Thank you for the reply.

As for 1 and 3, I understood. As for 2: I still did not understand how the problem is solved. After all, there is also the choice of how much force to invest in the choice, and about that choice too one could say that there is a choice about how much force to invest in it… (that is, how much force to invest in the choice of how much force to invest, and so on and so forth). There is an opening here for an infinite regress.

I’ll jump into the discussion and ask a question around the same issue—

Suppose there is a person who is completely rational, all of whose actions are based entirely on reason. Then for him, a rational consideration inclines him much more strongly. By contrast, a person who is not so rational needs much more effort in order to follow reason.

So is there a difference in the reward received by these two people? That is, for the first one, it’s “no great feat” that he conducts himself according to Torah, since reason almost compels him, so will he receive less reward than his fellow who exerts more effort? And if so, is that not unequal—that some people in potential can receive more reward than others (but also less Gehinnom)?

And while we’re at it, is it possible that a person who is pure intellect, a Platonic idea, would receive no reward at all for the commandments he fulfills, since he is compelled to follow reason? Maybe the answer is simply that no such person exists, but if so, then so be it.

Haggai,
It is clear that at the base there is always choice, but there is still a difference. After all, the fundamental problem they are trying to solve here (weakness of will) is that if a person failed, that is a sign that from the outset that is what he wanted. But when the choice is whether to choose or not, then it is possible that he really did not want to fail, but decided not to choose, and therefore failed (theoretically, if he had understood that he would fail, maybe he would have chosen to choose). In my opinion, this solves the problem of weakness of will, although there is still room to analyze it further.

Chaim,
Who said life is equal? There are major inborn differences between people not only in this area. When Moses our teacher was born, rays of light shone from his face. As far as I know (from my parents), that did not happen at my birth.
The question of equality is completely different from the question we are dealing with here.

But Rabbi Michi, even if we believe that at your birth the skin of your face did not shine, since then a lot of water has flowed in the stream descending from the mountain, and your face shines, glows, and beams!!

Am I the only one who sees the resemblance? http://www.creationism.org/images/DoreBibleIllus/bExo3219Dore_MosesBreakingTheTablesOfTheLaw.jpg

With appreciation

Actually, it seems to me there’s a resemblance to the one lying below. The face seems very similar to me. 🙂

Rabbi Michi,

So if I understood you correctly, we are talking here only about a prior choice—whether to choose or not in the next choice. But about such a choice too one could say that you chose to choose it or not… And in addition, I do not see how the issue of the amount of force invested in the choice enters the picture here (only a black-and-white choice—whether to choose or not).

You’re not following what I wrote. I explained the problem of weakness of will, which forces us to arrive at the choice to choose. That problem does not exist with respect to the choice to choose, so there is no need at all to continue the chain onward. Indeed, one can also say of that choice that I chose it. But here there is no need to get to that, because the problem of weakness of will does not exist. I did not want to choose, but I also did not want to eat pork.
The strict continuous logic here is not really important, but this is the truth (that there are different levels of intensity in this choice).

Regarding the question what would happen if everyone chose not to enslave, it seems to me that the first option the Rabbi gave for what would happen perhaps should be upgraded to something like this: the Holy One, blessed be He, decreed regarding the collective (of the nations) that one of them would enslave Israel. That is, the collective has no choice whether to enslave Israel or not. The particular nations have a choice up to the moment when only one nation remains, whose turn has now come to choose, and all those before it chose not to enslave. Now it no longer has the ability to choose not to enslave… To the extent that nations rush to choose not to enslave, there is in parallel a focusing of the collective lack of choice, little by little, onto the group of those who have not yet done so. Apparently, in the structure of reality there is no situation in which everyone can choose at the same moment. Maybe this also explains the relation between personal individual choice and a kind of statistical laws with respect to a fixed and given crime rate in a given society. In order for that itself to change (for the collective to merit choice), something has to change on the level of the collective itself. It seems to me that in such a formulation the second option the Rabbi gave merges with the first (and in addition the improbability presented in the second becomes irrelevant—that is, if the collective has choice then it can also choose the option that is currently improbable and the soccer ball will also pass through the wall. Perhaps this is a quasi-mechanical explanation for miracles in reality).

Ayalon, I did not understand what you gained by shifting your discussion to nations instead of individual human beings. You are copying the argument I wrote about people onto nations.

I wasn’t trying to gain anything. It wasn’t specifically about nations; I forgot that in the book the Rabbi argued that the decree was upon the Egyptians as a whole and not upon each individual. I simply somehow remembered from Maimonides that there was a decree upon one nation among the nations, and Egypt chose to be that nation, but I no longer remember—it doesn’t matter. My point is that the Rabbi’s formulation of the first option is childish—what, as if the Holy One, blessed be He, is like a human being who does all sorts of things? (In the second formulation it is a bit less problematic, though it is still problematic; there it does not appear as though they managed to fool Him. He decreed a decree, and since no one wanted to be the stick, something changed in reality and the decree was nullified, as a kind of nice reward for humanity.) I (out of a physical-scientific intuition) simply wanted to give a quasi-mechanical mechanism for the loss of choice. And also to say that the decree was on the collective (which includes the Jewish people) and not specifically on the Jewish people. There was a decree that a specific part of the collective (the Jewish people) would be enslaved by some other part, whoever it might be. And here there are two options according to the Rabbi: 1. Either the collective has no option to escape the decree through the private choices of its parts (and then I would argue that despite this, the collective as a whole still has choice as an entity that is more than the sum of all its parts), 2. Or, if no part is found that chose to enslave, then that itself is a kind of good choice of the collective as a whole, and therefore the decree will change (an alternative way out).

In my opinion this adds nothing at all to what I am arguing. The Holy One, blessed be He, gives a forecast about a collective (of individuals or nations), and each individual still has free choice. Therefore there are only the two possibilities I wrote.

Not exactly. I argue that according to the first option, not every individual has free choice. The last individual, who did not choose to choose not to enslave, has no choice not to enslave—and this is from the outset, without the Holy One, blessed be He, having to forcibly compel someone to enslave (after everyone chose not to). If the Rabbi argues that necessarily every individual always has free choice, then indeed I only added a different formulation (which in my humble opinion is no less important. New language = new thought). In any case, to say that all the individuals have choice and all choose the good, and then the Holy One, blessed be He, comes and forcibly compels one of them to enslave, sounds too crude to me (and not especially economical). Therefore it is not a good way out. The simple intuition of free choice for every person is correct when abstracting from the collective to which he belongs. This can also be seen without any connection to the decree about the Egyptians and the enslavement. There is interaction among people, and sometimes because of these interactions the freedom of choice of individuals in a society is reduced because of the actions of other individuals in it, due to external constraints that exist on the society as a whole. (Like the story of fixed percentages of crime, which look like a law of nature, and result from the fact that the criminals always come from the less developed segment of the population, while level of development is a relative matter. What kind of crime it is—murder or tax evasion—depends on the norms in that society. Like the comparison between secular society and religious and Haredi society.))