Q&A: Providence
Providence
Question
Have a good week!
I apologize for bringing up an issue that has already been discussed here to exhaustion, but it is Torah, and we must study it.
I would like to cite here a column by Rabbi Moshe Rat, published in the “Shabbaton” for the Torah portion of Vayishlach:
What Providence Looks Like
There are people who claim that they do not believe in individual providence, because, in their words, “they don’t see it.” It seems to them as though their lives unfold randomly and blindly, according to the laws of nature and probability, and they do not see any guiding hand.
The obvious question is: what exactly are they expecting to see? You cannot determine that you do not see something if you have not first defined what it looks like, so that it is possible to determine with what tools to look for it and how to identify it. By the same token, someone could say that he does not believe in God, because he looked at the heavens through a telescope and did not see Him… The expectations in that case are of course mistaken: God is not something that can be seen through a telescope, and therefore the fact that such an observation did not detect Him does not undermine His existence at all.
So what about providence? Those people apparently hold a naive conception, according to which providence means that anyone who seems righteous will always have only good, anyone who seems wicked will always have only bad, and every prayer will be answered immediately. If that is what providence means, then indeed one generally does not see it. But that description may fit a Disney movie, not providence as it is described in the Bible and in the words of the Sages. They pointed out that the divine system of considerations is complex and hidden, and no human being can fully understand it. An example that illustrates this is the midrash about Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi who accompanied Elijah the Prophet and saw him doing things that seemed completely unjust: for poor righteous people he prayed that their cow should die, for the stingy rich man he prayed that the wall that had fallen should be rebuilt, and so on. Rabbi Yehoshua was unable to understand this, and only when Elijah explained the matter was the justice in it revealed. Similarly, the Talmud tells of righteous people who were punished because God is exacting with them to a hairsbreadth, of wicked people who received reward for some small good deed they had done, and so on.
To deny the existence of providence because “you don’t see it” is like denying the existence of gravity because airplanes and birds “disprove it”—after all, they don’t fall! But the wise person understands that, just as in physics, providence too is a complex system that the ordinary person cannot understand, and nevertheless it operates with precision. It is better to be humble and understand that we see only a small part of the picture, instead of denying everything.
End quote.
And I would like to ask: how do you define that providence that prevailed in the days of the Sages and no longer does? What is the providence that you expect to see and do not find revealed before you? From the writings of the Sages it does not appear that reality in their time looked any different from how it looks today: the questions of how “the righteous suffer while the wicked prosper,” or “Is this Torah and this its reward?” were also asked in periods when providence prevailed, in your view, and yet denying it was not on the table.
If you were to deny the existence of providence even in earlier times and claim that they did not understand reality, fine. But when you claim that providence prevailed and then ceased, while on the other hand there is no historical justification or even hint for this, we are left in some confusion…
Answer
This really has already been dealt with here several times.
I would expect to see, in a controlled experiment, a different situation between someone who prays and someone who does not. Or of course to see an open miracle (a deviation from the laws of nature). At that time there were prophets, and they could tell you that what happened to you was the hand of God even without a controlled experiment and without an obvious deviation from the laws of nature. Beyond that, there were also open miracles then (deviations from the laws of nature), which anyone could witness.
Discussion on Answer
These topics have already been discussed to exhaustion, and the arguments are very weak. If you want to prove that there is providence from the claim that who says there isn’t, then in the same way you can prove the existence of fairies. In my books I explained very well why I think there is no providence (certainly not in the ordinary course of events, except for sporadic cases). I explained there why you too, and all those who wave around providence, do not really think so and do not behave that way.
I truly have already answered everything, and I see no point in going back again and again to such weak arguments.
Argument 1 is not weak; it simply says that one cannot set up in advance a prayer experiment that is scientific-empirical.
Argument 2 is definitely not weak, because if it is true it actually refutes the Rabbi’s entire view.
Argument 3 is also not weak because, like argument 1, it shows (at least in the context of diseases, which I brought as an example) that there is no point in looking for statistical significance among people who were prayed for, and that is because the attribute of judgment has already been sealed.
