The claim, which may not be very deep, is that God is so great, and you religious people supposedly diminish Him by saying that He takes an interest in the actions of tiny human beings. I have what to answer. I’d be glad to hear your perspective.

I have nothing to say about declarations.

Why declarations? It’s a certain claim of theirs..

Declarations and claims are the same thing. As opposed to arguments.

Uri, the Torah went to the trouble of telling us that He is interested in the actions of tiny human beings. That’s the essence of its claim. So if you agree with that, then apparently something in your argument doesn’t hold up. Maybe human actions aren’t so tiny after all, or maybe God isn’t so great? If you don’t agree with that, then there’s no basis for the discussion.

From what I’ve read, this is an argument of the philosophers who believed in God but held that He does not take an interest in human beings because it would be beneath Him. I can accept that precisely because He is great, He contains everything and is interested in everything, aside from the argument from the Torah tradition. I want to hear your understanding.

I don’t know what is beneath Him and what isn’t. And certainly I can’t determine a priori from that what interests Him and what doesn’t. If He said that what we do interests Him, then apparently it interests Him. Does that make Him small? Fine. Then He’s small. These are uninteresting questions that just play with words and baseless ideas.

It’s hard for me to grasp how, in your view, this is not a weighty and significant question—whether it is a priori reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, gave such a Torah, and to such a small group. If it’s given that He exists and gave the Torah, then indeed the question is not all that significant. But here we’re talking about an a priori consideration, and it will affect the proofs.

Why not? He gave a Torah to all humanity, except that it was given at different levels. I don’t see the slightest problem with that. And certainly I can’t raise objections based on strange intuitions like this.

The size of the group is relatively secondary compared to the nitpicky contents of the Torah—why should He care whether one slaughters from the back of the neck, and so on. What can I do, to me this intuition does not seem strange at all—quite the opposite—but one cannot bring a proof from that. Still, from my impression of the world it seems to me that this intuition sits very firmly in the thinking of secular people, and it is a major stumbling block to repentance.

[If I understand correctly, the main points of your doctrine on this issue are roughly as follows: observing the commandments and studying Torah out of free choice is an important purpose in creation. In some mysterious way this perfects the human being, and also in some mysterious way actualizes the perfecting power of the lofty, perfect Holy One, blessed be He, who apparently cannot Himself choose the good day and night. (By the way, this requires further analysis regarding a person’s choice of evil.) And the specific commandments are wired in such a way that they work wonders in hidden worlds that You created for this purpose. Therefore there really is no reason to think that the human intellect should be able to grasp the whole thing, either the general picture or the details of the commandment—not the definition but the purpose. For although there is a reason for the specific commandments, from our standpoint it is arbitrary, like the constants of physics. End of the summary of what I understood from your general remarks on this topic. In practice, it seems that all of the above is a structure that was erected and raised as an answer to the question the questioner asked. And that answer can seemingly be summarized by saying that the mind of the Holy One, blessed be He, is broader than ours, and we do not know how to understand the purpose—which presumably exists—of this whole matter. And not only in the details of the commandments, but even what the purpose is, full stop, in people knowing that there is a Creator who knows, is good, and is all-powerful, and crowning Him king and serving Him. And if even after the whole structure this is still the summary of the answer—that we don’t know, that’s all—then that raises quite an eyebrow and arouses suspicion that the whole thing is a human creation, a product of its native landscape and time, that became more and more entangled over the years until the giving of the Torah, and even more so afterward.].

That is not an answer to this question. It’s an answer to the question of why He would do things for no reason.

What do you mean? Uri brought a question about why He is interested in the actions of tiny human beings, and to that I perhaps only added that the particular form this interest takes in Jewish law also seems petty. And the answer is that there is some exalted need in God for choice of the good and obedience, and this also effects something, or there is a hidden reason. What did I mix up?

I explained. I answered the question of how He does things without a reason, and I answered that it is reasonable that there is a reason even if we do not understand it. Moreover, I explained that the reason should be outside the world, otherwise there would have been no need to create it. Let it not be created, and there would be no need for commandments. All of that is simple logic.
He asked why the Holy One, blessed be He, would be interested in human actions—surely that’s beneath Him. That is a completely different question, and in my view a really foolish one. How do you know what is beneath Him and what is not in His eyes? It’s just a baseless guess about what matters to Him.
The first question is logically difficult and was answered logically. The second question is not difficult and doesn’t require an answer. You don’t build objections on some random hypothesis pulled out of thin air.

