Singing Tears with the Sound of the Shofar (Column 169)
With God's help
In memory of Shir Monzon, of blessed memory
I have just returned from the funeral of Shir Monzon, of blessed memory, and I am still shaken. I therefore ask your forgiveness for this outpouring. Shir was a twenty-year-old young woman, a squad commander in a Search and Rescue Battalion, who was killed during her army service. She was the daughter of a childhood friend of mine (from yeshivah and the army), Yossi Monzon, and his wife Tami, from the neighborhood where I grew up. I met Shir once at a class in my home (she came with her father), and once more as part of a larger group at a class I gave at the "Be'er" Midrasha where she studied (which I helped establish in Yeruham).
I did not know her closely, but from my impression Shir was abundantly talented, with wonderful character and temperament, a gracious leader, deeply loved and highly esteemed by everyone around her. The funeral drew a huge crowd, and every eye was filled with tears. As I stood in line at the end of the funeral, I searched for words of comfort, or really any words at all, to say to her parents and to myself, but I did not truly find any. What can one say to parents, siblings, and family who have lost a daughter, especially at such an age?! After considering quite a few possibilities in various directions – I fell silent.
It was hard for me not to keep thinking about the words of comfort one hears in such cases. I will permit myself not to address the "sanctification of God's name" in a death like this, and the other empty phrases. Some speak of hiddenness and of the inability to understand God's actions, in the vein of "My beloved went down to his garden to gather lilies" ('My beloved has gone down to his garden to gather roses'). We are told that death at a young age testifies to an extraordinary personality, in the vein of ""Through those near to Me I will be sanctified"" ('Through those near to Me I am sanctified'). That may be true (and maybe not. My impression is that in this case it is), but I still find it hard to identify with those statements as well, since in my view it is not God who gathers these roses but the way of the world (= the laws of nature and the decisions of human beings). Therefore it does not seem likely to me that there is any built-in characteristic shared by all those who leave the world young. True, it is infuriating and disappointing. I would very much like there to be some logic to these events, but no one promised us a rose garden. Our hopes and desires, and even our reason, are not always fulfilled.[1] We would like every detail of our lives to have meaning. That everything be part of some great and planned process. But that is not necessarily so.[2]
Another frustrating point is what such an event says about the value of life. If I am mistaken and this is nevertheless God's handiwork, why does He do it? We have grown accustomed to regarding life as something exalted and sublime, beyond price. In Jewish law, human life is a supreme value that may not be harmed (except in the most exceptional cases). So what could justify taking a life in this way? It would seem, on the face of it, that God relates to us as though we were ants. He takes one and leaves others for all sorts of hidden considerations so that this whole enterprise, taken as a whole, will continue to function properly. To be sure, relative to Him there does not seem to be much difference between us and ants, and yet I would like to believe that our own attitude toward human life is not detached from its real value. I want to believe that the value of life is not merely an instrumental instruction from Him to us, but that human life truly has intrinsic meaning and value.
But even if God leaves the matter to the way of the world, as I think, the picture that emerges is no less problematic. One goes and others come, and the universe toys with us and tricks us, while overall the world keeps rolling on with us or without us. That picture too does not seem to reflect any more fitting attitude on God's part toward us.
They say that God does not work for us, and that is true. He also does not work for our reason or our aspirations. But we are also told that He does justice, even if it is hard to see it in practice. That I am very inclined to believe, but it is hard to explain the death itself in that way (if indeed it was not His action). So where, then, can that justice take place? Perhaps in the rectification of this tragedy, to be effected somewhere above. Alas, I also do not know what awaits Shir from here on, somewhere above. I can only hope that there will be some kind of rectification there for the chasm that has opened here below.
After that I tried to move to a Stoic response. The difficulty is that a twenty-year-old girl had not really had time to create and exert the influence she could have. She had only just ripened and matured, and only now could she truly have realized herself and begun to act in the world in earnest. I did not know her well enough to say with confidence that the impression she left will remain and continue to have an effect here below, and I believe and hope that it will. But longer life would undoubtedly have enabled her to do more. In response, I tried to tell myself that every person leaves the world at some stage, and overall our lives are rather short. Is there any real difference between twenty years and a hundred years? From the standpoint of eternity, it does not really matter. This of course does not comfort those who remain without her, but perhaps there is some comfort in such a Stoic perspective.
