God and the World – Lesson 10
This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.
🔗 Link to the original lecture
🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI
Table of Contents
- The problem of evil: human evil versus natural evil
- Rigid laws of nature and the price of suffering
- The burden of proof and the asymmetry between attacker and defender
- Limits on the Holy One, blessed be He: perfection, self-perfection, and logic
- Passive providence versus active providence, and a deeper notion of divine contraction
- Knowledge and free choice: the three components of the paradox and the proposed solution
- Conclusion of the series
Summary
General overview
The text summarizes a theological approach that distinguishes between human evil and natural evil, arguing that human evil results from a divine policy of non-intervention in order to preserve free choice, while natural evil is a necessary side effect of a world governed by rigid laws of nature. The author argues that it is not reasonable to say that all suffering is always “deserved,” and extends the idea of “there are those who perish without justice” to natural evil as well. He adds that certain limits on the Holy One, blessed be He do not detract from His omnipotence when they stem from logical contradictions or lack of definition, and applies this also to the question of knowledge and free choice: information about future choices does not exist, and therefore the Holy One, blessed be He does not know in advance what a person will choose, as part of an even deeper contraction of providence.
The problem of evil: human evil versus natural evil
The text distinguishes between human evil and natural evil, and argues that human evil is explained by the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He allows free choice and therefore does not intervene to prevent bad decisions, because consistently preventing every evil choice would eliminate the meaning of good choices and turn them into coercion. The text acknowledges that even after this explanation one can still ask, in extreme cases, why the Holocaust was not prevented, but maintains that an individual’s suffering is not diminished just because many others are suffering around him, and so this still counts as a reasonable explanation.
The text states that natural evil is harder, because according to Talmudic and commentarial sources, natural events are in the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the formulation “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven,” and therefore there is ostensibly no reason for a policy of non-intervention there. The text argues that in practice people are harmed by natural evil “without justice,” and that it is not reasonable to think that the Holy One, blessed be He “picked out with tweezers” the victims of a tsunami or a plague according to precise moral calculations, and therefore the question of the justification of suffering remains in force.
Rigid laws of nature and the price of suffering
The text assumes that the world operates according to fixed laws, and presents this as an empirical fact that makes predictable human conduct possible, such as medical treatment or earning a living, whereas a chaotic world without regularity would be impossible to navigate. The text argues that divine involvement in every “problematic” event would return the world to a state in which there are no rigid laws of nature, and therefore if the policy is stable regularity, it includes the “whole package” and the unpleasant sides of nature as well.
The text asks why a different system of natural laws was not created—equally rigid, but without tsunamis, plagues, and earthquakes—and answers with the hypothesis that perhaps no such equivalent system exists at all. The text presents a mathematical-physical intuition according to which trying to get “the same function” except for a few bad points creates a discontinuity that does not fit a continuous, differentiable system of laws, and adds that even if there is no certainty about this, the burden of proof lies on the objector to show that such a system exists.
The text concludes that natural evil is a necessary side effect of the laws of nature, and that there is no way to “get rid” of it without giving up a world governed by rigid regularity. The text presents this as an answer rather than a difficulty: if the Holy One, blessed be He is not “just evil,” then suffering follows from the fact that there is no logical or systemic option for a world that would do all the desired “work” without the price of distress.
The burden of proof and the asymmetry between attacker and defender
The text argues that one who challenges the Holy One, blessed be He by asking why He did not create a world with different laws free of suffering must show that such a system of laws exists, because criticism requires proof of an alternative possibility. The text illustrates this asymmetry through the laws of doubt in a refutation of an a fortiori argument, and through criminal law, where the prosecution must prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt while the defense need only cast doubt.
The text states that once one has reached the conclusion that the Holy One, blessed be He created the world, the mere existence of doubt as to whether there is a coherent alternative to the laws of nature is enough to neutralize the objection. The text presents this approach as an attempt to improve the theological situation regarding the problem of “the righteous who suffers,” because it abandons explanations that deny common sense and claim that all suffering is always justified.
Limits on the Holy One, blessed be He: perfection, self-perfection, and logic
The text raises a difficulty with the formulation “the Holy One, blessed be He has no choice,” since the Holy One, blessed be He is conceived as omnipotent, and cites a passage from Rabbi Kook in Orot HaKodesh on the problem of “perfection and self-perfection.” Rabbi Kook is described as arguing that a perfect being cannot perfect itself, that self-perfection has intrinsic value, and that one of the forms of perfection is precisely being in a process of self-perfection; the text also cites the saying of the Sages that a penitent is greater than a completely righteous person in order to highlight the value of the process.
The text presents the “secret that service is a divine need” as the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He “needs us,” and gives as an example the a fortiori argument in the book of Jonah concerning the gourd and Nineveh. The text offers two answers to the a fortiori argument: it may be that Jonah really did pity the gourd even if he had an interest in it, and it may be that the Holy One, blessed be He “needs” Nineveh in an interested sense, in which case the a fortiori argument operates on the same plane.
The text distinguishes between two kinds of divine “inability”: inability that stems from perfection and omnipotence itself, such as the claim that a necessarily existing being cannot turn itself into a destructible human being, and inability that stems from logical limitations such as “squaring the circle” or “a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side” (Guide for the Perplexed). The text argues that logical limitations are not a deficiency in the Holy One, blessed be He, because what is involved is a string of meaningless, undefined words, like the distinction that a point “has no length” and not that “its length is zero.”
The text argues that the use of the term “laws of logic” is misleading, because unlike state law or the laws of physics, logic is not a system chosen from among alternatives and is not the result of legislation. The text concludes that the Holy One, blessed be He is not “subject” to logic as to some external law; rather, what lies outside logic does not exist and therefore is irrelevant even with respect to Him, and from this it follows that the absence of an “alternative physical system without suffering” is a claim of the same order as the absence of an impossible square.
Passive providence versus active providence, and a deeper notion of divine contraction
The text distinguishes between passive providence, in which the Holy One, blessed be He knows what happens in the world, and active providence, in which He acts and intervenes, and argues that throughout the series it has challenged the notion of active involvement. The text connects this to the idea of divine contraction, and describes withdrawal as giving up the management of history and leaving the world to human beings, while maintaining general knowledge of what is taking place.
The text proposes a further extension of divine contraction: not only does the Holy One, blessed be He not act in the world, but there are certain things about the world that He also does not know. The text focuses this on future events that depend on human choice.
Knowledge and free choice: the three components of the paradox and the proposed solution
The text presents Maimonides’ question in Laws of Repentance, chapter 5: if the Holy One, blessed be He knows in advance what a person will do, how can the person have free choice, since if the person chooses otherwise, the prior knowledge would turn out to have been incorrect. The text rejects the claim that the Holy One, blessed be He is “above logic,” defining it as parallel to meaningless claims such as a “round triangle.”
The text describes Maimonides’ response, “for His knowledge is not like our knowledge,” and the Raavad’s objection, “this author did not follow the way of the wise,” and declares that it agrees with Maimonides that the question should be placed on the table even if there is no intelligible answer. The text divides the paradox into three components: divine knowledge of the future, free choice, and a temporal order in which the knowledge precedes the choice.
The text presents three types of solutions according to giving up one of the components: giving up free choice, attributed to Rabbi Chasdai Crescas in Or Hashem and discussed also in relation to Rabbi Tzadok; giving up the time component by claiming that the Holy One, blessed be He is above time; and giving up divine foreknowledge with regard to choices. The text argues that the “above time” solution answers the question of how one gets information from the future, but does not solve the contradiction itself, because the very existence of the information before the choice cancels freedom of choice.
