If this had really been given by God, the book would have been perfect. I would expect clear instructions. But because it was not given by God, I expect all kinds of opinions and different books that contradict one another. Judaism is an exemplary case in this regard.

With God’s help, eve of the new month of Elul 5780

To A. — greetings,

The laws of nature certainly were not created by man (who is altogether a biochemical illusion 🙂 ) — so why didn’t God create a nature that is simple and clear? Why is everything complex and complicated?

Regards, Gal Quentin the Two-Faced, who is sometimes like this and sometimes like that 🙂

Dear Shatz, hello again to you too.

I actually wondered to myself why God didn’t at least give one law of nature in His book. Then I realized that apparently Newton and Einstein are more godly than He is.

Strange that Newton, of all people, was actually very religious.

With God’s help, eve of the new month of Elul 5780

To A. — greetings,

Newton and Einstein actually didn’t think like you. Their recognition of the depth and complexity of the laws of nature brought them to belief in God.

One “law of nature” the Creator did reveal in His Torah: “which God created to do.” He created His world in such a way that a meaningful role would remain for man — “to do” and to cultivate the world. Even the Garden of Eden, planted by the Creator, was given to man “to work it and to guard it.”

Regards, Shatz

By the way, Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno raises the difficulty that “garden” is grammatically masculine, so it should have said, “and He placed him in the Garden of Eden to work him and guard him.” Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno answers that “to work it and guard it” refers back to what was said earlier: “and He breathed into man a living soul.” Man’s placement in the Garden of Eden was intended so that through his labor in cultivating the world — “to work and to guard” — he would develop and cultivate the living soul within him.

Einstein did not believe in your God; he believed in Spinoza’s God. As for Newton, I know from his secret writings that according to what he wrote there, you ought to convert to Christianity, Shatz. He wrote that Jesus’ original religion was purified of Judaism. But in practice, according to him, you could give up being religious and become only moral. He wrote that the more moral a person is, the more his consciousness, or his “sensory apparatus,” resembles God’s “sensory apparatus.”

That law of nature you wrote that “the Creator revealed in His Torah” — any ordinary person of their time could have said that.

To A. — greetings,

At any rate, Newton and Einstein, with all their scientific discoveries, did not think themselves, as you suggested, wiser than God. They saw themselves only as “discoverers” deciphering the profound wisdom the Creator embedded in His world.

And as I explained, the Creator intentionally left the deciphering of the depth of His wisdom in creation in human hands, so that man might merit to cultivate his personality by delving into the wisdom embedded in the world and by engaging in its development.

Of course, none of this is enough without the moral compass provided by the Torah. After all, sadly, humanity has proven in recent generations that scientific and technological development without a proper moral compass may drag humanity into developing means of destruction the likes of which had never existed.

That is why we need a Torah given through divine revelation, so that not everyone will twist it according to his imagined “sensory apparatus.”

Regards, Shatz

Of course. So you can betroth a woman with bull dung and stone and burn people.

With God’s help, eve of the new month of “each man to his fellow and gifts to the poor,” 5780

To A. — greetings,

The “religion of love and kindness,” which knew how to speak loftily about “turning the other cheek,” taught humanity to stone and burn — beginning with the entertainments of the auto-da-fé in the Middle Ages, and ending with the death camps of the Holocaust, where the two-thousand-year-old hatred of Judaism found expression — a hatred from which it stole faith and values while completely distorting them.

In contrast to Christianity, which spoke about lofty but abstract values, Judaism entered into detailed definitions. It established severe criminal laws to define the gravity of transgressions, but set endless conditions and restrictions on them — the need for witnesses, warning given immediately beforehand, and meticulous examinations — which made corporal and capital punishments almost impossible to implement.

Those speak of “love and kindness” while in practice stoning and burning freely, while these speak of the “four death penalties of the religious court,” yet in practice maintain an ethical society of love and kindness.

Regards, Shatz

“And ending with the death camps of the Holocaust”?

You’re right. Newton also wrote about that — that what later happened among the Christians was far worse than what happened to the Jews. They became so corrupt that they did not keep what Jesus said. So maybe you should go, Shatz, and keep the words of Jesus?

Shatz, I seem to remember a book by Aaron Kirschenbaum about punishments not from the Torah in Judaism during the period of the medieval authorities. I don’t have it in front of me and my memory has faded, but I remember there being a large collection of examples there of bodily punishments, some of them irreversible. Though of course this is nothing like the madness of the Greeks and Romans (and from them to the West and to Christianity. And even though the Kuzari is right that without the ability, it’s hard to compare. And Judah ben Tabbai hurried to execute a false witness in order to counter the Sadducees).

One depends on the other. The disdain for the fine points of Jewish law, to the point of the complete abolition of the commandments by Paul, while making do with general moral values of “love and kindness,” ended in a moral vacuum that invites distortion and corruption.

The exact opposite is taught by the Written Torah and the Oral Torah: general values need to be defined down to the details and sub-details. When a person is used to examining every step he takes in his relations with others — whether it is proper according to Choshen Mishpat — and every word that leaves his mouth — whether it is proper according to the Chafetz Chaim — then he develops sharpened and genuine “moral sensory tools.”

