Q&A: In Place of the Previous Post
In Place of the Previous Post
Question
Sorry, something got messed up; this is the corrected version:
With God’s help,
Rabbi Michael Abraham said (the second one; Column 4):
“When joyful events happen to us, such as the establishment of the State of Israel, that is a trigger to thank the Holy One, blessed be He, for the creation of the world and for our own creation.”
And Isaiah said (the second one) in God’s name:
“Everyone who is called by My name, and whom I created for My glory, whom I formed, indeed whom I made.”
And Isaiah said (the third one) in his own name:
“The religious stance, that is, my recognition of my duty toward God, does not stem from the fact that I know that He created the world. Because if He created the world, that is irrelevant to me. And even if you say that He governs the world, what does that mean? That I know, or that I think I know—and in fact, from a subjective standpoint there is no difference between a person knowing and thinking he knows—that an old man sits in heaven and pulls the strings of the world. Does that obligate me to anything?!”
And I said, with less pathos:
If the Holy One, blessed be He, created everything for His own glory and for His own sake, and the Rabbi wants to thank Him for our creation, then ostensibly this is gratitude for the fact that God acted כביכול out of His own self-interest.
In addition, when God demands of us acceptance of the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, He is obligating us to dedicate our lives to His service, while our lives are in fact the reason we thank Him. Isn’t there a logical paradox here?
For these reasons, perhaps Leibowitz said what he said, but I find it difficult to accept.
What is the Rabbi’s view on this matter?
Answer
I’m not sure I understood the questions.
Gratitude, obligation, and ontic recognition of the good are not dependent on the actor’s interest (see my article here on the site about gratitude). True, Rabbi Shimon and Rabbi Yehuda disagreed about this in the Talmudic passage in Sabbath regarding thanking the Romans for establishing marketplaces and bathhouses, etc. But that concerns moral gratitude, which perhaps does depend on that.
In my opinion, we do not need to dedicate our lives to His service, but rather to live them as they ought to be lived. In other words, life is a value in itself and not a means for the service of God. He gave us life not so that we would serve Him, but so that we would live. True, in the course of life there is an obligation to serve Him (that is the correct way to live). And this is the meaning of the verse, “and live by them”—that life is an end in itself and not a means to the commandments. The tanna who disagrees there in Yoma, holding that one may desecrate one Sabbath for him, apparently maintains that life is a means to the commandments. And even according to his view, I have already shown in several places that this is not so.