Q&A: The Contradiction That Cannot Be Whitewashed
The Contradiction That Cannot Be Whitewashed
Question
The contradiction that cannot be whitewashed
Your honor claims that morality and Jewish law are two separate domains:
Jewish law on its own, morality on its own.
They can clash, and that’s fine—just like chocolate is tasty but fattening.
One says “tasty,” the other says “unhealthy”—and both are right.
Sounds reasonable, right?
Except there’s one small problem here:
Your morality is not a matter of taste.
It claims to be an objective, ontological, metaphysical truth.
And Jewish law, too, is supposedly derived from that same divine source.
So how can it be that God, who is absolute good,
would command something immoral?
How can “the absolute good” forbid love between two men,
or command the destruction of an entire people?
If morality is embedded in God’s very essence,
then God cannot command evil.
Such a command is not a “legitimate conflict”—it is a logical contradiction.
It is equivalent to saying that 2+2=4 but “in a broader context” also 5.
Why the chocolate example is irrelevant
“Chocolate is tasty but fattening” is a dilemma between relative values:
pleasure versus health.
Both are true—from different points of view.
But “a divine command against morality” is a contradiction between absolute principles.
Not personal taste, but a question about the structure of reality itself.
Ordinary moral dilemmas (loyalty versus compassion, justice versus kindness)
take place within morality, between two human values.
They are not a contradiction on the metaphysical plane.
But if God is the source of morality itself and the one who gives it validity,
and He commands an act that contradicts that very morality—
then this is no longer a dilemma, but a collapse of theological logic.
The conclusion
It is impossible to hold two absolute truths that contradict one another.
Either morality dictates Jewish law—or Jewish law nullifies morality.
If morality is part of God’s essence,
then any immoral command is not truly divine.
And if Jewish law is binding even when it is immoral,
then morality is not embedded in God, but detached from Him.
In simple words:
You cannot believe in a moral God and in His name accept immoral acts.
Because a God who forbids love in the name of a “higher good”
is not moral—He is merely an authority.
Answer
I was very impressed by the decisiveness, but it does not cover up a complete misunderstanding on the logical level. There is no connection whatsoever between the question of the objectivity of morality and God’s good nature, and the question of immoral commands. I have explained this ad nauseam countless times. Of course, if you didn’t read it or insisted on not understanding it, then indeed this is a “contradiction that cannot be whitewashed.” But the claim itself is utter nonsense.
Discussion on Answer
I’m sorry, but there are not two words here that connect in a logical way. You are describing no problem other than the imaginary one that I have already solved every time I dealt with this question. If you want a response, you need to formulate a problem. Short and clear. What are the premises, and where is the contradiction. I promise you that you will not manage to formulate such a thing.
Here is the formulation you asked for—short, clear, and logical.
Premises:
1. God is good by nature (His goodness is inherent, not arbitrary).
2. Morality is an objective truth derived from that same metaphysical good.
3. There are divine commands that appear or are defined as immoral.
Necessary conclusion:
If (1) and (2) are true, then (3) cannot be true, because a command that contradicts morality contradicts God’s nature.
If (3) is true, then one of the first two premises is false:
either morality does not derive from God’s nature, or God is not good by nature.
This is a simple logical contradiction, not an emotional one and not a theological one.
The problem is not how I “understand” you, but how you avoid confronting the logical structure that you yourself create.
The claim that “there is no contradiction here” is equivalent to saying that A and not-A can coexist so long as we do not formulate them in symbols.
Indeed, a bit shorter. But not at all clear, and certainly not logical. Just nonsense dressed up as a logical formulation. Not only is the conclusion incorrect. That is obvious. It also does not follow from the premises. So there is both a logical problem here and a philosophical-theological one. Since I have explained this very point countless times, I will do so once more briefly and be done.
The Holy One, blessed be He, is absolute good (inherent, shminherent, and whatever else you like). Therefore He always desires the good. But He also desires other goals (religious ones), which are achieved only through halakhic conduct. Sometimes this clashes, and therefore there are situations in which the halakhic instruction conflicts with the moral instruction. In those situations the religious goal requires doing X, and the moral goal requires not doing it or doing the opposite. For example, killing an Amalekite baby or the prohibition regarding a mamzer, you may see a moral problem here, but the religious value still requires one to act that way. There is not the slightest shred of a problem in this, neither logical nor any other kind.