Best wishes for a good month, Shatz

The laws of harmful speech, I truly do wish on secular people.

A., you wrote:
“‘I actually wondered to myself why God didn’t at least give one law of nature in His book. Then I realized that apparently Newton and Einstein are more godly than He is.’
There is no question stupider than that on the subject of why the Torah didn’t write something. [Why didn’t the Torah write about the resurrection of the dead? And why didn’t it write about the World to Come? Those are understandable questions. They have answers. But your question:] If you want the Torah to start explaining Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity, you’re crazy. The Torah was given more than 3,000 years ago. People then didn’t know anything! And therefore the Torah didn’t speak about that, even though God knows it.
[I feel I wasted time on nonsense]
But if after all this you still conclude that Einstein is apparently much more godly, then your situation is bad.

And in general, the Torah doesn’t deal with or relate to science, so why should it deal with that???

With your permission, a little grammar before I respond — you can’t put a colon inside parentheses and then continue outside them. Also, you opened a new topic. Second, the resurrection of the dead is mentioned in the Book of Daniel, which is part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible, but originally it is an external book. The resurrection of the dead and the World to Come were learned from the external books and filtered into the Oral Torah. In the Written Torah there is no mention of the resurrection of the dead or the World to Come.

I expect God to produce a perfect book, one that contains the solutions for everything — in every period in which it was given. Because it is a book written by human beings, products of their time, it does not deal with science. Indeed, Einstein is more godly than God.

So that there won’t be any misunderstanding from me, I do not rate any human being in all of human history above any other human being. But in terms of the relation of the discoveries, to clarify the point, I wrote “more godly” or “more gods.”

With God’s help, 28 Av 5780

To A. — greetings,

An “anti-natural” law that no one in the biblical period could have imagined is the eternal existence of the Jewish people, who would not perish even after hundreds of years of exile, and would even return to their land and renew their life there. Only One who “calls the generations from the beginning” could foresee such a future wonder.

Regards, Samson Zwiblinger, Knight of Onions and Garlic

No people became extinct; descendants remained for all peoples. Among the Jews, the tradition was preserved. I don’t see how that is any different from Christianity, which began around the same period as the sages at the close of the Hebrew Bible and was more successful than Judaism, or Islam and other religions.

With God’s help, 28 Av 5780

To A. — greetings,

Christianity and Islam established empires that ruled many lands. By contrast, the Jewish people not only went into exile from their land, but were persecuted for hundreds of years — and all that did not help. The Hebrew Bible’s promise of the eternity of the Jewish people stood the test.

Regards, Shatz

The fact that the entire cultural world adopted monotheism, the Sabbath, and other biblical visions of a small and poor people — who would have believed in the days of Moses (and for hundreds of years afterward) that the whole civilized world would adopt monotheism?

Monotheism did not begin with Judaism. Besides, what do you want from me, that I should take my hat off to them? And what about all those who did not survive the cruelty throughout all the generations?

A] Only in grammar are you right.
B] After I wrote that it is not mentioned in the Torah, you write: “Second, the resurrection of the dead is mentioned in the Book of Daniel, which is part of the canon of the Hebrew Bible, but originally it is an external book. The resurrection of the dead and the World to Come were learned from the external books and filtered into the Oral Torah. In the Written Torah there is no mention of the resurrection of the dead or the World to Come.” Who was talking about Daniel?! Why are you suddenly saying that it is from the canon of the Hebrew Bible?
I know those verses there. And there are also other earlier places about the World to Come [for example Ecclesiastes and Psalms], but I was talking about the Torah.

C] You wrote: “I expect God to produce a perfect book, one that contains the solutions for everything — in every period in which it was given. Because it is a book written by human beings, products of their time, it does not deal with science. Indeed, Einstein is more godly than God.”
Indeed, if you start from the assumption that it was written by human beings, then of course it will not deal with science, and they really were not as wise as those men. You can whisper that to yourself as much as you like, but you can’t ask us the question, why isn’t such-and-such written in the Torah? Apparently Einstein is much more godly [by the way, what you wrote: “So that there won’t be any misunderstanding from me, I do not rate any human being in all of human history above any other human being. But in terms of the relation of the discoveries, to clarify the point, I wrote ‘more godly’ or ‘more gods.’” Don’t worry, everyone understood] at a time when our opinion is that God wrote it — and there is already the answer itself, which I already wrote: there is no reason for God to start explaining Einstein’s theories to people in the desert 3,500 years ago. And that is what I wrote: “And in general, the Torah doesn’t deal with or relate to science, so why should it deal with that???”

In short, only according to your view that human beings wrote the Torah is Einstein much wiser than them. True, everyone agrees that this is so. It’s just that in our view it is in the hands of God, and He is the one who established the laws of nature and of course knew Einstein’s theories — He simply did not say them for the reason above.
And therefore to conclude that Einstein is much more godly than the author of the Hebrew Bible because it is not written in the Torah is nonsense.
In short, if you want, the thing we do not agree on is whether the Torah was given by God [that is the only straightforward way to explain your words, which in any case are disturbingly puzzling].