The text cites the Shelah in “Beit HaBechirah” as writing that the Holy One, blessed be He has no information about future events that depend on choice. The text discusses the Or HaChaim on “for I regret that I made them” (Genesis 6), who suggests that the Holy One, blessed be He prevents Himself from knowing the future in order to preserve free choice, and objects that “closing one’s eyes” does not solve the problem if the information exists anyway.
The text presents Richard Taylor’s story about Osmo and the book “The Story of Osmo” in order to argue that the problem is the existence of the information itself, not who knows it, and that even if no one reads the book, the future is fixed if the information exists. The text reconciles the Or HaChaim by means of the “principle of charity,” according to which “prevented Himself” means that the creation of the human being as a being with free choice prevents information about future choices from existing in the first place.
The text concludes that the Holy One, blessed be He does not know in advance what human beings will choose, because information about a future choice is information that does not exist, and one cannot know non-existent information just as one cannot realize an undefined concept. The text suggests that Maimonides too may be interpreted this way: “His knowledge is not like our knowledge” means that the simple kind of knowledge that we call knowledge does not exist in His case with respect to future choices.
Conclusion of the series
The text presents the claim that future choices are not known in advance as “the cherry on top” of divine contraction in its plain sense, because it limits not only involvement but also knowledge in a certain domain. The text concludes with an invitation for questions and an announcement that a message will be sent to the group about the next series, and ends with “more power to you” and “good night.”
Full Transcript
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’re getting close to the end of this series. Last time I spoke about the problem of evil, and I said that I distinguished between human evil and natural evil. And I explained human evil through what is apparently a decision by the Holy One, blessed be He to allow us free choice. That basically dictates that He not intervene to prevent bad decisions, because the moment He prevents every bad decision, then our good choices also lose their meaning, because we’re coerced into choosing them. Any other choice of ours would never come to fruition, because the Holy One, blessed be He would neutralize it. And there’s the slippery slope—where exactly should He intervene and where not? And I spoke on the level of human evil, and it seems to me that this explanation is a reasonable one. Again, I said that in extreme cases you can certainly still ask why the Holy One, blessed be He did not intervene to prevent the Holocaust, to prevent a tsunami where tens or hundreds of thousands of people are killed. But a single person who suffers suffers to the same extent whether there are another hundred thousand around him or not. So I think that there it’s a reasonable explanation. In the context of natural evil, the situation is a bit more complicated, because natural evil is ostensibly handed over into the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He, and He has no reason not to intervene there. Especially when you look at the sources, it seems that the accepted view in Talmudic sources and among the commentators is that even if things that are given over to human choice are places where the Holy One, blessed be He has withdrawn His hand—that is, He left it to human beings to manage—in natural events they are indeed given over into the hands of the Holy One, blessed be He. “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except the fear of Heaven.” We discussed this and saw it in various places, with the inadvertent murderer and so on. Therefore the problem there seems more difficult. And last time I presented a suggestion for solving the issue, and what I basically said was that the first assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He decided that the world should operate according to fixed laws, rigid laws. First of all, we see this as a matter of fact—that is, this world operates according to laws of nature. I said there are protocols for how this whole thing works. It’s not some capricious reality where every moment something unpredictable happens. We more or less know the probabilities, and today in scientific research we know them even better. So first of all, that’s an empirical fact. You can even suggest some explanation for it, and the explanation is that if the world did not operate according to fixed laws, then it would really be impossible to function within it, because you can’t predict what will happen, and you also don’t know how to respond. If you have a fever, today you know that if you take acetaminophen the fever will go down. But in a chaotic world with no laws of nature—if you have a fever, what would you do? It could be that if you take acetaminophen the fever would go up. You don’t know, because there are no laws. How do you function in such a world? You don’t know. You have to go to work in order to earn money and make a living, but in a world without laws it could be that when you go to work you actually lose money. Our whole ability to cope with reality, to function within it, comes from the fact that there are laws of nature, that the world is governed by some laws that we more or less know, and we know how to conduct ourselves within this matter. So that’s the first assumption. The first assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He wants to run the world according to laws. If so, then it’s clear that the involvement of the Holy One, blessed be He every time something problematic happens basically takes us back to a situation in which there aren’t really rigid laws of nature, but rather the Holy One, blessed be He is actually managing things. So that’s something that runs against His basic policy. If He wants the whole thing to run according to laws of nature, then He says: okay, let the world run according to the laws of nature, including the whole package, including their less pleasant aspects. Because otherwise, if every time something unpleasant happens the Holy One, blessed be He intervenes, that basically means there are no laws of nature here. We can’t really describe the world as being governed by rigid rules. Still, the question comes up here—and I said this last time too—the question arises: then why didn’t He create a world with completely rigid laws, but different ones? Another system of natural laws, also rigid, in which there wouldn’t be these elements of suffering, of unjustified evil? What’s the problem? After all, the Holy One, blessed be He is omnipotent, so He can create a system—He created this system of natural laws, so He can create a system, a system of different natural laws. So here my claim is that first of all, it’s clear that if He chose the laws of nature, then presumably, if He chose these laws of nature, then apparently this mode of operation is what He wants. In other words, that is presumably the way He wants the world to function. So what’s the issue? We have some problem with certain phenomena that are suffering or unjustified evil—tsunamis, plagues, and so on. So what then? Basically, what are we supposed to suggest to the Holy One, blessed be He? Make another system of laws that does everything in exactly the same way as the current system of laws, except for the elements of suffering and evil. No tsunamis, no plagues, no earthquakes, no things of that sort. But aside from that, it’s supposed to function as our world functions today, because all in all, presumably if the Holy One, blessed be He made it this way, that’s what He wants to happen. So we say, okay, if this is what You want to happen, presumably You have Your reasons, so do it according to these rules—but just tweak them a bit so the bad things won’t happen. Okay? That’s really the claim. And here I said, and I proposed what I’ll call a hypothesis, that maybe there is no such system of laws. There simply is no system of laws that would be equivalent to the current system of laws, only without the elements of suffering and the distress they cause. The question is whether there is such a system of laws at all. Now here one can make this claim on two levels. On the first level, I wanted to say that somehow, intuitively, from the mathematical-physical understanding I have, I would bet that there is no such system of laws. There is no rigid system of laws—not that I’m saying I don’t know; I tend to think there isn’t one—because basically you’re trying to create a function that looks exactly like the other function except at three specific points, or a few specific points, where it will look different. That’s basically some kind of discontinuous function, some wild thing like that, and the question is whether such conduct can be generated by a system of rigid laws that are continuous and differentiable and so on, like our laws of nature. So first, I conjecture—and again, I intuitively tend to think—that there is no such system of laws. But beyond that, I say: let’s say that’s not true. Let’s say I can’t know. So I’m fifty-fifty, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t—I don’t know. Even then, my claim is that the one raising the objection against the Holy One, blessed be He—the burden of proof is on him. That is, if you say: why didn’t You, Holy One, blessed be He, create the world with another system of laws that would be the same except for the problems of suffering?