The difference is that to the first question—why does He do things without a reason—you answer that there is a hidden reason, and to the second question—surely this is beneath Him—you answer that it is probably great in His eyes, and there is no need for a hidden reason for why it is great in His eyes; it is just great in His eyes?

If you do not understand the difference between the two questions and the two answers, I have no way to explain it any better. To me it seems completely obvious.

I also don’t see a difference between the questions—not that they are merely parallel, but that this is exactly the same question. The Holy One, blessed be He, does something; to simple human beings it looks like something unnecessary; they ask why He did it—that is, this is both a question and an argument that He probably did not do A, B, or C. The question of why He did it can be wrapped in various words like “surely this is beneath Him,” but that is just a side addition to the question. And I also don’t understand, once you have the hidden-reason card, what other questions can there even be about anything in the world. Why create? What does He want with the Torah? The problem of evil? Why did manifest providence and prophecy cease? Why were human beings not born seven times wiser, able at age one to decipher all the laws of physics? Hidden reason! This is what the verse means: “For God shall bring every deed into judgment: over every hidden thing, whether it be good or evil.”
Besides, even the question of why create I don’t really understand, because in exactly exactly the same way one could ask why not create. (I hope we won’t get into odd ideas about a difference between deciding to do and deciding not to do.) So in order to pose the question, you have to add, “Why create, if such-and-such,” and that such-and-such is always a hypothesis—something made up by us about God. Maybe I’m losing my mind, but I can’t manage to bring myself to understand how you dismiss this great question that the questioner asked so offhandedly.

What I brought is an argument of the greatest philosophers, Aristotle among them, so I didn’t connect with the dismissiveness toward the claim and the question.
But what you answered—how do we know what is small, etc.—is, in my opinion, a nice answer. What you wrote, “maybe He is small,” doesn’t work for me; it’s obvious that God is great… even the Muslims cry out “Allah is greater.”
In my view, and I said this, He is interested because precisely the greatness of a creator is also to manage what He created, and to manage it He has to take an interest.
So to the honorable commenter: my point wasn’t to say that they’re right, but to hear more arguments in favor.

If I’m the honorable commenter, then I didn’t write that you claimed they were right.
There are also various other Jews—prophets and medieval authorities—who were astonished by this matter.

I’m familiar, like “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways.”
But such verses come to say that we do not understand the ways of the Creator, and not in your interpretation.
So I limit this only to the claim of the gentile philosophers.

Google it
https://www.hatanakh.com/en/node/39119

“The nature of the intellect does not yield this, but from our reasoning we would err and judge the opposite. We would think and say—were the Torah not to enlighten us—that the Lord, blessed be He, is exalted above all our deeds and affairs, and heaven forbid that He should set His heart on commanding us and warning us, as the philosophers thought and upon which they built their whole evil edifice, which will quickly be cut down and uprooted. Even the prophets, although they knew that the truth of the matter is so, wondered at it and said, ‘What is man that You remember him,’ and also said, ‘What is man that You make so much of him, that You set Your heart upon him and visit him every morning,’ and so on. Since this is so, were the Torah not to enlighten us, we would think and insist on the basis of our intellect that the Lord, blessed be He, is too exalted for His commandments and warnings to reach us, and that it is not fitting that we should worship Him at all. For if so, we would believe that He is affected by our deeds and has some dependence and connection to us. Rather, it would be fitting for us to worship the heavenly bodies, since we do have a connection with them. And we would think all this to be complete truth, and that anyone who thinks this magnifies the Lord, blessed be He, while anyone who thinks the opposite attributes weakness to Him. Therefore our Sages of blessed memory said, ‘I am the Lord’ and ‘You shall have no other gods’—we heard them from the mouth of the Mighty One Himself. By way of analogy: if one of the king’s close ministers were to command us in some matter that seemed to us a deficiency and a degradation of his kingship, it would be proper for us not to believe him in any way. Rather, we would answer him that under no circumstances would we do so unless we heard that command from the king face to face and mouth to mouth, even though we would believe him regarding other commands that he gave us in the king’s name.”