Do these feelings carry weight when it comes to shaping a worldview? As a Litvak, my instinct is that they do not. But the boundary I am used to drawing between feelings and thoughts, between rational considerations and emotional reactions, becomes somewhat blurred in such situations. It is quite clear to me that there is something here beyond emotion as well. There is a real difficulty here, and I do not really know what to do with it.
In short, I found no words of any kind, and nothing remained for me but to take refuge in silence, in the vein of "And Aaron was silent" ('And Aaron was silent'). In the columns on poetry (107–113) I tried to show that poetry is meant to express something that cannot be expressed in prose. The message of a poem passes through the structure and form as well, and not only through the literal meaning of the words themselves. So perhaps, in place of the words that have fallen silent, I thought to follow Wittgenstein's path: about what one cannot speak, one should sing.
At the funeral they played "One Must Not Pluck the Flowers of the Garden", and they said that she loved that song very much. It stayed with me all the way to the grave, but on the way back Arik Einstein's song (lyrics: Ilan Goldhirsh, melody: Berry Sakharof), Hard to Write Tears, began to play over and over in my head. It is probably just a song and not really a poet's poem, but it has lyrical qualities. I do not know whether it has exalted poetics (Tami is a literature scholar, and for little me it is hard to measure that), but it very much captured what I was feeling at those moments.
| The heart tightens and the throat constricts And the tears come down like rain And nothing can be seen through all the dust And who knows how one can even draw near. |
Cold winds enter the home
Bitter truth strikes us in the face
And in the air is a silence too hard to bear
And mist at the corners of our eyes.
It is so hard to write tears
Hard to bear the silence
It is so hard to sing tears
And who will grant us comfort. A great shadow sits right before you
A black cloud wraps the sky
And an upheaval seizes your whole being
You walk, you walk, and never arrive.
If only we might find the strength to overcome
If only we might find words within the speechlessness
So many words want to be spoken
And every word is mingled with a tear.
So very hard…
Kishon has a feuilleton in which he describes his agonizing when he cannot write a feuilleton. His way out was, of course, to write about that very thing, and thus that feuilleton was indeed created. I too, small as I am, write here about the fact that I have no words and nothing to say. From there it was only natural to arrive at Goldhirsh's song, since he apparently tried and failed to write or sing tears, and so chose to write a song about that very failure.
In the grip of the melancholy lyricism that descended upon me, and with the High Holy Days approaching, I thought that all this connects to Rosh Hashanah and the sounding of the shofar. In an article in which I discussed the meaning of the commandment of sounding the shofar, I tried to show that Rosh Hashanah has two dimensions: the blast and the remembrance of the blast. And on Rosh Hashanah that falls on the Sabbath, we observe only the remembrance of the blast without the blast itself (and this is so even according to the Babylonian Talmud, for which refraining from the sounding is only a rabbinic decree). The final section of that article is an expansion of the Wittgensteinian approach mentioned above, and I will therefore quote it verbatim.
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For both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, the combination of the Sabbath with Rosh Hashanah creates a day of a third type. It is a day on which an additional mode of enthroning God finds expression: enthronement through silence. This calls to mind the chapter in which Elijah, in the course of his flight, encounters God (I Kings 19:11-12): And He said, "Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord; and behold, the Lord was passing by, and a great and mighty wind was rending mountains and shattering rocks before the Lord; the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind, an earthquake; the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, fire; the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still, small voice.": God's deeper manifestation comes through silence. His enthronement lies in discerning Him through silence. When all the din around us is silenced, only then can God be discerned. How is this done on a Rosh Hashanah that does not fall on the Sabbath? One should note that even then the noise is of a very special kind. A song is an object composed of words and melody. When the words are stripped away, only the melody remains. This is a subtler phenomenon. When the melody is stripped of the nuances that modulate it, what remains is sound without melody: a raw sound, and nothing more. That is the sounding of the shofar. Thus the sounding of the shofar is indeed a sound, but it is a simple and abstract sound, without all the noisy characteristics that accompany the everyday sounds we encounter. And on the Sabbath we undergo one further abstraction: there we erase even this simple sound. Not only is there no erasure here of the very essence of the day; there is in fact a purer and more complete manifestation of it. And we have no fuller expression of this than Rashi on these verses in Kings, who writes: a still, small voice– A sound with which they praise quietly; but regarding the prophets of the nations it says, "and I heard a still voice" (Job 4:16). The stillness was for praise., And I heard a voice emerging from within the silence, a faint ringing in the vernacular, though the voice itself cannot actually be heard.: Even on Rosh Hashanah that falls on the Sabbath, the sound of the shofar exists. It emerges from the silence, and there is no greater sound than that. Of this it is said (with regard to the shofar of Mount Sinai): "a great voice, and it did not cease" ('a great sound that did not cease') (see Deuteronomy 5:18), and the translation renders it "and it did not cease" ('and it did not stop') (Onkelos ad loc.).
