Q&A: Philosophical Gratitude
Philosophical Gratitude
Question
Hello Rabbi, in the fifth notebook on faith / belief you wrote about “philosophical gratitude,” on the basis of which one should serve God today, and you compared it to the ontological bond that parents have to their child who was taken from them through no fault of their own. But here (unlike the case with the parents), God “abandoned” us through His own fault, so it seems the comparison is incorrect… so why is it correct?
Answer
He did not abandon us; rather, we grew up. I do not abandon my children when they grow up and leave home. They have grown and can, and should, stand on their own feet. I equipped them with the tools needed to manage in life, but that is something they have to do themselves. So too with us: we were equipped with the tools to manage in life, and that is what we must do on our own.
Discussion on Answer
What does the Sabbatical year have to do with Mount Sinai?! Here you asked why He abandoned us, and I said that He did not. In the notebook I was discussing the reason why one should serve Him, and I proposed philosophical gratitude.
The measure of philosophical gratitude is proportional to the degree of dependence. Since our dependence on the Holy One, blessed be He, is absolute—He made us and the entire world, and everything exists because of Him and depends on Him—therefore the obligation is absolute.
As stated, I would be happy for discussion at more reasonable intervals.
David wrote:
You wrote that God gave us tools, which is not true for all of us… and in the notebook, in any case, you wrote that this is philosophical gratitude that stems from the ontological bond between us, so in any event that is different from what you wrote now, namely that this is a kind of gratitude. I don’t understand the comparison to parents who, through no fault of their own, had their child taken from them. Here, whatever it is that God did (some of us He abandoned, some of us He gave tools to cope with life), it is not similar to parents and child, and consequently the comparison regarding the ontological right also does not seem correct to me.
And another question is: to what extent? How much would I be obligated to God because of that philosophical gratitude? Because obviously I have some obligation to do what parents (in the comparison) say, but not everything. I would never spend my whole life praying if parents who did not take care of me when I was little were asking that…