Question

Hello Rabbi,
I listened to your series “The Holy One, Blessed be He, and the World,” and I have several questions. I’m not sufficiently familiar with your content (I know you have quite a few “followers,” ironically enough, but I’m not among them), so it’s possible these questions have already been asked and answered; if you could point me to the answer, I’d appreciate it.
(These questions are in descending order of importance for me, so if time is limited I’d be happy with a more detailed answer to the earlier ones.)
A) In the third lecture, if I remember correctly, you struggled with the question of how the Torah can command repentance. You brought up the famous problem of weakness of will, and through that raised the point that seemingly it makes no sense to command me to change, since either way: either I’ve already changed, in which case there’s no point commanding me, or I haven’t changed, in which case there is no reason I would listen to that command. You said you don’t have a clear answer to this; you only said that it’s obvious the direction is to challenge the basic assumptions (as one should do with any refutation of this kind of proof), meaning that it’s not true that there are only two options—either I change and the Holy One, Blessed be He, has nothing to do with it, or the Holy One, Blessed be He, changes me and I do nothing—but rather there is a third possibility (and here is the difficulty—to define it), namely that the Holy One, Blessed be He, in some sense helps / assists / acts upon me to repent; that is, in some way, I and the Holy One, Blessed be He, repent together, כביכול.
And here I ask: seemingly this contradicts what you said in the rest of the series. Your words imply some sort of divine involvement in my actions, and according to you this is “complete nonsense”—to say that the Holy One, Blessed be He, acts through me and I through Him and other such statements and assorted vegetables. In what sense could it even be conceivable that the Holy One, Blessed be He, “helps me,” if He is not involved at all either in my decisions or in nature?
As I understand it, there is a blatant inconsistency here with your other points, and I’d be glad for an explanation.
B) You said there is no point coming to the Holy One, Blessed be He, with complaints about evil in the world due to human actions, for the simple reason that the Holy One, Blessed be He, did not do them—human beings did. Free choice itself is a good thing in its own right, and a person who chooses evil is responsible for that, not the Holy One, Blessed be He.
My question: one can still argue with the Holy One, Blessed be He, why He allowed human beings to make such terribly evil choices. After all, there is a limited range to our free choice. There are things that are physically impossible to do (like being taller or shorter), and there are things that are psychologically very difficult to do (like murder and the like). And one could complain to the Holy One, Blessed be He: why didn’t You make us in such a way that murdering an entire people, such as in the Holocaust, would be psychologically harder to do, and then perhaps the Nazis would not have done it? Free choice would still have meaning, because one could choose good and evil; I’m only suggesting raising the lower end of the scale of choice, so that choosing utter evil would not be possible.
C) On the question of divine foreknowledge and free choice, you indicated that the question has three “legs”: human free choice, divine knowledge, and the dimension of time. Regarding the dimension of time, you said some want to answer that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is above time and therefore there is no question. And you rejected their words, saying that even if the Holy One, Blessed be He, is above time, that can only explain how He can “send His hand into the future and pull information out from there,” but that itself assumes there is such information, and if so then it is again difficult, because there is no free choice, since that information already exists in advance (and it makes no difference whether someone knows it or not).
However, in my humble opinion, the intent of those who claim that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is above time is different. The meaning is not that the Holy One, Blessed be He, “pulls information from the future,” but that just as the Holy One, Blessed be He, “is present” in the present, so too He “is present” in the future. That is not a paradoxical or meaningless statement. After all, we understand very well that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is not limited by the limitations of space (even though we are limited by that), even though we ourselves are not like that; and really, we do not fully understand what that means. Seemingly, in the same way one can say that the Holy One, Blessed be He, is also not limited by the limitation of time. In other words, space and time are human concepts that simply do not apply to the Holy One, Blessed be He. He was, is, and will be—not in the sense that we are confident He will always remain, but that He is the kind of “thing” to which time does not apply by definition. And then indeed the Holy One, Blessed be He, knows what people are going to do—because He already “is present” there tomorrow, after they have done it, even though with our conceptual tools we cannot understand this.
And in my humble opinion this is also Maimonides’ intent when he said that His knowledge is not like our knowledge—that He knows simply by virtue of being “there.”
Thank you very much