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So perhaps when there are no words, and there is no possibility of writing the tears or singing them, what remains is to sound the shofar. Or only to remember the shofar and be silent…
May it be a good year for all of us
[1] Sometimes the very fact that some principle sounds logical to us is specifically a reason to wonder whether it is true. If it is logical and compelling, then it is certainly possible that people created it as a balm for disappointment and as an opening to hope and consolation.
[2] In column 159 I distinguished between two kinds of meaning: the subjective kind that we build for ourselves (psychology, cognitive dissonance) and the objective kind (philosophy).
Discussion
To tell the truth, when I wrote those things I was thinking precisely about this point.
I think it is hard to distinguish between emotional and intuitive opposition, and I certainly do not know how to give a criterion. Moreover, I find both of them in myself as well regarding the conception of providence that I presented, exactly as you describe among those commenting on it. To me too it does not make sense, and it is also outrageous. But what can be done if factually that is how things appear?!
Blessed is the true Judge. May all who cherished her be comforted from Heaven.
""He once said (R. Yitzhak Leib of Berdichev) in the sermon before the sounding of the shofar: "Master of the Universe, You told us: ‘It shall be a day of blowing for you,’ and because of this one command we have blown a hundred blasts for many thousands of years. And what have we been asking of You for many hundreds of years? Only blow one blast: ‘Sound the great shofar for our freedom’…
In a foundational article, the communications scholar Menachem Blondheim discussed the communicative function of the shofar as an intermediary between us and God. It is fitting to study it before the festival is sanctified:
https://musaf-shabbat.com/2012/09/14/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A8-%D7%9C%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%A1%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%97%D7%9D-%D7%91%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%94%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D/
May it be His will that the sound of the great shofar be realized before our eyes and remove tears from every face
A good year
The dread of judgment came early this year. In this connection it is highly recommended to read Rav Shagar’s eulogies for the friends who were burned together with him in the Yom Kippur War but did not come out alive (it appears in the book Bayom Hahu – Mo’adei Iyar). Rav Shagar describes there the dread of judgment that has enveloped him ever since.
It seems to me that Rav Shagar saw divine visions, but for understandable reasons he could never speak of it (perhaps in that war when his body was burned, or perhaps simply at home in the evening when the shadows descend); all of his Torah comes out illogical without this assumption. He constantly speaks about a mystical, suprasensory vision that the ordinary reader interprets as metaphor, but it seems to me that it should be interpreted literally.
Shir’s story, may her memory be blessed, reminded me of David Grossman’s song, Spring Is So Short Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjOqqJcJ15U
There is a brief moment between Adar and Nisan
when nature rejoices with all its might
it overflows with life
drunken and fragrant –
how beauty can heal!
Stormy and impassioned and spraying
sparks –
but in another moment it will wither and yellow
for already at its edges summer is kindling –
spring is so short here.
Short and fleeting and heart-rending
to think that it will soon fade
its gaze has only just opened
it has only begun to blossom –
it was only given to me and at once taken away.
A youthful, stormy spring
and its end—
is already written in its budding leaves,
but it whirls about
like a butterfly in flight,
and like it—eternal in its own eyes.
Short and fleeting and heart-rending
to think that it will soon fade
its gaze has only just opened
it has only begun to blossom –
it was only given to me and at once taken away.
And you and I know
and it is terrible that only it does not –
how short life is,
the short life that was given to it.
Generous and stormy and painful
so very short here
is spring.
Before thinking what to say to mourners and how to comfort them, our Sages taught us that the first thing is to sit silently and wait for the mourner to begin. Simply to listen to him…
With blessings, S.Z. Levinger
And concerning the shofar too we were commanded to ‘hear the sound of the shofar’; the shofar says its piece, and the living shall take it to heart.
Indeed, much too short.
If I thought this was the dread of judgment, that would be one thing. The question is whether there is indeed some execution of judgment here at all.
Forgive me, I was not precise in my words. Rav Shagar speaks there about the awe that awakens in a person when he encounters this reality in which young people are plucked away and taken from us. This awe marks the boundedness of reality. A feeling that reality has a sharp side and not only a soft one. Faith gives shelter from this harsh side, but it is a fragile shelter, like a sukkah. It cannot really protect us; it only gives us the strength to keep going forward.
