Q&A: The Harsh Judgment of the Holy One, Blessed Be He
The Harsh Judgment of the Holy One, Blessed Be He
Question
Hello Rabbi,
How can one understand the harsh judgment of the Holy One, blessed be He, according to the Sages? After all, we assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, is righteous, and created the world in order to do good. But many sayings of the Sages speak of harsh and bitter punishments for all sorts of banal or common sins, such as: one who says an orphaned Amen, his children will be orphaned; anyone who transgresses the words of the Sages is liable to death; and in the Zohar it says that one who prays the additional service while wearing tefillin on the intermediate days of a festival is liable to death, and one who opens his eyes during the Amidah is liable to death. And the Vilna Gaon writes in his letter: “And all of the slingshot punishment is for the breath of his mouth uttering idle words, and for every idle utterance one must be slung from one end of the world to the other. And all this is for superfluous speech. But for forbidden speech, such as gossip, mockery, oaths and vows, dispute and curses, and especially in the synagogue and on the Sabbath and a Jewish holiday—for these one must descend very far down into the grave, and it is impossible to estimate the magnitude of the suffering and troubles that he endures for a single utterance (Zohar).”
This is not a lot of examples, but I think that if someone invested effort in collecting all those liable to death in Judaism, he would come up with hundreds of statements in the style of, “Whoever does [insert some random and banal act] is liable to death.” Even if you simply do not accept the words of the Sages and the sages of Israel throughout the generations on this issue, it is impossible to ignore the fact that all the transmitters of the tradition of the Jewish people attribute a very harsh and almost impossible standard of judgment to the Holy One, blessed be He. How can this be understood?
Answer
- No one in any of these cases is actually liable to death. These are expressions that should be taken as metaphors, if anything.
- Even if the speaker thought this was a factual claim, whoever said all this cannot know that this is indeed the case.
- You cannot always know what is a significant sin and what is not. These are not moral sins but religious ones (do you understand why desecrating the Sabbath incurs the death penalty?).
- It also depends on context. The various speakers also sometimes saw a problematic phenomenon around them, and in order to preach against it they used these descriptions. That does not necessarily mean that in their view this is the most severe sin.
Discussion on Answer
Very nicely put.
What’s the problem? If you did one of all these common things whose transgressor is liable to death, afterward just do one of the common things about which it says that whoever does them, “all his sins are forgiven.”
With all due respect, Rabbi, if I intend to take the Zohar seriously—really seriously—to the point that I call it the holy Zohar, then I have to expect it not to write things casually. In section 4 you suggested that this is only an educational method, but what kind of educational method is it to tell someone who puts on tefillin on the intermediate festival days, following halakhic authorities in Israel, that he is liable to death? And if, as you said in section 3, we do not know the severity of every transgression, then that only shifts the full weight of the question onto the Holy One, blessed be He—and makes the question even stronger. Why impose such punishments for things that seem so minor? Why design the world in advance in such a bad way?
It is commonly told in the name of the Chazon Ish’s notebooks that one book wrote (maybe the Zohar) that one who walks four cubits in the morning without washing his hands is liable to death, and the Chazon Ish wrote in the margin: “In what case is this said? When he murdered someone…”