blunted?) It may be that in the world of Hazal you are right. That is a world in which there is interaction between man and his God, even after prophecy ceased. God supervises the world, takes an interest in what happens in it, and cares what human beings do in it. In such a world, there is sense in serving God. Note well: the sense is not because of hope for reward or fear of punishment, but because this is indeed the service of God—as the service of a king before him in his palace. By contrast, in the world you describe, “God has forsaken the land” and gone off to amuse Himself with His angels somewhere beyond the galaxies. This is a world akin to a palace the king has abandoned, cut off contact with, and does not even phone. What value and meaning does serving the king have in such a palace? So what if he built the palace and commanded how to behave in it? Why is that of any interest once the king abandoned his palace, moved to live in another palace, and leaves every demon and Ashmedai free to rampage in the abandoned palace and destroy every pleasant corner of it, as it is said: when the cat’s away, the mice might play. What moral value is there in serving such a king? If God has forsaken the land because of a “policy change,” there is no moral obstacle whatsoever to our forsaking Him.

Indeed, you probably sensed this, and in your book you explain that God left the land because “we matured” and no longer need His daily guidance, etc. Come now, really. You reject God’s intervention in the world because you do not sense it; and do you sense humanity’s “maturity”? True, in the last 500 years humanity has advanced greatly on the scientific and technological plane, but alongside this progress can you really say that humanity has also advanced in the spiritual dimension? On the contrary, it seems to me that anyone who does not shut himself up in the four cubits of philosophizing will sense that the opposite is true. Religion has lost its standing in the world, atheism is flourishing, along with all sorts of evil ideologies, and in recent decades decadent ideologies, materialistic lustfulness, animalistic hedonism, postmodernism, political correctness, and armfuls of nonsense. (You yourself have criticized some of these phenomena on this very holy site.) Humanity has matured? Perhaps too much, and has already entered the dementing stage. If “God’s ways are hidden” is “apologetics,” then “we matured” is…

Your claim about “and you shall do what is right and good in the eyes of the Lord” is in no way relevant. I also claim that right and good are only in the eyes of the Lord. The fourth talk of vol. 3 is devoted to that. But what is right and good is not mitzvot but morality. And the content of morality is not learned from this verse. Especially note that it is counted in the enumeration of the mitzvot. The claim that I built an edifice on omitting those words means simply that you either did not read, or your logic is in a state such that your introductory remarks are very encouraging to me. From my limited acquaintance with you here on the site, I incline to the first possibility.

The question in the second section is nonsense, obviously (again one of the two possibilities above), and you yourself point to one aspect of it in the section that follows.

In the argument in that section I disagree with you entirely. But that is indeed a different discussion. You did not raise arguments here, only general assessments, and it is hard to discuss them.

It is obvious that the question is nonsense, since it explicitly emerged from the Master’s keyboard that it is nonsense. (Q.E.D. And what is he teaching us?)

Presumably the argument in the section after it is also nonsense, since the Master disagrees with me entirely. (Q.E.D. And what is he teaching us?)

But what then? I only wrote a talkback, whereas his honor in his holy book heaps up “general assessments” in the style of “we matured,” “the world does not need” divine intervention, “we have been weaned” from “childish dependence,” etc. In another chapter of the above-mentioned holy book, his honor repeats again and again the “fact” that “nobody changed his mind because of the Bible,” and in at least one place even emphasizes “rest assured” of this. Nowhere in that above-mentioned holy book (that is, in the two thirds I have managed to read so far) does his honor refer to empirical studies, statistics and the like that substantiate this claim, whereas in earlier chapters his honor pours scorn on belief in providence on the grounds that there are no empirical findings supporting it and, in general, that it is “not scientific” in the Popperian sense (and I read and did not understand—so what?).

You are forced to say, then, that from the fact that the Master said “rest assured,” the matter is grounded theoretically, empirically, and logically, and the words are as joyous as when they were given at Sinai; and whoever senses otherwise is nothing but wicked, a denier, and a heretic, with nonsense in his mouth and on his keyboard. (Obvious. Q.E.D. And what is he teaching us?)