As for the arguments I wrote in section 4, they can indeed be called “weak,” because there really is no indication that they are correct. But דווקא in our time, when teachings like reincarnation and Rabbi Kook’s doctrine (the unity of reality) are becoming clarified as something very basic in Judaism (and it is a shame that the Rabbi is unable to understand/accept them), there is no reason not to rely on them as a basis for the arguments I raised. All that is needed is to come open-minded regarding these new conceptions in Judaism.
Well, the Rabbi surely knows physicists who progressed from Newtonian mechanics to quantum theory…
Let the readers judge.
Hi,
Your claim is, more or less, that God is no longer involved in history. If I understand correctly, it is based on familiarity with Jewish history and its sacred writings. After all, you believe that in the past God revealed Himself to Israel, but that is over now. That’s it.
Right?
My question: if you were not Jewish and did not have familiarity with this culture, would you reach the same conclusion—that is, the conclusion that God is no longer involved in the world?
No. It is based on looking at reality and understanding that it operates according to its own laws. Therefore I think I would reach the same conclusion.
1. The claim that one should expect a difference in a controlled experiment is not correct, in my humble opinion.
Excessive scrutiny of prayer is forbidden, and that is apparently parallel to the physical “observer effect.”
Our expectation will cause things not to happen as expected.
2. If conducting a controlled experiment is forbidden (as stated, because of the observer effect / excessive scrutiny of prayer), then one can look at data from the past (where there was no such scrutiny/expectation), and see whether there really was a difference between those who prayed and those who did not.
Well, it turns out that according to an article on the website run by Rabbi Dr. Rabbi Moshe Rat (who is one of its leading figures), it actually seems that religious people live longer and are healthier:
https://www.knowingfaith.co.il/%D7%99%D7%94%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%95%D7%97%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%A8-%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%90%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%A8-%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA%D7%A8
3. Even if the above article is not fully convincing (I’d be interested to hear what the Rabbi has to say about it), and in truth it is indeed hard to see a difference between, say, religious patients who were prayed for and secular patients who were not prayed for—
for example, suppose we take 1,000 terminally ill secular cancer patients and 1,000 religious ones, we would see that all of them (or nearly all of them) died. The secular and the religious alike, even though people tore open the heavens with prayers for the religious ones. One cannot see a difference between the two groups, certainly not a statistically significant one.
The explanation may be as follows:
Perhaps one could say that once the illness has already arrived (whether it is a mild fever or terminal cancer), the attribute of judgment has already been decreed upon the person, and from that point the chance that prayer will help is very, very low. Therefore one does not see a substantial difference between a religious patient and a secular one.
That is to say, praying after one is already sick is almost a “cry over the past” (though only almost).
After all, no basketball player who broke his leg the day before an important game expects that if he prays, the fracture will heal; likewise someone with a mild fever (the attribute of judgment has already struck him) cannot be healed through prayer.
Still, one must answer the question why the Sages nevertheless ruled that one should pray in every situation (“even if a sharp sword rests upon his neck…”).
A few answers:
A. It is not a full-fledged case of “crying over the past” (if it were considered such, it would be forbidden to pray).
B. Of course there is the psychological effect of prayer and faith.
C. Although the attribute of judgment has been decreed by virtue of the medical problem itself, prayer can still help in very rare situations.
D. Prayer helps even if the problem is not resolved—in the World to Come, etc.
4. Rabbi Michi does not address Rabbi Moshe Rat’s argument that prayer has effects we cannot see; for example, perhaps because of the prayer the patient’s suffering is far less than it otherwise would have been?
The Rabbi’s perspective is very limited. Who said it has to be binary?
Whether the patient recovered or not?
Likewise, the Rabbi does not address the possibility that the prayer the patient prayed—even though it did not help him now—will help him in a future reincarnation.
Likewise, the Rabbi does not address other arguments like the “bag of merits” that keeps filling up, and also that a person’s prayer may help someone else. For example, suppose someone physically harmed another person, and as a result the victim became sick and paralyzed. After a few years the attacker himself becomes sick and paralyzed, and then he prays for his own recovery, but because everything is unified, the attacker’s prayer actually helps the person whom he harmed a few years earlier.
“I’m telling the truth,” Rabbi Michi believes. The thing is that this truth is very partial and narrow, and one could say that it is not really the truth at all…