Q&A: Shall I Go, or Strike the Rock?
Shall I Go, or Strike the Rock?
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi,
I’ll spare your precious time and be very brief, even though this will surely sound stupid.
My model for understanding the world is simple and childish: reward/punishment in the banquet hall in exchange for commandments/sins in the corridor, plus the whole idea of the “bread of shame,” that’s it. End of story.
I suffer from an attention problem and have difficulty reading or listening to deep texts. There’s also no time—there are children and a thousand urgent things to take care of.
And I’m astonished to see mountains of books and lecturers and philosophical systems and Jewish thought and all that! The spiritual world is spinning in hurricanes of ideas (and you too have a considerable part in that).
My childish question is: what’s wrong with my own little plot of God’s earth?! What am I missing here?!
Am I obligated to try anyway and jump into this ocean? To learn to swim by trial and error?
Will God scold me after 120 years for not having read Rosenzweig and Guide for the Perplexed or at least The Two Wagons…?
Maybe I sound cynical, but there’s a lot of pain hidden here.
Thank you
Michal.
Answer
Hello Michal.
I don’t see any cynicism here, and I think I understood you completely, and I very much identify with what you wrote.
I don’t see any obligation to engage in philosophy, and even less so in Jewish thought, which in my view is usually a waste of Torah study. It is a collection of people’s ideas and reflections, which may be true and may not. There is no essential difference between Guide for the Perplexed and any other philosophical book, or between Ethics of the Fathers and Dale Carnegie. The essence of Torah is Jewish law, and if from your perspective there is a sufficient basis to feel obligated—fortunate are you.
To be sure, serving in order to receive reward and avoid punishment is service on a lower level, as opposed to serving God for its own sake. See Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance. It is better to serve God because that is the right thing to do (both intrinsically, meaning that the acts themselves are right, and also in terms of the obligation to obey Him).
Most of what I write is not connected to Jewish thought, except perhaps to dismantling it on the one hand, or to those who need philosophical reinforcement regarding truth and faith / belief. I feel about Jewish thought more or less the way you do.
Discussion on Answer
Michal, I understand that “bread of shame” means that a complete person is the source of his own good/essence.
In my understanding there are two ways to understand this.
The first understanding is connected to the question of from where we draw concepts like “perfection”—is this a social-psychological determination, or something essential, ideal, something that comes from the Holy One, blessed be He? If it is something essential, then the claim is that something that is its own cause is more complete than something that is not its own cause.
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The second understanding is that the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted to bestow good and create the most complete reality possible, and since He is the most complete and is His own cause, He therefore wanted to bestow good and create a reality as complete as possible, one that would itself be the cause of its own good. And therefore He wanted to create a person who would be (relatively!) his own cause, to the extent that he acquires his reward / cleaves by his own powers, etc. I heard this from Rabbi Sherki, if I understood him correctly.
Michal,
It seems to me, by simple reasoning, that God asks of a person only for that person’s own place, not someone else’s. Seemingly, you need to find your own place and your own connection in serving God, not look for it אצל others. For example, I connect to an existentialist approach to Torah and I make use of Rabbi Michi’s thought in the topics he deals with. Rabbi Michi doesn’t like existentialist literature, but that doesn’t really matter to me, because each person has his own path in Judaism. Rabbi Michi’s level of thinking is much higher than mine (he is also older than I am and has years of skill, and is more talented than I am too), and I don’t feel bad about that. Everyone has a different role in Torah. In the end, what matters is love of God and awe of Him, good character traits, and observance of the commandments.
Or, as Rabbi Zusha of Anipoli said: “In Heaven they will not ask me why I was not Moses our Rabbi, but rather why I was not Zusha.”
Thank you very much, Rabbi.
Your answer, which was completely unexpected, will apparently be a significant milestone for me.
By the way, I copied the question and answer (I assume that’s fine from your standpoint) into a Facebook post in a certain group, and it stirred up waves—more than 230 comments so far, and still counting.
So again, thank you, and best wishes for success in your many projects.
🙂
I’m currently finishing the editing of a trilogy, in whose second book I explain in detail what I wrote here. There you’ll be able to see that, in fact, all my elaboration and analysis are ultimately meant to arrive at the conclusions you presented here (that there is no value in Jewish thought, and really there is no such thing at all. What there are, are simply correct and incorrect ideas in philosophy, for whoever is interested. Whoever isn’t can certainly pass it by).
Many thanks.
I think that from the very wording of the question, it is clear that the questioner is uncomfortable with the fact that the banquet-hall-and-corridor theory, with a little support from the bread of shame, is a childish, simplistic, and concretizing theory of the sublime and the inconceivable. The mountains of books and theories written on the subject are an attempt to move beyond that. That does not mean they are correct or that one is obligated to study them. It only means that this requires thought and deeper reflection, each person in his or her own way.