Q&A: Perceiving the Greatness of the Creator Is Pure Rationalism
Perceiving the Greatness of the Creator Is Pure Rationalism.
Question
Hello and good evening,
In the past you wrote that the matters of the soul’s survival, reward and punishment, and the resurrection of the dead are not, in your view, essential to faith, and that you personally do not see great importance in these things within religious faith (whose essence, according to your teacher and rabbi Leibowitz, is simply that one must serve God, period). Is that not, in fact—with all due respect—anti-rational in a certain way?
And I’ll explain what I mean:
In many writings and lectures by rabbis such as Rabbi Cherki, Rabbi Sherlo, Rabbi Lau, Aviner, Eliyahu Rahamim Zeini, Rabbi Melamed, Rabbi Zvi Tau, Rabbi Mordechai Lau, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Micah Goodman, Yoav Sorek, and the like, and sages who are no longer with us (such as Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Maimonides, Ramchal, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Shadal, Baal HaSulam, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Yehuda Amital, Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, Rabbi Rabinovitch—all of blessed righteous memory; and studies also show that Heschel was careful in commandment observance and came to the seminary in order to bring Conservatives closer to Judaism. I’m saying in advance that I know his name, among most Torah-and-commandment observant Jews, is associated with the Conservative movement), one finds a statement in various formulations that part of perfection in knowing the Creator, believing in the Creator, and serving Him is also the assumption that He is a God of justice, who wants to benefit His creatures and lead the world to a state in which there will be justice and integrity—an ordered world. And in the Talmud we also find that the Holy One, blessed be He, does not withhold reward from any creature, and there is also the famous midrash about the tears of mamzerim. Is it not a deviation from simple logic not to assume with certainty that if the Holy One, blessed be He, exists and gave His Torah, and also commanded us to live by certain codes and sometimes suffer because of them, we will ultimately be rewarded for this? (Or, to put it in an extreme example: does a line of thinking in which the Holy One, blessed be He, lets a Holocaust victim, who observed even minor commandments as carefully as major ones, suffer and be tormented all his life, and then supposes that it is possible that in the end he will also receive no reward at all—doesn’t that make the Holy One, blessed be He, look ridiculous? Is this very claim, with all due respect, not a desecration of God’s name, bordering even on the prohibition of cursing God, for which Noahides are executed?)
And conversely, doesn’t the thought that wicked people who act lawlessly all their lives and enjoy this world without any disturbance will ultimately receive no punishment make the Holy One, blessed be He, look anarchic? And ridiculous? Doesn’t this to some degree suggest that the world is ruled by laws in which the wicked win and survive, while the upright, who walk in the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He, come out the losers?? Is there any greater mockery than that of the Creator’s image? Has it really never occurred to the Rabbi, in complete seriousness, without cynicism or mockery, that his own faith and service of the Holy One, blessed be He, are:
A. clearly irrational and contrary to common sense?
B. and again, I am not joking at all, causing a definite Torah-level transgression of desecration of God’s name, and coming very close to violating the prohibition of cursing God, in my humble opinion.
I know the Rabbi usually answers that this topic does not interest him and should not be motivation for serving God. But the point is that, in my humble opinion, this is not motivation or a tool for serving God; rather, it is truly an essential part of loving God and the obligation to serve Him.
With blessings,
The Complete Monotheist.
Answer
First, Leibowitz is not my teacher and rabbi. Not that it matters.
Second, your arguments may be correct, but that does not make them a principle of faith or something important. Just as 1+1 cannot equal 3. And still, 1+1=2 is not a principle of faith.
Discussion on Answer
1+1 cannot be 3. But 2+2 can be 0 in modular arithmetic. And just as that is an arbitrary game with agreed-upon symbols that man concocted in his mind, so too it misleads you. But the difference is that in arithmetic this is proven here and there, whereas what he says here is based on faith. You’ve reached a correct conclusion; the Sages already addressed it: “Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper?” I answer as the Talmud says in Megillah [13b]: because he is righteous. That is not to say I justify the way of the wicked, only that “the wise man has his eyes in his head,” like Jacob, who acted as a brother in deception with Laban, whereas “the fool walks in darkness.”
And all this is being said in earthly terms. In Torah terms, I justify the way of the wicked.
Now you’ve moved on to a new tune. At first you spoke about how all these things are necessarily principles, and now you’re shifting to argue that it is important to discuss them because otherwise there will be a desecration of God’s name. That is a different discussion. It’s worth deciding what exactly your claim is, otherwise it’s hard to have a discussion.
I’ll tell you briefly what I think on both issues. In my opinion there is a fairly good chance that all three of these things (the soul’s survival, reward and punishment, and the resurrection of the dead) are true. But I do not see them as principles of faith. They are the result of logical considerations, more or less, and not necessarily a tradition from Sinai. Some of those considerations are what you wrote here.
In my opinion there is not much importance to this discussion, since we have no way to decide it. Is it true or not? Arguments can be made either way. Is it a principle that came down from Sinai? I don’t know how one proves that. Whoever thinks that without this the Holy One, blessed be He, comes off badly—let him adopt it. There is nothing to prevent that.
At the margins of my remarks I’ll just note that even according to your own view, the Holy One, blessed be He, doesn’t come out looking great. The Holocaust happened according to your view too (unless you deny the Holocaust). You too are supposed to have an explanation for why it happened, and why God-fearing and righteous people were murdered there indiscriminately. I didn’t invent the question of “why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.” If you think the resurrection of the dead or the World to Come explains it—good for you.
