Q&A: The Secret of Divine Service: Higher Will
The Secret of Divine Service: Higher Will
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In some of your articles you mention the saying, "The secret of divine service is for a higher need." When I said this line to my study partner, he immediately raised a good question: it cannot be that the Holy One, blessed be He, has needs. Then I thought that אולי one should replace the word "need" with "will." The difference between them is that a need is driven by an inner lack, whereas a will is driven by something else, something higher (like the desire to benefit another—altruism). This also connects for me with your distinction between cause and purpose in the context of free will: our will is purposive and not causal. Need is a cause, not a purpose. For example, when a couple decides to have children, they can do so out of a need for children, or out of a desire for children. The difference between the two is that the need is more egoistic and focused on the parents, who need a child to provide them with a sense of happiness or meaning, whereas the desire is more altruistic and focused more on the children (to benefit them), or on the world (contributing to society), or on the Holy One, blessed be He (the commandment of being fruitful and multiplying), or something else external to the parents themselves. So too, when the Holy One, blessed be He, created the world and commanded commandments, He did not do so out of need, but out of some kind of will—whether a will to benefit His creatures, or some other will whose focus is external to the Holy One, blessed be He.
What do you think of this?
Best regards,
Answer
First, why is that impossible? Second, it is certainly possible to interpret it as you suggest (will and not need; purpose/reason and not cause).
But one should remember that even if you interpret it as will rather than need, human will still comes to achieve some goal. But when the Holy One, blessed be He, was alone and there was no world and nothing at all beyond Him, it is not clear what place there is for His will (to benefit creatures that do not exist? Then He should simply not create them and there would be no need to benefit them). What is that trying to achieve, if not His own self-correction? And if it is His own self-correction, then once again we are back to need.
Discussion on Answer
It is no different. Parents have children for themselves.
Most human beings prefer to continue existing rather than cease existing. That shows that the state of existence is preferable to non-existence. Therefore, when the Holy One, blessed be He, created man, the very bringing of him from a state of non-existence to a state of existence contains a benefit. So too with bringing children into the world: generally, children are happy that they were brought into the world, and therefore bringing them into the world is also an act that benefits the child.
A benefit to whom?
A benefit to the future person who is created, or to a potential person. That is, a benefit does not have to be toward someone who exists right now, but can also be for someone who will exist in the future. For example, a person who plants a carob tree for his grandchildren to eat from. Clearly he does so in order to benefit them even though they do not yet exist.
That is a matter of definition. But intuitively, benefit in its moral sense exists only toward someone who exists. To measure a benefit, you compare two alternatives, with and without the benefit. If in one of them the subject of the benefit does not exist, there is no room for comparison.
But according to that, the ending of a person's existence is also not a harm, because there is no room to compare the state before the ending and the state after it.
Correct, unless one assumes that something of him remains after his death. I touched on this in the column about death.
(As I recall, I raised there the possibility that it is bad for the world.)
I mean an act of murder, where a person murdered his fellow. He is in fact ending his existence. It is obvious to everyone that he is doing something bad to him, even though the two states are not comparable.
I tend to think that murder is not bad for the murdered person (unless there is survival of the soul, as stated), but rather bad for the world. But one should also distinguish between causing harm to a living person by killing him and creating a person as a benefit.
According to that logic, whom does an abortion harm? And how is it different from refraining from bringing him into the world?
It harms the fetus. And even if it is not different from not bringing him into the world, one can still say that both are bad for the world (and not for him).
The first part contradicts the second.
As for the first part, you said earlier that murder is not bad for the murdered person, so why does abortion harm the fetus?
As for the second part, if abortion and refraining from bringing a baby into the world are equal in that both are bad for the world, then why is their punishment, in your view, different?
Oren, we are going in circles. I said both things, and the discussion about abortion was conducted on the assumption of the side that says it is indeed bad for the one who is killed.
The punishment is not given according to the moral issue but according to the halakhic-religious issue. Apparently in the religious sense there is a difference. After all, according to your view the punishment should have been compensation to the murdered person or his heirs. But here we are dealing with criminal punishment, meaning that the punishment does not express the moral evil and the injury to the murdered person.
How is that different from children?