With God’s help, 26 Nisan 5780

The son who asks, “What are the testimonies, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord our God has commanded?” assumes that there is here a system of divine commandments intended to guide the individual and the nation, and he seeks to understand their content and purpose. He receives the answer in the story “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt” (Deut. 6); there he receives the definition of the purpose: “And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, to keep us alive, as at this day.” The goal is to be God-fearing, worthy of divine good and eternal life—“service for the need of the ordinary one.”

By contrast, the son who asks, “What is this service to you?” assumes in his question that “service is for the need of the Most High”—that there is here some sort of labor by a worker who brings benefit to his employer, and in return the employer pays him his wages. He sees the bringing of the Passover sacrifice, and about this he wonders: “What is this service to you?” Is this what one gives to the great God—a little lamb in its first year, most of which is eaten by the members of the group themselves? Is this “service” to God or service to ourselves? We are giving God almost nothing; we are just “having a barbecue” for our own enjoyment.

Against this provocation—“And it shall be when they shall say,” not “ask”—the Torah instructs us to answer: “It is the sacrifice of the Passover unto the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses.” God does not need our “giving,” for everything is His. What God needs is us: that we acknowledge His kindness and love and rejoice together with Him—and this is the greatest “gift” we can give Him, the “togetherness” of all of us, our gathering to be a “company of servants of God.”

If “service” is measured by the value of the “giving” to the Most High, then the connection to the collective only disturbs the individual, who in seclusion might attain much higher levels of spiritual elevation. Therefore the provocative son grumbles, “to you and not to Him,” “your service is beneath me.”

And we answer him: “Had he been there, he would not have been redeemed.” According to your way of thinking, God should have chosen for His service the developed and cultured Egyptian people, not some wretched band of slaves. But His thoughts are not your thoughts. He rejected the proud Egyptians and chose precisely the poor people as His nation, for they are better able to approach their God out of humility, which binds “the great together with the small.”

With blessing, Shatz

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… all our days, to keep us alive, as on this day …

With God’s help, 11 Iyar 5780

Both hametz and matzah have a side of the “naturalistic fallacy.” Hametz has the factual advantage that it tastes better. But matzah too has a factual advantage—it is more natural. Who is more justified on the normative plane?

It seems that, as in most disputes, both are right. For the Torah that forbade hametz with the full severity of the law on Passover—it is itself what permits it at the end of the counting of the Omer, and not only permits it but even commands that an offering be brought from it to the Lord!

In order to receive Torah properly one needs both aspects. On the one hand, absolute devotion to the will of the Creator, expressed by matzah; and on the other hand, in order to develop the Torah and derive conclusions from it even for new situations, a person must understand its reasons in depth, know how to rise above what appears at first glance, and therefore one must “let the law ferment” in order to bring it out correctly.

When we internalize that our absolute point of departure is to do purely the will of God without the “leaven in the dough,” then the path opens before us to create an “alignment of intentions” and to absorb God’s will also by means of our intellect.

With blessing, Shatz

With God’s help, 26 Nisan (the day of the death of Joshua son of Nun), 5780

Those two aspects of Torah—acceptance without reservation and constant innovation—parallel the “face of Moses” as against the “face of Joshua.” Moses expresses the absolute acceptance of the word of God. When Moses stands before a doubt, he turns to hear “what the Lord will say.” By contrast, for Joshua this way was already closed. Upon him and his successors devolves: “This book of the Torah shall not depart from your mouth, and you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it; for then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have success.”

When you stand firm upon the solid foundation laid for you by your teachers and predecessors in the chain of transmitters of the Torah, then you will merit to innovate true novelties—like the moon, whose light is entirely received from the sun’s light, yet it is constantly renewed, every day and every hour, and has the power to illuminate even in states of darkness and fog, and in them to reach a clear conclusion.

With blessing, Shatz

It may be summarized that the problem of the “wicked son,” who provocatively asks “What is this service to you?”, was diagnosed by Hazal not as opposition to the yoke of the commandments. What distinguishes him is that he “excluded himself from the collective,” and thereby, the sages say, “it is as though he denied the fundamental principle.”