—in order to raise that objection, you basically have to show that there is such a system. The burden of proof is on you. Because even if we’re in doubt—even if I’m in doubt—I can’t raise an objection on the basis of doubt. Doubt is enough in order to answer objections. Right? Suppose I make an a fortiori argument, and then I raise a refutation. The refutation says: perhaps the source case is more stringent than the target case, and perhaps not. It’s enough for me to show that maybe yes and maybe no in order to undermine the a fortiori argument. Okay? In other words, the question is whether you’re trying to justify or trying to challenge; whether you’re trying to prove something new, or only to show that the burden of proof hasn’t been met, that nothing was proven. Right? Just like even in court, if you want to convict someone in criminal law, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did the act. The defense doesn’t have to prove that he didn’t do it; it’s enough for the defense to show that the prosecution did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it. In other words, there’s an asymmetry between the attacker and the one being attacked. Whoever attacks, the burden of proof is on him. Now my claim is that assuming I’ve reached the conclusion that the Holy One, blessed be He created the world, then when someone comes and asks: so why did He create it with this system of laws and not with another system of laws that would make things better, without the points of suffering?—I say: prove that such a system of laws exists. You’re raising an objection; if you’re raising an objection, you have to show me that such a system exists. Once you show me that such a system exists, then you’ll have an excellent objection against the Holy One, blessed be He: why didn’t He create the world with that system rather than the one that exists now? But in order to raise that objection, you have to show that such a system exists. And it seems to me that it’s quite difficult to show that such a system exists. Even if I’m not sure it doesn’t exist—I said I tend to think it doesn’t; I’m not sure—but to show that it does exist, that is a very, very difficult task, and I don’t know of anyone who has shown it. Therefore, my claim is that the answer to the question of natural evil, as opposed to human evil, is simply that natural evil cannot be gotten rid of. Natural evil is a necessary side effect of the laws of nature that govern the world, and those laws of nature require that there also be certain elements that generate suffering, distress, and bad things, without justification. Okay? In other words, there’s nothing to be done; it’s part of the price that has to be paid for the decision that the world operate according to rigid laws, that the laws of nature be rigid laws. And that seems to me the only explanation that I at least can think of regarding natural evil. In other words, if of course you think that natural evil is managed in such a way that everyone who suffers really deserves to suffer, then there’s no problem, then there’s no question. But if, as I claim, there are those who perish without justice—yes, that there are people who sometimes suffer even though they don’t deserve to suffer. Fine, “there are those who perish without justice,” the Re’ach says that only about acts of choice, and I’m claiming that even beyond that. I think that if there are, I don’t know, a million people killed in some tsunami in Southeast Asia, it doesn’t seem to me that the Holy One, blessed be He picked out with tweezers exactly a million people who were supposed to die at that moment and put them all there. From all over the world, somehow, for some reason, they all apparently also belong to one people. That’s a bit strange, right? It doesn’t sound reasonable to me. Therefore it seems to me that natural evil too can strike people without justice. Contrary to what the Re’ach says—that “there are those who perish without justice” means when there is an act done out of choice, when someone murdered someone else—I want to expand this idea in light of the series we’ve discussed here and claim: no, there are those who perish without justice also in natural evil, not only in evil stemming from choice. And then the question really does arise: why? Why does the Holy One, blessed be He allow such a thing to happen? And the claim is—and here there really is a not-simple question; I don’t know a good answer to it. If you think everything is justified, then there’s no problem, there’s no question. But that sounds unreasonable to me. If it’s not justified, then there’s a good question: why does the Holy One, blessed be He allow such a thing to happen? Not only allow it, but actually created it—He created these laws of nature. My claim is that He had no choice. He couldn’t do otherwise. Because there is no other system of laws that would do all the work except for the problems of suffering and distress. And since that’s so, then He had no other option. That is the price paid in order for the world to operate according to rigid laws, for the laws of nature to be rigid laws. And that seems to me to be the answer that I at least can give to this question of evil. And in that sense, on the one hand, this thesis that the Holy One, blessed be He is not involved can be seen as something that sharpens the question even more. If He isn’t involved, then why not? Let Him intervene to prevent it. So what I’m saying is ostensibly difficult in a theological sense. On the other hand, it seems to me that that is only on some theoretical plane, but on the practical plane it only improves the situation in terms of the questions about evil, about “the righteous who suffers.” Why? Because as I said earlier, in the end it’s hard to deny that people suffer, including people who do not deserve to suffer. So of course you can bury your head in the sand and say: we don’t know, but really everyone who suffers deserved to suffer. So whoever is willing to buy that line, fine. But someone who says: no, I’m not willing to compromise on common sense, and my common sense and my observations tell me that people suffer not necessarily because they deserve to suffer—then the question exists no matter what theology you present. The question is before us because it is a result of facts. Facts, and interpretation of course—an interpretation that in my view is very reasonable—namely, that it is not true that everyone who suffers is someone who deserved to suffer. The facts are that suffering comes to people not always in a way calculated according to their spiritual or moral debts and merits. And then this question—explaining that the Holy One, blessed be He has all kinds of reasons one way or another won’t help. In the end, people who don’t deserve it suffer. Why doesn’t He do it differently, achieve His results in some other way He chooses? Why do innocent people have to pay the price? Therefore I think that the way out I am proposing is the only possible way out. The Holy One, blessed be He does evil—assuming He is not simply evil—so why does He do evil? Because He has no choice. Because He could not have prevented this evil. Why not? Because apparently there is no way to create the world in such a way that it will function as the Holy One, blessed be He wants, only without the elements of evil. There is no such thing. Therefore, in my view, this is an answer and not an objection. In other words, this thesis that the Holy One, blessed be He is not involved seems to me to improve our situation regarding the question of evil, not to worsen it. Now I want to continue a bit further. This statement I just made—that basically the Holy One, blessed be He has no choice, He cannot create a world in which these elements of suffering and distress would not exist—sounds itself like a problematic statement. What do you mean, the Holy One, blessed be He cannot? He is omnipotent. That means He is above all rules and laws, and He can basically do whatever He wants; He created the rules and laws. So what does it mean that He cannot? “Who can say to You, what are You doing?” In other words, how can I say about the Holy One, blessed be He that He cannot? So here there is an interesting point that I only saw yesterday—I talked about it in some class. There’s a very famous passage by Rabbi Kook in the second volume of Orot HaKodesh where he discusses the problem of perfection and self-perfection. And the claim basically is that the Holy One, blessed be He created the world and us because He needs us, what the medieval authorities (Rishonim) call the secret that service is a divine need. In other words, that our service—our service of the commandments, our service of God—is needed by the Holy One, blessed be He. We do things for Him; that is, He wouldn’t manage without us. Usually we are used to thinking that we are limited creatures, and of course we need Him; we can’t manage without Him. But He—He is omnipotent, He is perfect, He doesn’t need us. But there is what the medieval authorities (Rishonim) call the secret that service is a divine need: the Holy One, blessed be He does need