I do not understand why faith helps here without the assumption that this is the work of providence. The “compensation” above?
The fact is that almost everyone, believers or not, goes on. And one could press the argument that this is an implicit faith (as I wrote about moral atheists).
These are two different functions, and therefore they are not two alternatives that exclude one another. Listening is perhaps psychological assistance, whereas I was looking for philosophical-theological assistance.
With God’s help, eve of the holy Sabbath, “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God,” 5778
To the Rabbi, greetings,
It was not for nothing that I compared the listening of the comforters to listening to the sound of the shofar. Is listening to the sound of the shofar “psychological assistance” to the blower? Listening to the sound of the shofar comes from a clear understanding that there is a directed divine message here: “The Merciful One said: blow,” and we are silent in order to listen and try to understand what God is saying to us.
And in our attentive listening to the shofar we find many messages included in the simple sound: remembrance of the binding of Isaac, which places upon us the duty to devote all our powers to doing the will of our Creator; remembrance of Mount Sinai, where we entered into a covenant with our God and received from His hand a Torah to guide us in all our ways; a call to “let us search and examine our ways,” to renew and improve our deeds; and a call not to lose sight of the purpose of our lives – to work for the redemption and repair of the world.
The shofar awakens us to the understanding that life is not meaningless. Life flows toward a goal, and we are called to concentrate our powers in order to realize it. It is not upon us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it, and we listen to its sound. We remember what was done in the past, and receive spiritual strength and insights with which we will walk into the future.
A person’s life too is like a shofar. It comes out of the past and flows into the future. And the living shall take it to heart and gather from the life-story to which he has been exposed strengths and insights for the continuation of the journey. I heard from my relative R. Moshe Yaakovovitz, may his memory be blessed, that life is like a “relay race”: each person takes the role and carries it through a certain stretch, in order to pass the mission on to those who come after. Each one contributes his part, and tries to leave those who come after him a better starting point.
With blessings, S.Z. Levinger
Does the fact that apparently Shir committed suicide (or acted negligently in a way close to suicide) not absolve the Holy One, blessed be He, of responsibility? (Of course, from our perspective the story is no less painful, perhaps more painful, but insofar as complaints about the arbitrariness of the Holy One, blessed be He, are concerned, it is less relevant.)
I thought of something that might be comforting: in tractate Yevamot 62a there is a dispute regarding procreation:
If a man had children and they died, Rav Huna said: he has fulfilled the commandment to be fruitful and multiply; Rabbi Yohanan said: he has not fulfilled it. Rav Huna said he has fulfilled it because of Rav Asi, for Rav Asi said: The son of David will not come until all the souls in the body are exhausted, as it is said, “For the spirit that wraps itself is from Me, etc.” And Rabbi Yohanan said he has not fulfilled the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, for we require “He created it to be inhabited,” and that is not present.
It follows that according to Rav Huna’s view (though the halakhah does not follow him), every person who came into the world brought the redemption a little closer, even if he lived a short life.
In this column you describe the essence of the despair and sorrow in a worldview that sees us as unsupervised ants.
No one is aware of our very existence; it makes no difference what happens to us; it makes no difference whether we behave morally or wickedly; everything is blind, everything is meaningless.
1) The fact that on the face of it experience shows us that things proceed according to nature without any connection to justice and judgment, and therefore we add components of reality such as the World to Come or hidden miracles—do these additions not give life meaning?
2) I saw several times in your writings that you argued, following Kant, that atheistic morality is not consistent; moral obligation is contingent on a divine command. If the Holy One, blessed be He, is not aware of what we do, what point is there in fulfilling His will if we are ants whose existence He is unaware of? It is really meaningless whether we are moral or not.
Doesn’t objective moral obligation require providence?
3) Abraham’s claim, “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice?”—is that a claim one can dispute?
With God’s help, ערב Rosh Hashanah 5779
To “Sad” — greetings,
The Holy One, blessed be He, commanded us: “Judge every person favorably.” It does not seem to me that He wants us to look for grave sins in people in order to “defend Him,” all the more so that it is improper to accuse a person who has died and cannot respond and defend her good name.
Weapons accidents in the army usually occur because of an unforeseen malfunction in the weapon or as a result of “human error” stemming from the stress and exhaustion soldiers are under. A momentary mistake in the process of unloading the weapon is enough, God forbid, for a bullet to be discharged. So it is unlikely that this was “negligence close to suicide.”
