Q&A: Reward and Punishment
Reward and Punishment
Question
I saw you say that there is no reason to believe in reward and punishment in the World to Come, and as for this world you are pretty sure there is no reward and punishment. How do you explain: “And know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, keeping the covenant and the kindness to those who love Him and keep His commandments, to a thousand generations; and repaying those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them; He does not delay with one who hates Him, He repays him to his face”?
Answer
My claim is that the Holy One’s mode of governing the world has changed over the years. Scripture also says that there will be prophets and describes miracles and the like, but all that has ceased today. It seems that the Holy One’s involvement in the world has also ceased. Maybe He makes up for that in the World to Come, and maybe not. I don’t know.
In the verses that appear immediately afterward, reward and punishment in this world are stated explicitly:
12 “And it shall come to pass, if you listen to these ordinances and keep and do them, that the Lord your God will keep for you the covenant and the kindness that He swore to your fathers. 13 And He will love you and bless you and multiply you; and He will bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your land, your grain, your wine, and your oil, the offspring of your cattle and the young of your flock, on the land that He swore to your fathers to give you. 14 Blessed shall you be above all peoples; there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle. 15 And the Lord will take away from you all sickness, and none of the evil diseases of Egypt that you knew will He put upon you, but He will lay them upon all who hate you. 16 And you shall consume all the peoples that the Lord your God gives to you; your eye shall not pity them, and you shall not serve their gods, for that would be a snare to you. 17 If you say in your heart, ‘These nations are more numerous than I; how can I dispossess them?’ 18 You shall not fear them; you shall surely remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, 19 the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs and the wonders, the mighty hand and the outstretched arm by which the Lord your God brought you out; so shall the Lord your God do to all the peoples of whom you are afraid. 20 And also the hornet shall the Lord your God send among them, until those who are left and hide themselves from you perish. 21 You shall not be terrified before them, for the Lord your God is in your midst, a great and awesome God. 22 And the Lord your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will not be able to make an end of them quickly, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you. 23 But the Lord your God shall deliver them over to you, and shall throw them into great confusion until they are destroyed. 24 And He shall deliver their kings into your hand, and you shall wipe out their name from under heaven; no man shall stand before you until you have destroyed them.”
As a matter of fact, I do not see all this around me. What I see is a world proceeding according to its ordinary course. What exactly these verses mean is a good question, but the gates of interpretation have not been locked. (It also says “an eye for an eye,” and it is interpreted as monetary compensation, and there are many more such cases where verses are taken away from their plain sense.) Still, one should not deny what is plainly observable. Of course, there can always be sporadic divine interventions in the world in a way that nobody notices, and that is not what I was talking about. By the way, the Sages already said that there is no reward for a commandment in this world.
Discussion on Answer
Now it’s already empirical! Interesting… Happy is the one who sees what my blind and feeble eyes fail to see.
A good tactic — using words whose meaning you have to check on Google before you can understand the response. It really does sound very high-level.
As for the matter itself, I also don’t see wheat the size of kidneys and lentils the size of gold dinars, even though they preserved some for future generations. Apparently they were lost at some point. But for me it is enough that the Sages testified that there were such grains of wheat and lentils. I also didn’t see what happened in the Holocaust in Europe, and it is enough for me that people testify that those things happened there. But of course, hearing is not the same as seeing.
The problem is that in this verse the Holy One is described as “the faithful God,” meaning that if He changed His mode of conduct, He would be abandoning His faithfulness. And it says, “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice,” and “all His ways” does not mean only in a certain generation. “A God of faithfulness and without injustice” — and if there is no distinction between the righteous and the wicked, how is that not injustice? And it is written in Malachi, after the cessation of prophecy, “And you shall return and see the difference between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who has not served Him. For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, and all the arrogant and all evildoers shall be stubble, and the coming day shall set them ablaze… But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings… Remember the Torah of Moses My servant!”
Reward in this world is national reward. How are you supposed to see it? Are we today really in a state of “if you listen to all these ordinances and keep and do them”?
The times when the Jewish people were worthy of this were few, even according to the Sages, and throughout the entire Second Temple period this happened only once: we find in the days of Shimon ben Shetach that rain fell for them on Wednesday nights and on Sabbath nights until the wheat grains became as large as kidneys, the barley as large as olive pits, and the lentils as large as gold dinars; and they tied some of them up as examples for future generations, to make known how much sin causes, as it is said: “Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have withheld the good from you.” And in any case we hear from this that they had to preserve them for future generations, to show what happens when “if you listen” is fulfilled, and that the current situation today is only because we do not listen.
If you want to see reward and punishment in this world, look at what happened to European Jewry when they rebelled against God, and what was fulfilled in them was: “He has forsaken Me and broken My covenant that I made with him; then My anger shall be kindled against him on that day, and I will forsake them and hide My face from them, and they shall be consumed, and many evils and troubles shall find them, and he will say on that day: Is it not because my God is not in my midst that these evils have found me? And I will surely hide My face on that day because of all the evil that he has done.”