us. I once brought an example of this from the a fortiori argument in the book of Jonah. Right? At the end of the book, the Holy One, blessed be He causes a gourd to grow for him to give him shade, and then sends a worm and the gourd withers, and an east wind, and so on. And then the Holy One, blessed be He says to Jonah—Jonah asks to die—and the Holy One, blessed be He says to Jonah: “Are you so deeply grieved over the gourd?” He says to Him: “Yes, I am deeply grieved, even unto death.” He says: “You had pity on the gourd, for which you did not labor and which you did not raise, and should I not have pity on Nineveh, the great city, with one hundred and twenty thousand people and many animals?” So the a fortiori argument is supposedly: if you had pity on the gourd, then shouldn’t I have pity on an entire city full of people and animals? So what do you want? It’s as though Jonah asked the Holy One, blessed be He not to pity Nineveh. Right, the whole dispute throughout the book is basically the question whether to pity Nineveh and allow them to repent or not. So the question, of course, is what kind of a fortiori argument that is. Jonah did not pity the gourd; Jonah had pity on himself. It’s like the fishermen and the fish in that old comedy sketch. Right? The fisherman loves fish? If he loves fish, then why does he catch them? In other words, he loves himself, not the fish; he wants the fish for himself. So too Jonah needed the gourd to give him shade. He didn’t really pity the gourd; he wasn’t moved by the poor gourd as a gourd. He missed the gourd because he wanted shade and he was hot. So what kind of a fortiori argument is that compared to the Holy One, blessed be He and Nineveh, where the Holy One, blessed be He doesn’t need Nineveh? He has pity on Nineveh. So what sort of a fortiori argument is this: you had pity on the gourd, and should I not have pity on Nineveh? Jonah didn’t pity the gourd. So I once spoke about this—I think I said that I spoke about it once in Yerocham in the yeshiva. It was the day after Yom Kippur. We always used to go pray at sunrise on Mount Avnon there above the big crater. So after the prayer I talked a bit with the guys, and I told them I had two answers to this question. One answer is very relevant nowadays: the fact that Jonah had an interest does not mean he didn’t pity the gourd. That’s just our criminal mindset. When we see someone performing an action that yields some good result for him, it is obvious to us that he did the action for the sake of the result, for self-interested reasons. Okay? But that doesn’t have to be so. It could be that a person does an action because it is a good action and he wants to do what is good, and as it happens he also profits from it. But it doesn’t have to be that he does the action for the profit as an impure motive. Right? See, for example, Hanan Crystal and all kinds of political interpretations, where every time you see that some politician has an interest, it’s obvious to you that what he did was for the sake of that interest. But not necessarily. It may be that he does it because he really thinks that this is the proper way to act, though true, it also helps his interests. Fine, let’s try to look with optimistic eyes. In any case, so here too it may be that Jonah indeed had an interest—he needed the gourd—but that doesn’t mean—if the Holy One, blessed be He says Jonah had pity on the gourd, He presumably sees that Jonah really had pity on the gourd. True, Jonah had an interest, but besides that he really did pity the gourd. Then the a fortiori argument is a good one: you had pity on the gourd, so should I not have pity on a whole city? “For which you did not labor and which you did not raise,” which came up overnight and perished overnight. In other words, it lived only one night and then dried up. Big deal, fine. And should I not have pity on Nineveh? With one hundred and twenty thousand people and animals and a whole city that has existed for many years, and so on. So that’s one answer. And this answer carries a big lesson for how we look at the world. This is a Marxist way of looking, after all. Every time someone does something, the Marxist asks what he gains from it. Why does he do it? What interest is he pursuing? Right? It’s a Marxist interpretation of reality. Marxists are always looking for the plots, the interests, the power games that lie behind events, behind the actions of people, of groups, and so on. And that’s not always true. Sometimes people do things because they really think they are right, that this is the proper thing to do. Even in cases where they profit from those things, that still doesn’t mean they do them for the sake of the profit. I once mentioned the Eglei Tal, who says there is absolutely no defect, no problem, in studying Torah and enjoying it. On the contrary, it even improves the learning if you enjoy it. But to learn in order to enjoy—that really is learning not for its own sake. In other words, what is expected of us is to learn and derive enjoyment from the learning, but not to do the learning for the sake of the enjoyment. Exactly the same distinction I’m making here. Okay? The second answer to Jonah’s a fortiori argument is the opposite answer. That is, before I explained that Jonah did not do it because he needed the gourd, and therefore I put him on the same plane as the Holy One, blessed be He in relation to Nineveh. Now I’m making the opposite claim: the mistake was not in the interpretation of Jonah, the mistake is in the interpretation of the Holy One, blessed be He. We assume that the Holy One, blessed be He does not need Nineveh; He merely has pity on them. But that’s not necessarily true. It may be that the Holy One, blessed be He needs Nineveh, exactly as Jonah needed the gourd. And again, the a fortiori argument is perfectly fine, because both operate on the same plane. Both are interested parties. Jonah is interested in the gourd, and the Holy One, blessed be He is interested in the people of Nineveh. He needs them. They do things, they work for Him; that’s why He created them. Because apparently He needs them to do things for Him. And if so, then the Holy One, blessed be He too is an interested party, not only Jonah. So you can apply Hanan Crystal in the theological realm too. In any case, what am I basically trying to say? That the Holy One, blessed be He needs us. Now the question that comes up is: how can that be? After all, He is perfect; He can do everything by Himself. How can it be that He needs someone or something other than Himself to do things for Him that He cannot do? And especially creatures housed in material bodies like us, formed from matter, limited and weak—and us He needs? Are there things we can do that He cannot? So here there is a very interesting twist in Rabbi Kook in Orot HaKodesh, where he speaks about the problem of perfection and self-perfection. And he says there is one thing that a perfect being cannot do. By definition. And that is to perfect itself. A perfect being, by virtue of being perfect, apparently cannot perfect itself, because if it is perfect, then it cannot become more perfect than it is now. To perfect oneself means to become more perfect than I am now, to improve. Okay? But a being that is perfect cannot improve. So what? Fine. Here one would have to elaborate; I won’t go into it now. But the claim is that improvement has value in and of itself. One of the forms of perfection is being in the process of perfecting yourself. That’s what Rabbi Kook writes. Likewise, the Sages say that a penitent is greater than a completely righteous person. Why is a penitent greater? Seemingly, if he succeeded in becoming a complete penitent, then he arrived at being a completely righteous person, so now they’re the same thing? No, a penitent is greater. Why is he greater? Because the penitent is not only completely righteous, he is also becoming righteous, yes—he is improving, he is undergoing a process, he is progressing. It’s not only that he is a completely righteous person. There is value in progress not only because it brings you to the level of a completely righteous person, but the very fact that you were in a state of progressing—that itself gives you points. In other words, there is value in the process, there is value in self-perfection, not only because it brings you to perfection, but the very fact that you are perfecting yourself is itself something of value. Okay, that’s the claim. And then something very interesting comes out here. It turns out that precisely the perfection of the Holy One, blessed be He turns Him into one who lacks something. Because if He is perfect, then He cannot perfect Himself—there is something He cannot do. And the Holy One, blessed be He created us so that we, as deficient creatures, would perfect ourselves. And once we perfect ourselves, that brings from potential to actuality the potential for self-perfection that exists in Him as well. That is what Rabbi Kook writes there. I once wrote an article about this. It connects to various scientific and philosophical fields, but I won’t get into that here. In any case, I only want to show that sometimes these claims—that if the Holy One, blessed be He is perfect, then no, then… there can’t be things He can’t do—are not correct. Sometimes precisely because He is perfect, that does not allow Him to do certain things, for example, to perfect Himself.