Of course, the army conducts an in-depth inquiry in order to clarify what caused the malfunction or the mistake, so as to draw lessons and sharpen the safety procedures and check whether there was negligence. And we too need to examine ourselves, and be careful not only about the discharge of physical bullets, but also about slips of the tongue that may cause sorrow and pain. And the more we judge our fellow favorably – then we too will merit to be judged favorably in Heaven..
With blessings for a good year, S.Z. Levinger
I do not know what your source of information is. But it does not matter to the discussion itself. There are many cases that are neither negligence nor suicide in which people die.
I did not write anywhere that it makes no difference how we behave. And that also has nothing to do with whether the Holy One, blessed be He, exercises providence or not. He legislated the laws of morality, and now this is the proper way to behave regardless of His providence.
Nor did I write that He does not supervise, but rather that He does not intervene (except perhaps on rare occasions).
The World to Come, etc., can give meaning, but that still does not explain the value of physical life in halakhah.
If I understand correctly, you distinguish between what is called God’s knowledge and God’s providence: you believe in His knowledge, but in providence that intervenes in the world generally, not so much.
1) If He also has no knowledge of us, then the fact that He legislated the laws of morality means we are obligated to them even though He left us to the point that He is not aware of us?
2) If He is aware of what happens to us, and it is clear to us that He judges justly (after all we are speaking of God, not Satan), then doesn’t it follow that everything comes in judgment, if not in this world then in the next, all according to considerations of justice, for “Shall the Judge of all the earth not do justice”?!
If that is so, then we already have great consolation.
With God’s help, ערב Rosh Hashanah 5779
To Oren — greetings,
In the present case it seems that the deceased had already managed to do quite a few good deeds in her short life and had inspired others toward goodness, except that this itself increases the pain that this goodness was cut off in its prime. The pain of parents over their child is unbearable, especially over a child from whom great things were expected.
In the piyyut Et Sha’arei Ratzon Lehipate’ah by Rabbi Yehudah son of Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Abbas (recited in Sephardic communities before the shofar blasts), he describes how Isaac is ready to go to the binding, but is worried about what will happen to his mother: “Tell my mother that her joy has turned away; the son who was born to her at ninety years, has become allotted to fire and the knife. Where shall I find a comforter for her, where? I am distressed for my mother, who will weep and lament.”
It is not in human power to comfort. Until the Creator Himself stands to comfort their hearts and says: “As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you, and in Jerusalem you shall be comforted,” and to the “storm-tossed and afflicted” He will say, “The time of salvation has come; Yinnon and Elijah I send.”
With blessings for a good year, S.Z. Levinger
What can be said, when there are no more words,
and if there are, they are too poor to speak,
what can be said, when we have no tools
to express bitter sorrow.
There are times when one may be silent,
and tell everyone that they should understand,
for if we are silent at this time,
they will listen to this silence.
.
And sometimes this silence,
speaks like a thousand words,
and a multitude of cries and words
join together into a talkative silence.
When a person has something to cry out about, and wants to cry out, but cannot cry out – that is the greatest cry of all.
The Kotzker Rebbe.
The ability to cope with the pain of death can come only with the understanding that “You are children of the Lord your God,” and therefore we are forbidden to gash ourselves and wound ourselves for the dead. We are confident and assured that even what we do not understand, and perhaps will never understand, “God sits there and sees, and watches over all that He created.” All the good that appeared in a person’s life does not go lost, but continues to bring goodness and blessing in this world and in the World to Come.
With blessings, S.Z. Levinger
1. Absolutely. Unless you behave morally only in order to receive reward.
2. I wrote that. But that is a logical argument, and logical arguments are not compelling, certainly not with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He.
With God’s help, Sunday, for the portion “for the Lord your God is the One who goes with you; He will not fail you nor forsake you,” 5779
To the Rabbi — greetings,
As you mentioned, it stands to reason that the Lord, who implanted in us the attribute of justice, acts justly, and the matter is explicit in Scripture: “A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is He.” Both the good in this world and the sufferings are intended to straighten our ways, as it is written: “And you shall know in your heart that as a man chastises his son, so the Lord your God chastises you” (Deuteronomy 8:5), and the purpose is “to do you good in your end.” Therefore, “May the Lord our God be with us; may He not forsake us nor abandon us,” until our repair and the repair of the whole world are completed and all the powers of good hidden within us are brought into actuality.
With the blessing, “May the perfection of the yearning for good appear,” S.Z. Levinger
I will explain my first question more fully:
“1) If He also has no knowledge of us, then the fact that He legislated the laws of morality means we are obligated to them even though He left us to the point that He is not aware of us?”
