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Q&A: God's Mandate

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God's Mandate

Question

Hello Rabbi, partly בעקבות your latest column (which I still haven’t finished reading), and in honor of the recently released movie Avengers: Endgame, I wanted to ask a question that became sharper for me while watching the previous film.
Thanos is a character who seeks to solve the world’s problems. He tries to obtain a gauntlet that will allow him to thin out, seemingly painlessly, the world’s population so that he can impose order on the world and put an end to our troubles.
And the question that became sharper for me is this (maybe childish, maybe immature, and maybe foolish, but I matured late): what is the difference between Thanos and the Creator of the world? A few distinctions occurred to me:

  1. The Creator of the world derives His mandate from the fact that He created the world, and therefore it is His “right.” Of course I find it hard to agree with such a statement. It may be, however, that we simply have no possibility of judging the morality of God, and we are just fated to accept it.
  2. The Creator of the world knows what is good for us, and therefore it is okay. Perhaps one has to say that He does what is good for the collective, and if a righteous individual is harmed, he will be rewarded in the World to Come. Then there are two factors here: His knowledge, and His ability to repay everyone with good in the final reckoning.
  3. When I presented the question to a friend, he told me that this is a question that arises from a corporeal understanding of the Holy One, blessed be He. But I have already reached the conclusion that my intellect is apparently not refined enough to grasp God not as a supreme power but as something that includes the world, etc., as we already discussed in a previous question.

Thank you!

Answer

I think it is difficult to compare the Holy One, blessed be He, to any other being. First, He created us. Second, He is a completely different kind of being from us, and therefore it is hard to make determinations about Him.
I wrote in my article about gratitude that one who creates something has rights over it. See there (and briefly at the end of the fifth booklet).
As for His being different from us: if I make decisions for my sons, everyone sees that as reasonable. Because I want what is good for them, and I know better than they do what is good for them. Our relationship to the Holy One, blessed be He, is similar. Therefore, He should not be compared to any other creature of our kind, regarding whom one can wonder whether he has the right, whether he really knows something that we do not know, and whether that knowledge is certain.

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