[Speaker B] Isn’t that like the stone that the Holy One, blessed be He can’t lift?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, it’s the same thing. The stone that the Holy One, blessed be He cannot lift—because He can do everything, there is some limitation that follows precisely from His being omnipotent, and that limitation is that He cannot create a stone that He Himself cannot lift. There is no such stone. Or in another example. That will come,
[Speaker B] It will come.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, no, but that has to come now, just a second. Okay, I already don’t remember, I had something else there. Yes, there are already people who know my canonical examples, I see them here in the chat. Right, so basically the claim is that no, these examples, all these examples of… right, so maybe let’s take— I don’t even remember anymore whether this is the example that slipped my mind or not. The example of Puss in Boots, yes, another one from my list of canonical examples for this issue. Puss in Boots—everyone, I assume, knows the story. The miller died and left his property to his three sons. To one he gave the flour mill—the miller’s son, yes—he gives him the flour mill, to another he gives some other property, and to the youngest child he gives the cat. The fellow doesn’t know what to do—how is he supposed to make a living from a cat? So the cat says to him, don’t worry, I’ll set you up, everything will be fine, just buy me boots. He buys him boots, the fellow goes, the miller’s son goes to bathe in the river, takes off his clothes. Of course the cat hides the clothes, and just then the king passes by with his beautiful daughter, and the cat goes to the king and says, my lord, the count is bathing here in the river and they stole his clothes—perhaps the king has some clothes to give him? You can’t leave the count without clothes. The king of course gives him clothes, and then he invites the king to his palace. So the cat runs to… he has no palace and nothing, of course. So the cat says to him, keep going down this road, at the end there’s a palace, that’s the palace of my lord the count. Of course it’s the palace of the terrible sorcerer. So the cat arrives at the terrible sorcerer’s palace, and when he enters the palace there, the sorcerer turns himself into a lion, like this, to scare the cat. The cat says to him, wait, wait, just a moment. He says to him, look, I see you can turn yourself into a lion—can you also turn yourself into a mouse? He says, of course—poof! He turns himself into a mouse, and then the cat devours him and invites the king, and from then on they live happily ever after. The interesting question for our purposes is whether the terrible sorcerer really can turn himself into a mouse. So in the analogy I’ll ask it this way: can the Holy One, blessed be He, turn Himself into a human being? Apparently He is omnipotent, He can do anything. And if He turns Himself into a human being, I’ll shoot Him in the head, I’ll kill Him. So what will you say? That it will be a kind of human such that when I shoot Him in the head He doesn’t die? Then that’s not a human being. He didn’t turn Himself into a human being, because when you shoot a human being in the head, he dies. So can the Holy One, blessed be He, turn Himself into a human being or can He not turn Himself into a human being? The answer is no, He cannot turn Himself into a human being. Why not? This again is a limitation that stems from His omnipotence, from His perfection. Because one of His perfections is that His existence is necessary. And if He turns Himself into a human being—by definition, a human being is not something whose existence is necessary. You can shoot him in the head and finish him off. But the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot turn Himself into someone who does not exist; He cannot remove Himself from reality; that too He cannot do. So He also cannot turn Himself into someone whose existence is not necessary, into someone who can be eliminated. Okay? These deficiencies too, that exist with the Holy One, blessed be He, are deficiencies that stem דווקא from His perfection. They are not deficiencies despite His perfection. They are deficiencies that arise from within His perfection. Okay? His very perfection generates these deficiencies. And therefore, essentially, the Holy One, blessed be He, needs us—imperfect creatures—in order to create the possibility of covering the… that is, doing things He cannot do, things that as a perfect being He cannot do. So that basically means that yes, definitely—even the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, is perfect does not mean He has no deficiencies. It sounds bad when I say such a sentence, but that is the reality. There are deficiencies that stem from the very fact that you are perfect, and you cannot do things because of your perfection. Now in our case, okay, they mentioned here the shell and the wall, because the question is whether someone can create a shell that penetrates every wall and a wall that withstands every shell. Would the omnipotent one be able to do that? The answer is of course no, He cannot do that. Because if that wall withstands every shell, then there will be no shell that penetrates it. So there is no shell that penetrates all walls, and vice versa. Okay? It can’t be, or the stone that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot lift, or all sorts of things of that kind. But in our case it’s like squaring the circle.
[Speaker B] What? It’s like squaring the circle.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, right, like squaring the circle. Squaring the circle is a better example. Why? Because really, the question whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a circular triangle or square the circle, or as Maimonides writes in The Guide for the Perplexed, whether He can create a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side— in a square the diagonal is longer than the side, right? Can the Holy One, blessed be He, create a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side? The answer is of course no, He cannot.
[Speaker B] But that’s by definition, not by exa—exactly.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Here it’s different from the previous examples, because here this is not a limitation that stems from the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He. He cannot be limited—He cannot do it because He is perfect. His perfection is what creates the list of deficiencies I gave before. Here I’m talking about something else. Here I’m talking about the inability to do something not because of your perfection, but despite your perfection. And that is already a harder statement. The question is whether one can say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is limited not because of His perfection, but despite the fact that He is perfect, there are still some limitations that even He cannot overcome. And my answer is yes: logical limitations. He can do miracles, He can work against the laws of nature, He can leave things in the air so they won’t fall to the ground, or I don’t know, do all kinds of things against the laws of nature. He cannot bypass the laws of logic. That is a limitation. And then the claim, essentially, is that if I want Him to square the circle or make a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, the answer is that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do that because there is no such square, because there is no concept of such a square. It’s not just that such a thing does not exist in reality; rather, the concept itself contains an internal contradiction. Therefore the concept, as a concept, does not exist. Not only is it not instantiated in our world, but this concept does not exist even in the world of ideas. There is no such concept. So when I ask whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can actualize a non-existent idea—well, you cannot actualize a non-existent idea. If the idea does not exist, then it also cannot be actualized. It’s impossible not because you are not clever enough or strong enough or powerful enough; it’s impossible because it is undefined. There is no such thing. There cannot be such a triangle, a triangle that is circular. A circle is not a triangle. Or a square—its diagonal is always longer than its side. You cannot produce a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, because otherwise it would not be a square. Okay? There are other shapes where a diagonal can be shorter than a side—in a rhombus, for example, a diagonal can be shorter than a side, one of the diagonals is shorter than the side. Fine. But not in a square. So the point is that there is here some other kind of limitation, let’s call it that, which is not a limitation that stems from perfection, but rather a limitation despite perfection. That is, there is a certain kind of limitation that even someone who is perfect and omnipotent cannot crack, and those limitations are the limitations of logic. The Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, He cannot square the circle, He cannot. Now here it really is a question how it can be that the Holy One, blessed be He, is limited. If I am willing to accept a limitation that stems from His very perfection—those were the previous examples. But how can there be a limitation that exists despite perfection? In other words, the question is, in different words, what I said earlier: the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create a system of physical laws in the world that does all the work the current system does, but without the suffering. Why? My claim is: because there is no such system of laws. Exactly like the circular triangle or the square whose diagonal is shorter than its side. This limitation stems not from the perfection of the Holy One, blessed be He, but despite His perfection, because even a perfect being cannot get past or circumvent the laws of logic. That is basically the claim. Now why is that true, or how can one say such a thing? Because basically I think that when we say “a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side,” we feel that here we are describing some kind of object that may not exist in reality, but we are describing something. But that is just an illusion. This concept—“a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side”—is simply a meaningless collection of words. Because if it is a square, then its diagonal is not shorter than its side. If its diagonal is shorter than its side, then it is not a square. You can’t say—you can’t talk about a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side; that set of words is meaningless. So when I ask whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, first of all, if someone asks me that question, I’ll tell him: first explain your question to me. That is, I do not understand the concepts that appear in your question. If you can explain the question to me, I can try to think of an answer. But in the question you are using— it’s like asking me whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can bla bla bla bla bla. What am I supposed to answer to such a question? You are basically giving me a collection of words behind which there is no pointing finger, no meaning, and therefore such a question cannot be answered. It’s not that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side; rather, “a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side” is a meaningless collection of words. That’s all. Therefore it is not correct to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, can do it, and it is not correct to say that He cannot do such a thing. When one says a sentence that includes that collection of words, one has said nothing.