This is no different from a situation in which the Holy One, blessed be He, who desires the good and also desires human free choice, allows people to choose evil. And it is also no different from situations in which there is a clash between two moral values (with no connection to Jewish law), and such a situation does not mean that the one who created the situation is not absolute good. The chocolate example that I have repeated many times makes this very clear. The Holy One, blessed be He, created a world in which we are sometimes required to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save lives. Does that mean that He wants us to desecrate the Sabbath (that is, does not want us to keep it)? Or does it mean that life does not matter to Him? You would not need to explain the stupidity of that even to a kindergarten child.
In short, either you do not understand or you insist on not understanding. Either way, the discussion is pointless and foolish. That’s it.
Rabbi,
I understand that you want to close the discussion, but a response to your remarks is unavoidable,
because there is clearly a fundamental missing of the main criticism here.
My response:
Adding “religious goals” alongside divine goodness does not solve the contradiction—it only deepens it.
The moment you claim that God is “absolute good” but that there are additional values that can override this good,
then His goodness is not absolute but limited.
An “absolute good” that can be bypassed in the name of another value—is no longer good, but a relative preference.
Your comparisons are fundamentally mistaken:
Free choice is not a relevant example—there human beings sin against God’s will, not according to His command.
And desecrating the Sabbath to save life is not a contradiction but the implementation of an internal hierarchy within that same halakhic system.
Neither of the two resembles a situation in which God Himself commands an act defined as immoral.
The chocolate example is not analogous at all:
it describes two subjective tastes, not two objective norms.
To compare personal taste to the question of a contradiction between two metaphysical values—that is intellectual evasion, not an explanation.
In the end, you are talking about a God who is “good” as long as that is convenient for His other goals,
and about an objective morality whose entire validity disappears the moment it contradicts the command.
This is not a logical system—it is an ad hoc theology trying to hide an unbridgeable gap.
If in your view this is “not a logical problem,”
then apparently even the principle of contradiction has already been defined by you as a separate domain from logic.
I read the polemic here between the two of you, and I do not judge others but only myself, and I have to say that the one who is evading here, or does not understand, or both together, is Michi’s argumentation, which misses the depth of the definition nicely formulated by Joseph. But on the other hand, from the style of the wording here, I feel that Joseph enlisted ChatGPT. However that may be, in any case an argument is an argument, and it has to be dealt with even if it came out of the head of a golem.
Absolute good can command the doing of evil acts.
From the fact that He is absolute good it does not follow that He must command only good acts.
Response to “I Get It”
Your intuition is misleading you, because you are projecting onto “absolute good” the human understanding of good.
When we talk about human beings, it really does sound reasonable to say:
“A good person can sometimes do an act that seems bad, in order to achieve a greater goal.”
But that is true only because our good is relative—we balance different values, make judgments, err, and compromise.
By contrast, when you say “God is absolute good,” you are speaking about an essence in which there is no internal split.
“Absolute” means that there is nothing above it, no value that can override it, and no external goal that justifies deviating from it.
If you say that absolute good can command evil,
you are in effect saying that this good is not truly absolute,
but rather something that can be bypassed when there is a sufficiently good reason.
But that is already relative good—not essential good.
This is exactly the intuitive trap:
You are trying to understand God through the mechanism of human morality—
but by definition, “absolute good” is not good like ours, but a principle that is wholly good,
and therefore cannot will evil without ceasing to be what it is.
In simple words:
If He is absolute good, He cannot command evil.
And if He can command evil—then He is no longer absolute good.
There is no logical way to bridge that gap.
Rabbi, to say that there is no connection between the question of the objectivity of morality and the question of divine commands—
is a claim that does not solve the problem, but merely hides it behind different terms.
If both morality and Jewish law carry independent metaphysical validity,
then necessarily there are two absolute normative principles within one reality.
And if they contradict each other, then this is not a “legitimate dilemma” but an ontological contradiction.
You cannot maintain that God is good by nature, while simultaneously insisting that His commands may be immoral,
and then say that “there is no connection” between the two.
If there is no connection—then God’s good nature has no practical meaning;
and if there is a connection—then an immoral command cannot come from Him.
That is, one of two things must be true:
Either morality is an objective metaphysical truth—and then God too is bound by it,
or it is an independent realm, in which case God is not the exclusive source of the good.
In both cases, your claim that the conflict is legitimate collapses.
To claim that the contradiction stems from misunderstanding is easy;
but logic is not mistaken:
if two absolute values clash,
they are not “two legitimate domains,” but two principles that contradict one another on the fundamental plane of reality.
This is not an emotional problem and not a misunderstanding—it is a logical problem that cannot be sidestepped by rhetorical declaration.
Therefore, the question is not “did you understand me correctly,”
but whether your system can survive the test of consistency.
And so far, it has not.