The laws of morality are either created, renewed laws like the laws of nature, or they are existing (primordial) laws such that one cannot conceive that they do not exist and are not always true, like the laws of logic.
If they are God’s creations, then they express God’s will; and if He is not aware of us and our deeds, what point is there in fulfilling His will when He is not aware whether His will is being fulfilled or not?
And if they are primordial and exist like the laws of logic, then they are true even without Him. What, then, is inconsistent about the atheist’s morality? Is the atheist who keeps the laws of logic also inconsistent?
My claims are as follows:
1. In a world without a Creator, the laws of morality have no validity.
2. In a world with a Creator, they do have validity. The world was created such that the correct conduct within it is moral conduct. Now whoever understands this ought to conduct himself accordingly.
3. The providence of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not connected to the issue. Whether He knows of our deeds or not, this is the correct way to conduct oneself in the world as it is. Just as the laws of physics that He created dictate a certain kind of conduct in the world even without His providence and reactions.
4. Quite apart from all this, I never wrote that He does not know of our deeds. What I wrote is that He probably (almost) does not intervene in the world.
1. Can I understand from your words that the laws of morality were created with the world?
2. There is a difference between the laws of nature, which were created in the form in which He embedded them in the objects He created (which have no free choice), and the laws of morality, which we need to choose of our own free will to conduct ourselves by.
Every year on the night after Rosh Hashanah there is a memorial for my friend, for the past 9 years.
This year is the first time I can remember that issues similar to the discussion here in the comments came up at the memorial,
when his brother mentioned thoughts and feelings he had about the matter on that night after the holiday.
And therefore, even what I have to say, it seems, will only be possible next year.
Rabbi Michi wrote:
“In a world with a Creator, they do have validity. The world was created such that the correct conduct within it is moral conduct. Now whoever understands this ought to conduct himself accordingly.
The providence of the Holy One, blessed be He, is not connected to the issue. Whether He knows of our deeds or not, this is the correct way to conduct oneself in the world as it is. Just as the laws of physics that He created dictate a certain kind of conduct in the world even without His providence and reactions.”
It is not clear to me what it means to say that moral conduct is “correct conduct.”
When one says that the laws of physics dictate conduct, the meaning is that if you want to achieve a certain result (for example, a certain speed), then you need to act in a certain way (for example, apply a certain force that will produce that speed). That is, there is a prior goal, and the laws of physics dictate conduct in order to bring that prior goal into effect; that is the correct conduct for actualizing that goal.
To say that moral conduct is correct conduct—I do not understand what meaning that statement has without defining something that moral conduct is the correct conduct to achieve / reach / bring into effect. (Indeed, Maimonides also wrote that the highest level is to do the commandments because it is the truth, and even there it is not clear to me what it means that this is the truth.)
Moral conduct is correct regardless of goals. It is its own reason. Even when the Holy One, blessed be He, sets goals before us, you can ask about Him too what His goal was in setting them. In the end you always arrive at a goal that has no goal beyond itself. The laws of morality are like that.
See about this in the fourth notebook, part 3.
By the way, see my post that has just gone up on the site, where I distinguished between a process and the state that it comes to achieve. I explained that there is value in the process itself and not only as a means to reach the desired state. The laws of morality are like that too. Their value lies in their very performance and not only in the positive state to which they lead.
I identified very strongly with these words. I too do not connect with the “explanations” people try to give (and as a teenager during the intifada it disturbed me very much that this was what we heard from the educators around us).
My mother, who works in Holocaust remembrance, speaks about the silence and Aaron’s silence in the context of the survivors’ silence, who did not speak after the Holocaust.
Line 1
… that the Lord, who implanted in us the attribute of justice – acts justly…
Line 4
… all the good that appeared in a person’s life does not go lost…
It is so hard to read silence.
And who will grant us consolation…
Hello Rabbi.
The Rabbi wrote in the introduction to the notebooks that there is a person who believes without proofs; he simply believes, that is all, he has a kind of basic intuition that this is how things are.
It seems to me that the feeling the Rabbi describes here is perhaps the common root of all those who object to the Rabbi’s conception of providence. It seems that even after all the rational arguments, we all have a kind of basic intuition that it cannot be that He really left us like this to fend for ourselves, to be alone and manage by our own powers. We may perhaps say this with our mouths, but never truly believe it.
What does the Rabbi think? How does one distinguish between emotional opposition and intuitive opposition?
A good year, and better tidings.