[Speaker B] So how can one speak of a deficiency? What? So how can one speak of a deficiency?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I’m saying this is not a deficiency. Unlike the previous examples, there, let’s say, the inability to perfect Himself is a deficiency. But here it really is not a deficiency in the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s not true that He can’t do it; rather, there is no such thing to do. You haven’t presented before me the entity about which you’re asking whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make it. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. What do you want me to answer? I can’t answer a question when I don’t understand what it means; it means nothing. So here it’s not even a limitation of the Holy One, blessed be He. It’s not a limitation. I’m saying—it’s like what I wrote in one of my recent columns—I said people think that a point has length zero. But in the standard conception, unless you start getting into the hair-splitting of measurement theory, in the standard conception a point’s length is not zero. A point has no length. That is something different from saying that its length is zero. When something has zero length, that means it has length, and its length is zero. A point has no length in the sense that it cannot be described in terms of length. Because length describes things that have at least one dimension, and a point’s dimension is zero. Therefore the concept of length does not apply to a point—not that a point’s length is zero. The concept of length is not relevant. It’s like saying that a good character trait is triangular. The attribute triangular is not relevant with respect to a good character trait. You’re mixing categories that don’t belong together. Here too, when you speak about the length of a point, it’s not correct to say that the length is zero; rather, it has no length. That’s the meaning of the matter. So too in this context, when I say that the Holy—I’m not saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side. I’m claiming that there is no such square. Once you show me what this square is, I can think about whether the Holy One, blessed be He, can make it or cannot make it. Okay? But there is no such thing. So what’s going on here? I’ll tell you what I think confuses people, those who insist that the Holy One, blessed be He, can also make a unity of opposites and all the rest of this meaningless chatter. What confuses people when they say such things? We are used to this—especially today, or not only today but ever since Aristotle, though today it’s much stronger—we’re used to the fact that every domain has its own laws. There are the rules of the basketball association, the chess association, there are traffic laws, the laws of physics, the laws of the State of Israel, the laws of logic. Meaning, every domain has a system of laws governing that domain. Okay? And there are many systems of laws in many domains. And in the domain of logic too there is a system of laws called the laws of logic. But that terminology is misleading. There is no such thing as laws of logic. The laws of physics are laws, or the laws of the State of Israel are laws, because someone legislated them. He could have legislated differently, and he chose to legislate specifically those and not others. So we say these are laws because someone enacted them. But no one enacted the laws of logic. There is no other system of laws of logic that might have existed here, and someone decided to establish these laws of logic rather than some others. They were not passed into law. Legislation is choosing one system out of several possible systems. But the laws of logic are not one system out of several possibilities; there are no other possibilities. These are principles embedded in reason itself. There is no alternative, there is no other system of logical laws. And because of that, when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject in quotation marks to the laws of logic, people become uncomfortable. It’s like saying that He is subject to the laws of nature, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent—He is not subject to anything. True, He is not subject to the laws of physics, because the laws of physics are laws, just as He is not subject to the laws of the State of Israel. But He is subject to the laws of logic, because being subject to the laws of logic is not really subjection. And these laws are not laws in the usual sense; they are not something someone decided upon, so how could it be that the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject to something someone decided on? This is simply the nature of things. Meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, is subject in the sense that anything outside logic is not relevant. It is not relevant even with respect to the Holy One, blessed be He, because it does not exist; it is meaningless. In that sense He is subject, in quotation marks, to the laws of logic, but that is not really subjection, as I said before. It is not really subjection; rather, the point is that another logical system simply does not exist. Consequently the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot create a world with a different logical system. My claim is that the inability with respect to an alternative system of physical laws, one that would do everything the current system does except for the bad phenomena—I claim that if there really is no such system, and that is a mathematical statement, there is no such system—then that is exactly like saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot make a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side. Since we have here a logical impossibility—or not impossibility, lack of definition, not inability, but logical lack of definition—therefore this is not a limitation on the Holy One, blessed be He. To say that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do something that is impossible on the logical plane is an extended, borrowed use of the term cannot. It is not true that He cannot; there simply is no such thing. If there is no such thing, then I cannot say that He can, and I also cannot say that He cannot; it is simply undefined. That is the claim. When you ask me why the Holy One, blessed be He, does not make such a system of laws that does everything the current system does but without evil, that collection of words is meaningless. There is no such system. Just like a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side. Omnipotent—when I say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, what am I actually saying? That anything that can be conceived, anything that can possibly be done, the Holy One, blessed be He, can do. That is what it means to be omnipotent. But if something is not conceivable, it is not defined, it cannot possibly be done, then when the Holy One, blessed be He, also cannot do it, that is not a limitation on His ability. It does not detract from His being omnipotent. What would detract from His being omnipotent is only something that in principle can be done, and nevertheless He cannot do it. Then I say, wait a second—but that is a deficiency. But if there is something that in principle cannot be done, then the fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do it—it’s not that He cannot, it is not a limitation in His ability. It is not because He is not strong enough, or sophisticated enough, or wise enough, or something like that, but simply because there is nothing there to do. And therefore it does not detract from His omnipotence. By the way, let’s say the inability to perfect Himself can indeed detract from His omnipotence. The Holy One, blessed be He, is not omnipotent, because He cannot perfect Himself, and there it really is inability, because I, for example, can perfect myself as a deficient being. The Holy One, blessed be He, cannot perfect Himself. So in that sense, specifically the first set of examples I brought really does challenge the statement that the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, because in those examples you see that there are things which in principle can be done, and the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do them, so He is not omnipotent. The other examples I brought, like the logical examples—a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, squaring the circle, or I don’t know what, or creating a system of laws, assuming there is no such system, a system of laws that would do everything the same except for the bad things—all those things are cases of logical lack of definition, and therefore there is no limitation here on the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He. So in that sense, on the one hand this sounded more novel than the first examples; on the other hand it is less novel, because here there really is no limitation whatsoever on His omnipotence—we are just babbling words that have no meaning. By contrast, in the first examples, that limitation which arises from His being omnipotent is a real limitation. He really is limited, He really is not omnipotent. There are things He cannot do. Because He is omnipotent, He cannot do them; He cannot remove Himself from the world. Okay, so that’s just to complete the picture regarding the problem of evil. And along the way I also discussed the question whether we can speak about any limitations or things that the Holy One, blessed be He, cannot do. Now I want to use this discussion for the last section I want to touch on now, and that is the question of foreknowledge and free choice. The line of thought that I have basically sketched until now distinguishes between passive providence and active providence. Passive providence means that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows what is happening in the world. About that there is no dispute—He can, He knows everything, everything is fine, everything is revealed before Him. What I have challenged throughout this series is the thesis of active involvement, namely that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not act in the world. He knows, He follows what is happening in the world, but He does not act in the world—passive providence as opposed to active providence. Now I want to make a claim that narrows this down even further. If you remember, everything came in the context of withdrawal. I started from a discussion of withdrawal, and then I said: what does it mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, withdrew Himself, removed Himself from the world? So I said, for example, that He stops being involved in it; His providence is no longer active—that is part of the removal. He leaves us the management of the world, the management of history, and He is no longer involved. But passive providence still remains in place. The Holy One, blessed be He, still follows what is going on here and knows everything that is happening. And now I want to take a bite even out of passive providence—that is, to go one step further, to deepen even more this literal withdrawal, the removal of the Holy One, blessed be He, from the world. Meaning, there are certain things—that is, the Holy One, blessed be He, is no longer involved in the world, He does not act in the world, that was my first claim. Now I want to claim that there are certain things that the Holy One, blessed be He, also does not know about the world—not only does He not act in it, and this already cuts into the thesis of passive providence, providence of knowledge