Whoever talks about the greatness of the Creator is ultimately talking about his own greatness.
In short, it comes from stupidity and chutzpah.
I didn’t claim these are principles of faith in the sense of labeling someone an apikoros / heretic and saying that whoever doesn’t believe them isn’t Jewish. Rather, he is lacking in common sense if he doesn’t believe them, and halakhically it is indeed possible that indirectly he is causing a Torah-level prohibition.
The Holocaust, the Crusades, the pogroms, the murders—not only of Jews but of all the inhabitants of the world—are explained by the fact that in the World to Come there is reward and punishment, and these things happen because man has free choice. Through these events man can advance, understand the source of evil, and repair the world under the kingship of the Almighty. The question of suffering is ancient. But no Jewish sage, or even the nations of the world, would claim that in the end there is no justice, and that the way of the wicked succeeds with no judgment and no judge.
I really don’t understand what the relevance is of whether this came down from Mount Sinai or not. As far as I’m concerned, it could have come down from the moon that the prophet Muhammad split.
The Last Decisor,
watch your mouth.
According to your approach, every attempt to fulfill and understand the will of the Creator comes from chutzpah and stupidity. So come onnn, let’s all become heretics and atheists already. Humble nihilists who know nothing.
Anyone who tries to understand the will of the Creator is stupid and insolent and denies Moses our Teacher.
Moses our Teacher got the closest and brought the Torah. And that’s it. That’s where it ends.
Any attempt to understand the will of the Creator not according to Moses our Teacher is denial of the Torah and of Moses.
Too bad the prophets, the Sages, the medieval authorities, and the later authorities didn’t know that. And that providence had to send us The Last Decisor to explain it to us.
The Complete Monotheist,
Do you have an explanation for “the righteous suffers and the wicked prospers”?
Of course they knew it.
You just don’t understand that they knew it.
I explained what I had to explain. I don’t see any point in repeating it.
The explanation for “the righteous suffers” is “the wicked prospers.”
If he were truly righteous, there would be no such thing as “the wicked prospers.” (The righteous person would make sure there was no wicked person, or that he did not prosper.)
All the best.
I truly and seriously hope that your rationality won’t stop only at things your eyes can see, and that you learn to become a complete and profound rationalist in the fullest sense of the word. May your study hall be filled with students, and may your service of God also be on a higher level.
A.,
Indeed,
reward and punishment are the correction for the injustice in this world.
A.,
and evil in general is caused by free choice, which intensifies the ability to develop and choose good even when everything around is dark, in the sense of: “In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man.” And through the evil that is gradually exposed, man also learns to advance and know what good is, on the way to redemption, as the Rabbi of blessed memory wrote in Orot HaMilchama.
Dear Decisor,
academic conspiracy theories don’t interest my grandmother.
The Complete Monotheist,
So allow me to tell you that your thinking is distorted. Even if there were clear proofs that there is a World to Come, that would not at all justify the injustice in this world. What is this, a sadistic game? Second, evil is caused by free choice, but it also encourages it. Whether you like it or not, a person is the landscape of his environment. So he advances little by little toward evil.
What conspiracy theory? If someone is such a righteous person, how is there evil in the world? Why didn’t the righteous person make sure there would be no evil? So apparently he wasn’t so righteous, and for that he is punished.
Reward and punishment are in this world. That is what the Torah says.
Dear A.,
The problem of evil is caused by the fact that man has free choice. From the moment he was created in the Garden of Eden, man could have chosen not to sin, and he and all his descendants after him would have received the Torah, created peace in the world, and lived without the evil inclination. Since man sinned, and the serpent’s filth spread through the world, so too the ability to choose evil arrived—and since then humanity has had freedom of choice: the nations of the world, whether to stop wars, slaughter and murder, plunder and theft, violence and promiscuity, and to settle the world in ways of integrity—then the world would be a Garden of Eden. And for the Jews, whether to invest their lives in Torah study and cleaving to the Creator of the world, and not be dragged after mistakes. If the Noahides and the people of Israel had fulfilled their roles faithfully, there would be no evil in the world.
Decisor,
when I spoke about conspiracy theories I was referring to your statement that the Sages, the medieval authorities, and the later authorities held your approach but hid it.
The Complete Monotheist,
That itself is the question: why did He create him with such a great measure of evil? Second, God set a trap for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. So who exactly are you complaining about? As for what you wrote about the nations of the world and the Jewish people, it does not depend on their choice or on Torah study מצד the Jewish people. It depends on repairing the environment from the root and the influences that cause that evil. For example, the Torah says that one who desecrates the Sabbath is liable to stoning—do you really think that’s normal? It’s a sickness that needs correction.
A certain man went down before Rabbi Hanina and said: “The great, mighty, awesome, powerful, fearless, strong, courageous, certain, and honored God.” He waited for him until he finished. When he finished, he said to him: “Have you concluded all the praises of your Master? Why do I need all this? As for us, these three that we say—had Moses our Teacher not said them in the Torah, and had the Men of the Great Assembly not come and established them in prayer, we would not have been able to say them. And you said all this?” It is comparable to a human king who had a thousand thousands of gold dinars, and they were praising him with silver ones—is this not a disgrace to him?
I didn’t understand.
If the arguments are correct, then indirectly you are desecrating God’s name in public, violating a Torah-level prohibition of blessing God, and more than anything making Judaism look like a sect disconnected from reality, just as you say about your opponents from the Haredi camp.
So how exactly is that not important or essential?