From the wording “as though he denied,” it follows that he is not actually one who denies the fundamental principle. He believes that there is a God and wants to serve Him, but in his own way, not with the collective. The “wicked” one of the Haggadah is the one who “separates from the ways of the community,” who, as Maimonides defined it, does not participate with the community in the performance of the commandments and does not identify with the fate of the community: he does not grieve with them in their distress and does not rejoice with them in their joy. And of him the sages say that his detachment from the community is regarded as detachment from God.

On this basis I explained his question, “What is this service to you?” as contempt for the service of the community. He provokes them: What you are doing is not “the service of God,” so “what have I to do with you”—you and your service of God are beneath me.

From such “righteous people,” who separated from the ways of the community, despised their service of God, and built idealistic sects of their own, Christianity grew—beginning as excessive punctiliousness in commandments between man and his fellow and ending in a complete casting off of both the faith of unity and the practical commandments. And their teeth, the sages taught, are to be blunted with full force.

With blessing, Shatz

The answer that the Torah proposes to the question “What is this service to you?” also emphasizes God’s love for His people: “who passed over the houses of the children of Israel when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses.” The Israelites of that generation were in a very low spiritual state and were not very different from their Egyptian neighbors, and nevertheless the Lord had compassion on them and saved them from destruction.

For a person who feels himself more righteous than everyone else, the sages found no remedy other than “to blunt his teeth.” But for one who is prepared to connect with his people in their service of God—there is hope, and even if he “has sunk into the forty-nine gates of impurity,” since he chose to bind his fate to that of his people, the Lord has compassion on him and redeems him.

Precisely Rabban Gamliel, the great fighter for distancing the sectarians, is the one who emphasizes that one is obligated to say the Torah’s answer to the wicked son: “It is the sacrifice of the Passover unto the Lord, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel when He smote the Egyptians and delivered our houses.” The recognition of God’s love for His people is what gives the hope of being redeemed.

With blessing, Shatz

With God’s help, the night after Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day, 5780

Between the brother who asks, “What are the testimonies, statutes, and ordinances that the Lord our God commanded you?” and the brother who provocatively asks, “What is this service to you?” there is and should be a sharp spiritual struggle, and there are situations in which one must “blunt the teeth” that bite. But before discerning the abyssal difference, there comes the understanding that the Torah speaks “to all four,” does not despair of anyone, and tries to find the fitting response that will restore their turbulent souls, and perhaps bring about a renewal of brotherhood.

It is worth mentioning two examples from the days of the Holocaust in which great things were accomplished through cooperation between movements between which, in ordinary times, there prevailed severe ideological rivalry.

Thus in Slovakia there arose the “Working Group,” in which the sharply anti-Zionist Haredi Rabbi Weissmandl worked together with Gisi Fleischmann, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement, and together they did much to save Jews and to alert the free world to the great danger. Through negotiations with the Germans, the “Working Group” succeeded in delaying for several years the destruction of Slovak Jewry, and even conceived the “Europe Plan,” to create a deal that would bring about the rescue of all the Jews of Europe.

A similar cooperation between Haredim and Zionists was also formed in the city of Turda in Hungarian Transylvania, and thus they succeeded in saving many by smuggling them to neighboring Romania. A description of the affair appears in Malka Shenkolevski’s article, “The Community of Turda, a Rescue Station for Jewish Refugees during the Holocaust” (summary of the article on the “Beit Morasha” website).

According to Dr. Hava Eshkoli (in the conclusion to her book Silence – the Jewish Yishuv in the Land of Israel in the Face of the Holocaust), one of the main reasons for the helplessness and the failure of many rescue initiatives was the rivalry and mutual distrust between the various movements and parties, each of which pulled in a different direction without the ability to unite for joint action.

The two examples I mentioned teach that in places where people were wise enough to unite in action despite sharp antagonisms, they succeeded in accomplishing great things.

With blessing, Shatz