even without involvement. And here, of course, I am speaking about events that depend on human choice. And that brings us to the question of foreknowledge and free choice. I have dealt with this in the past already, but here I bring it only to complete this picture of the relationship between the Holy One, blessed be He, and the world. I bring it as the cherry on top of the withdrawal, of literal contraction. I want to claim that there is another dimension here of withdrawal: withdrawal from knowledge of what will happen in the future, or what human beings will choose to do in the future. And the claim is basically what Maimonides asks in chapter 5 of the Laws of Repentance. Maimonides asks: if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything in advance, then how is it possible that we have freedom to choose? After all, if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows today what I will do tomorrow, then I have no option tomorrow to do something different, because then it would turn out that today the Holy One, blessed be He, did not know correctly. That cannot be, because He is omnipotent, He knows everything. So therefore, if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows today what I will choose tomorrow—that is basically the question Maimonides asks, and of course many others ask it too, and much ink has been spilled over it. Now in this context, once again, everyone assumes that both sides of this dilemma must be true. Because on the one hand the Holy One, blessed be He, is omnipotent, so He knows everything—about the present, the future, the past, everything He knows because He is omnipotent. On the other hand, we have free choice, and the claim is that these two things do not fit together. Now there are various more or less heroic attempts to reconcile these two dogmas—yes, “everything is foreseen, yet permission is granted”—people always latch onto that Mishnah in Ethics of the Fathers, although I do not think that is what it means. Some commentators on the Mishnah do think so, but it seems to me the Mishnah is not saying that. In any case, the claim is that it is impossible to reconcile the—on the one hand both sides are true, and on the other hand they do not fit together. Yes, there is a paradox here, a real paradox. Now of course immediately there are those claims that say: true, but the Holy One, blessed be He, is above logic, and therefore He can both know in advance what will happen and we can still have free choice tomorrow to do what we want. But as I said before, assuming there is a logical contradiction between the Holy One’s knowledge today of what I will do and my ability tomorrow to choose freely what I will do, then logical contradictions are something even the most accomplished omnipotent being cannot get through or get around. And therefore to say that is like saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, can make a round triangle. Meaning, this is really some sort of claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above logic, because the contradiction here is apparently a logical contradiction. And therefore there is no such thing. The Holy One, blessed be He, is not above logic, and so one has to look for explanations—so how nevertheless, on the one hand, is He omnipotent, and on the other hand do we have free choice? So what do we do? So Maimonides, as is known, says: because His knowledge is not like our knowledge, and so on, and that this is a difficult question and the answer to it is profound and we cannot understand it, and so on and so on. And the Raavad comments there against him and says: this author did not follow the way of the sages. Yes, sages don’t ask questions they have no answers to. Sages—that’s another name for lawyers. Lawyers, as is known, do not ask a question unless they already know in advance what answer they are going to get. In court, the recommendation is never to ask a question unless you know in advance the answer to it, otherwise you may find yourself facing surprises. So the Raavad’s claim is that Maimonides too was no lawyer; he did not follow the way of the sages, because he asked a question to which he has no answer, and one does not ask such questions, because it confuses the public. Personally, if you ask me, I am entirely with Maimonides in this dispute. I think that even if there are questions with no answers, one should put them on the table and honestly admit that there is no answer to them, and then decide what to do with them. But various suggestions have nevertheless been offered in order to reconcile these two principles, and I would divide them into three types. When we formulate—or present—this contradiction between the Holy One’s foreknowledge and free choice, there are three components here. One component is the omnipotence of the Holy One, blessed be He, in that He knows everything, including the future. The second component is the assumption that we have free choice. But that is not enough; you also need the time axis. Meaning, you also need the Holy One’s knowledge to already be in His possession before I choose. Without that assumption we still do not have a contradiction, we do not have a paradox, right? In order to arrive at the paradox, you need all three components: divine knowledge, our free choice, and the temporal relation—that is, that divine knowledge comes before we choose freely. Because if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows after we choose, that raises no problem at all. I too know what you did after you chose; that is no problem. The problem arises because our assumption is that the Holy One, blessed be He, knows before we choose. So the time axis is an essential component in creating this contradiction or this paradox. Now the answers to this question are basically divided according to those three components of the problem. There are those who pin it on our free choice and say: if the Holy One, blessed be He, knows in advance, then we do not have free choice. Simple mistake—human beings have no free choice. There are those who attribute this to Rabbi Hasdai Crescas in Or Hashem. There are formulations there in the first part of the book; in the second part there are somewhat different formulations, but he apparently presents a deterministic view. And in various places in Rabbi Tzadok too there are those who want to claim that such an idea appears, although there there are tons of contradictions, as is the way of Hasidic writers—good luck building a coherent system out of that. So the claim, the first possibility, is to say: okay, I give up that component of free choice. There is some paradox here, and one somehow has to deal with it. These three things together don’t work, so I give up the component of free choice. Others give up the component of time. What does that mean? The Holy One, blessed be He, is above time. He is not above logic; He is above time. And because He is above time, He can know in advance even a choice that a person has not yet made. Unlike human beings, who cannot know something before it happens, the Holy One, blessed be He, can. Now one has to understand that for a future natural event, you could say such a thing. Why? Because a future natural event—my not knowing it is not a matter of principle; it is only because I do not have sufficient computational power. If I had sufficiently strong computational power, and you gave me the complete physical state of the world right now, I could calculate what its physical state would be in another five minutes or another year. Okay? It is only a question of computing power, as Laplace said: give me the state of the world today, all the data, and in principle I will tell you the entire history until the end of days. So that is only a problem of computational power, and the Holy One, blessed be He, has no problems of computational power, so He can compute it and know everything that will happen in the future. All this is with respect to natural events. But events of choice—the problem there is not a problem of computational power. The problem is that you are speaking about information that does not yet exist. Or in other words, let me put it this way: suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, can obtain information from the future, stretch out a hand, as it were, forward along the time axis, pull out information and bring that information back to Himself—something human beings cannot do. Then this thesis, that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above time and can pull information from the future, answers the question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, has the information before the event happened. But the question of foreknowledge and free choice is not that question at all. The question of foreknowledge and free choice is the opposite question. Assuming the Holy One, blessed be He, has the information now, how is it possible that I tomorrow still have free choice? What is the answer to that? Suppose the Holy One, blessed be He, reached into the future, pulled out the information, and brought it to Himself. He is omnipotent, He knows, He can pull information from the future. So now He knows what I will do tomorrow. Fine—but if He now knows what I will do tomorrow, then tomorrow I have no option not to do that. Meaning, no problem—you can say that He pulls information from the future into the past, but you still have to explain to me: assuming the information is in His possession, how is it that tomorrow I have free choice? I am not omnipotent, I am subject to the time axis and to all the logical constraints and everything else—so how can I choose freely? Suppose I choose the opposite of what the Holy One, blessed be He, knew yesterday. So what then—how can that be? Will it turn out that yesterday He did not know correctly? Meaning, this answer that hangs everything on the order of times is an answer that apparently addresses the wrong question. It does not answer the question of foreknowledge and free choice; it answers the question of how the Holy One, blessed be He, obtains information about the future. So they say: He obtains information about the future because He is omnipotent. But the question of how I can choose freely after that information is already in His possession—that is a different question. Therefore the required way out is a third way out: to give up the third component in the procedure, and that is the component of divine foreknowledge. The Holy One, blessed be He, does not know in advance what people will choose in the future. He truly does not know. Why? Because it is impossible both to know in advance and to leave a person free choice. Assuming there is a logical contradiction between these two things, then obviously they cannot both hold. The Holy One, blessed be He, is not above logic, as I said before, and that is why I also need the introduction I gave earlier. These things, by the way, appear in the Shelah. In his introduction to the book there are ten “houses,” one of them is called the House of Choice, and there the Shelah writes this: the Holy One, blessed be He, does not have information about future events that depend on a person’s choice. He does not know what will happen in the future. But there is an interesting comment by the Or HaChaim. In chapter 6 of Genesis, on “for I regret that I have made them,” there the Or HaChaim discusses the question of foreknowledge and free choice, and he wants to argue that the Holy One, blessed be He, prevents Himself from knowing the future in order to leave us