According to the questioner, how can one assume the metaphorical nature of the World to Come / reward and punishment / the future to come in light of the explicit verse: "The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, righteous and upright is He"??

What's the problem? There is no injustice, and therefore He threatens punishment in order to straighten people out. But why assume He also carries it out? Is that justice—to punish for no benefit at all?

So in your view this is a reasonable possibility? That the concept of "punishment in the World to Come" is only for deterrence? If so, where is the fairness toward those who observed even the slightest commandment as carefully as the gravest one? Or perhaps in the world of souls nobody will care anymore about the fairness of the previous world.

"Is that justice—to punish for no benefit at all?"
So you mean that even if someone murders masses of people, there is no point in killing him or making him suffer if the killing will not create deterrence or prevent him from murdering again in the future? And there is even a commandment to treat him kindly as usual too, because, 'why not'?

Hi Tzach, actually I meant the reward part, not the punishment. A person who all his life observed all 613 commandments—will he be identical to someone who didn't observe them? That seemingly makes no sense.
If I accept the assumption that there is cause and effect, and that there is a super-rational entity that created and dictated all the processes in nature, and gave the Torah to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai, why should I assume that it would invent reward and punishment and create unfairness between the righteous and the wicked in future reward? To me that sounds like a hole in the moral perfection of that entity.

It seems that we still have not managed to properly understand how Rabbi Michael Abraham's view of providence and so on fits together with belief in some kind of "future to come" (with the various interpretations of that term). After all, the Torah explicitly speaks about reward and punishment, as for example in the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, where it explicitly says: "Keeping kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; yet He does not completely clear, visiting the iniquity of fathers upon children and upon children's children, upon the third and upon the fourth generation." And following that, the prophets explicitly speak of a "future to come" involving a Day of Judgment and the like. How do all these fit smoothly with the positions of Spinoza / Leibowitz, and, to distinguish between them, Rabbi Michael Abraham?
Thank you for the response.

I have no idea, and nobody else does either. I don't see any point in dealing with these issues. It's all speculation.
I wrote in a book and elsewhere that personally I too tend to think there is something after death.

Rabbi Abraham, I don't understand why you don't "connect" to this topic. Why is proving the existence of God easier / more important than proving reward and punishment?
In my view, the question of the reality of God and proving His existence is less relevant and important than the question of His relationship to human beings.
After all, that's the whole point. Otherwise what is the point of proving that there is a divine force external to nature—just for philosophical fun?

Rabbi Michi,
I'm not sure that punishment or reward in the World to Come is meant as a threat. It could be that the World to Come, which is called the "World of Truth" or the "World of Recompense," is the place where the world exists as it ought to according to the "justice of law." In the present world we do not see that God leads creation according to principles of justice, so it sounds reasonable to assume that in another world the divine judgment is carried out. In that world, it goes badly for the wicked and well for the righteous. So there is indeed room for punishment in the future to come.

It's not a question of connecting. The question is whether there is a reliable way to reach a conclusion. In my opinion, there isn't. A collection of inventions and speculations, nothing more.
Beyond that, the existence of God and commitment to His commandments are, in my view, also far more significant than reward and punishment. But as I said, I don't see any point in discussing all this, or even in discussing discussions on these topics.

Actually I think this discussion is important in order to sharpen the justice policy that we apply in our world. Seemingly, according to your approach, where there is no deterrence or prevention of any harm, there is no place to punish a criminal in human law solely for the sake of doing justice. I seem to remember that somewhere you wrote to me that this is God's role (seemingly in contradiction to what you wrote above).

Even if you are right, we still have no tools to reach conclusions. And therefore what happens is that we apply our own concept of justice to the Holy One, blessed be He, and from that decide whether there is reward and punishment in the World to Come or not. So in any case this will not help us formulate our conception itself.