And in my understanding—probably mistaken—Rabbi Michi actually does give a direct answer to this question: is it reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, takes an interest in the actions of peeing man; after all, there is a baseless assumption and a strange intuition, etc., that this is not reasonable. And his answer is that worship is a higher need because there is free choice—perhaps this is the contraction—and that this miserable choice, wow, what a hidden treasure there is in it, to plant the heavens and found the earth and to give strength to God. And close to this is the statement that there is no king without a people, and therefore it is fitting that the Holy One, blessed be He, create subjects for Himself.
And there are other ideas: that the Holy One, blessed be He, is good—that is, as I understand it, interested in matters like suffering and pleasures—and the nature of the good is to do good, and therefore He stuck us in this ridiculous world and revealed to the Sages, in the deepest secrets, that there is reward in the World to Come. Likewise Elihu said in Job—whose words are generally true according to Nachmanides—”Look to the heavens and see; behold the skies, they are higher than you. If you have sinned, what do you do against Him? And if your transgressions are many, what do you do to Him? If you are righteous, what do you give Him, or what does He receive from your hand? Your wickedness is for a man like yourself, and your righteousness for a human being.” But for the benefit of created beings He commanded and warned, as Nachmanides explained there, and as appears in the words of the Sages: to refine people.

Interesting. I still think it’s very logical, even without Torah and the revelation at Sinai, to say that God takes an interest in our actions, as I explained.

Rabbi Michi, a question if I may: after all, your line of argument in moving from the philosophical God to the religious God is that if God exists then it is reasonable that He wants something, and what could He possibly want—apparently something from man, because of free choice; otherwise let Him just spin the whole world along by Himself in no time—and therefore it is reasonable that there would be revelation and demands. Now, which revelation is the most convincing—and also convincing on its own merits? Obviously, the Torah at Sinai. Granted, the component that revelation is likely is not critical to the argument, but if I remember correctly you do use it, if only as an additional support. That is, you explicitly use—in the sense of “we are but a finger pointing to intuition”—the opposite hypothesis, namely that it is reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, wants something from man. Is that indeed so?

Indeed. Opposite to what? My claim is that it is not reasonable that the world was created without a purpose, as I wrote above here.

Not just any purpose, but a purpose connected to man and his actions, no? Otherwise what connection would there be to revelation within that line of argument? Maybe there is a purpose unrelated to man and connected rather to toothpicks. Seemingly this is a positive hypothesis—that it is reasonable that the Holy One, blessed be He, is interested in man—which is the opposite of the negative hypothesis that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not interested in man.

Indeed, exactly as you wrote. Choice and revelation are the indication that the purpose is man.

I understood the opposite: that the hypothesis that man is the purpose supports the claim of revelation.

I explained there that it works in both directions. The fact that we have free choice hints that the purpose of the world lies with us. That means revelation is to be expected, to tell us what this means for us. But by the same token, the tradition about that revelation comes back and strengthens the initial thesis.

So regarding the first direction—that apparently the purpose of the Holy One, blessed be He, in the universe is connected to man on earth—is this not a hypothesis that assumes what matters in the eyes of the Holy One, blessed be He, and what does not? After all, the hint is not from the difficulty of why He created choice, because we don’t know why He created many other things either, but because choice apparently seems to you a wondrous power and an immense and awesome thing, and therefore it is reasonable that such a great thing, with a little bit of God in it, has a great purpose and that He would want us to use it according to His instructions. In other words, from the same hypothesis that others turned into a great astonishment, you turn it on its head—with improvements, choice being the improvement—and make it point in the opposite direction.

Not because of the tremendous and awesome power of choice, but because it is the only thing that is not mechanical, and therefore there is room to say that it can create something that is not a creation of the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself.
This is not a hypothesis that assumes anything regarding the Holy One, blessed be He, and what matters in His eyes. I keep repeating this over and over, and my throat is already hoarse.

(I understood—and wrote—that this is the power of choice.) Your throat is hoarse and my head is spinning, sorry. (Because in my eyes this is a huge, sealed riddle, and I was stunned to see your initial response.) But I still don’t understand. I’ll go back and look through the thread again in a few days.