freedom of choice. That is how he resolves the contradiction between the Holy One’s knowledge and our freedom of choice. But of course that does not answer the question. Why? Because suppose the information—the Holy One, blessed be He, withholds the information from Himself—but the information still exists in some form. Does the Holy One, blessed be He, simply close His eyes and not look at it? If the information exists, I still do not have free choice tomorrow, because the information about what I will do exists. The fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, closes His eyes and does not look at that information solves nothing. In this context I cited Richard Taylor’s story in his book Metaphysics. When he talks there about fatalism, he tells the story of a teacher in the American Midwest, Osmo, who one day comes to the library in his town, and there in the library he sees on one of the shelves a book with the title “The Story of Osmo.” That’s the title of the book. Interesting—exactly my name. He opens the book and starts reading. The book describes how Osmo was born on such-and-such a date to such-and-such parents in such-and-such a place. Everything is precise, exactly him. Then he went to kindergarten and had such-and-such friends, then he went to school and had such-and-such a teacher, and his grades were such-and-such, and everything matches his biography exactly. It is simply a book about him. And then of course he keeps going and reading further, and he got married and became a teacher in some rural town in the Midwest, and so on. And then one day he entered the library—so it says in the book, everything is written in the book, yes? One day he enters the library and sees on the shelf a book called “The Story of Osmo,” and he pulls it out and starts reading. And all this is written in the book. Okay? At this point Osmo is already hysterical. How can it be that this book contains the information about everything he went through, everything he did? He dared not look at the next page, because the next page would already describe what would happen to Osmo tomorrow, the day after, in another year, and in ten years. But in the end he could not resist, and he kept reading further, and there it said that after, I don’t know, three months—just making it up—after three months Osmo would crash in a plane over New York. He was in utter hysteria, because the book had been perfectly accurate in every stage up to that point. So apparently the book also knows the continuation, and in fact he is going to die within three months. In short, three months pass. Osmo had to fly somewhere, but he decided he would fly in exactly the opposite direction from New York. He does not want to fly toward New York; he wants to fly somewhere else. So he boards the plane, they fly in the opposite direction. A storm begins, and the pilot announces over the loudspeaker: there is no choice, I am turning the plane because of the storm, and we are going to head north, yes, toward New York. Osmo goes into complete hysteria. He enters the captain’s cabin, the cockpit, and starts fighting with him so that he will not turn the controls. And of course, because of that struggle, the plane crashes over New York. Yes? Like Appointment in Samarra, if you like, or Pygmalion—no, not Pygmalion, what is it called? I forgot. The mythological story about fatalism too. Oedipus? Huh? Oedipus. Oedipus, exactly. By the way, in Appointment in Samarra I think one of the mottos was Oedipus. Anyway, the interesting question here is: what would have happened if Osmo had not read the book? The information would still be there in the book in the library on the shelf. In principle, assuming that information is accurate information, it has nothing to do with the question of whether Osmo read the information or did not read the information. The information is there. And what is written in the book is apparently what is going to happen to Osmo in the future. It’s just that even if he reads the book he cannot avoid it, because the information is accurate, it is fixed, the book knows. In other words, Osmo’s future does not depend on whether he looked in the book or did not look in the book. More than that, it does not depend on whether anyone ever read the book. As long as there is such a book containing all the information, assuming that information is correct, then that is what is going to happen to Osmo in the future. Or in other words: if there is information about what will happen in the future, events that I am going to choose what to do about, then even if the Holy One, blessed be He, closes His eyes and withholds that information from Himself, does not look at it, I still do not have free choice tomorrow. The contradiction is not between the Holy One’s knowledge and my freedom of choice. The contradiction is between the existence of the information now and my freedom of choice tomorrow. Even if no one knows that information, if the information exists in principle, then tomorrow I have no free choice. Therefore this answer of the Or HaChaim, who says that the Holy One, blessed be He, withheld this information from Himself, does not solve the problem. It is like saying that Osmo will not open the book. So if he does not open the book, he will not crash in three months? He will crash anyway. Rather, I do not know if this is what the Or HaChaim meant, but according to the principle of charity I will attribute it to him. And what I want to argue is the following claim: the Holy One, blessed be He, withheld the information from Himself—meaning, the Holy One, blessed be He, decided to give us free choice. By doing so He withheld the information from Himself. Meaning, He could have created us without free choice, and then He would have had the full information also about what will happen in the future. But once He decided to create us with free choice, by that very act He withheld from Himself the information about what we would do in the future. It is not that the information exists and He simply does not look at it. Rather, by the very fact that He gave us free choice, that itself prevented the information from existing. He actually prevented the information from existing, not that the information exists and He simply does not look at it. By giving us free choice He prevented the information from existing. That is the claim. Or in other words, if my act is the result of free choice, then it cannot be that the information about what I chose exists before I chose. Therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, had to decide between two possibilities: either to know the future, but then nobody has free choice—to know the future fully, but then nobody has free choice—or to give people freedom of choice, but then obviously He would not know part of the future, namely the part that depends on people’s choices. There is no option both to give us free choice and to know in advance. That is a logical contradiction. He can choose either this or that. The Holy One, blessed be He, chose to give us free choice, and by doing so to withhold from Himself knowledge, at least of part of what is going to happen. And perhaps this is what the Or HaChaim means when he says that the Holy One, blessed be He, withheld knowledge from Himself. The meaning is that by the very fact that He gave us free choice, knowledge is withheld from Him. Not that the information exists and He simply does not look at it. If we have free choice, then the information does not exist. And if that is so, then the Or HaChaim too is basically saying that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. By the way, also in Maimonides, whom I cited earlier, when Maimonides says “because His knowledge is not like our knowledge,” everyone understands Maimonides to mean that the Holy One, blessed be He, is above logic and above time, and therefore He both knows and we still have free choice. I think Maimonides means to say that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not know. That is what he means. When we speak about the Holy One, blessed be He, knowing the future, we do not mean knowledge in the sense that we speak of; rather, something else, I do not know exactly what. But knowledge, information in the plain sense in which we use that term about the future—He does not have that. Because otherwise we would not have free choice. “His knowledge is not like our knowledge” implies that our kind of knowledge, that He does not have. What He has is some other kind of knowledge, not the knowledge that we call knowledge. Fine, so that is something else—why should that interest me? But this knowledge He does not have. And therefore I think Maimonides too is basically going in this direction. But for our purposes, this is really where I end the series. For our purposes, what I want to summarize and say is that in the context of knowing the future regarding actions that depend on choice, that is where contraction goes the farthest. Because there it is not only that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not involved in what I will do, because I have free choice—that we already discussed in previous lectures—but here I want to claim that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not even know what I will do. Not only is He not involved; there is no passive providence here either, not only no active providence. There is passive providence after I have done it. After I have done it, the Holy One, blessed be He, of course knows and passively oversees after it happened. But to know in advance what is going to happen—He does not know. And if that is so, then this is another slice that takes a bite, yes, out of the Holy One, blessed be He, or expands the contraction, the space from which the Holy One, blessed be He, contracts. Contracts or withdraws. Not only involvement in the world, but even knowledge of what happens in the world—knowledge, part of what happens in the world, He does not have. Concerning future events that depend on choice, even the knowledge, even the knowledge regarding that, the Holy One, blessed be He, does not have. And again, one should not be too troubled by the question how this can be, how there can be a limitation on Him, because as I said in the previous discussion, where the limitation is a logical limitation—it cannot both be known in advance and still leave free choice—logical limitations apply also to the Holy One, blessed be He, not only to us. Therefore this is not a blow to His omnipotence, because you cannot know information that does not exist. Just as you cannot create a square whose diagonal is shorter than its side, because there is no such square, so too you cannot know information that does not exist. And information about future choices is information that does not exist. How can one know such information? There is no such thing; the information does not exist. Okay, we’ll stop here. If anyone wants to comment or ask something—and as far as I’m concerned, this is the end of the series.
[Speaker B] Announcements to the group about the next series.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What will the next series be?
[Speaker B] What’s the title of the next series?
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I, I’ll send it. Along the way sometimes you need to remind me when I forget, so remind me, but I’ll try to remember and send it.
[Speaker B] Okay, more power to you.
[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Anyone else want to comment, ask, then you can. Okay, so goodbye, good night.