Q&A: Effort 2
Effort 2
Question
Following up on the question I just posted now (too bad you can’t comment on the same question page before also getting an answer from you), I once heard that the line between effort and faith is this: you need to do everything you can in order to succeed, but you should know (believe) that even if you do succeed, it is not thanks to you but thanks to the Holy One, blessed be He (that is, His decision).
Is that your view? Why? What is your approach?
Answer
Absolutely not. I’ve written about this a lot here on the site. Nothing depends on the Holy One, blessed be He. “Effort” is a ridiculous and absurd thesis they invented in order to reconcile what they think (that everything depends on us and on nature) with what they think they are supposed to think (that everything depends on the Holy One, blessed be He). See, for example, Column 279.
Discussion on Answer
And you, Ehud—what would you say to him? That it’s the Holy One, blessed be He, who is sending you the suffering and you should get over it, there’s a Father in Heaven watching over you, etc. etc.? So in your opinion, is religion really the opium of the masses?
Hello EA,
If I tell someone that his pain has a purpose, that’s not “just” to calm him down, but because I truly believe it.
It is of course possible that someone’s punishment is that he has been abandoned to the “mercies” of nature (for better or worse), and then apparently there really is no purpose to the suffering. But even here it is a decision by God to leave him to the “mercies” of nature, so perhaps that too counts as a kind of punishment.
Rabbi Michi does not say that the Holy One, blessed be He’s non-intervention is not intentional. After all, if He wanted to intervene, He would intervene. And the fact that He does not intervene is because that is what He decided (and apparently, in His view, that is what is best). So even when He does not intervene, that itself is His intention and His will. So everything is still directed from Heaven (His non-intervention, and the effect of our actions), and there is no need for all this “effort” nonsense.
If I remember correctly, in “The Science of Freedom,” Michi talks about the absurdity if there is no free choice and everything is pure determinism.
Notice that Michi himself arrives at a moral absurdity in his distorted views.
What would Michi say to a person whose life is mostly suffering and torment, and doctors simply cannot help him, and he also cannot help himself?
For example, someone suffering from excruciating pain for which there is no cure.
According to Michi’s view, there is no atonement for sins here, no punishment, no reincarnation, no divine intervention, nothing like that.
It’s all nature.
What would Michi say to such a person — “There’s nothing to do. You got screwed by chance. Get over it”
?
Insane.