Q&A: Knowledge and Free Choice in an Eclipse of the Luminaries
Knowledge and Free Choice in an Eclipse of the Luminaries.
Question
Hello to the honorable Rabbi. The Talmud in tractate Sukkah brings various sins because of which the luminaries are eclipsed. The well-known question is: after all, the movement of the stars is known in advance and will happen with or without those sins. And the well-known answer (of the Maharal, I think) is that the Talmud is speaking about the spiritual cause of things—why the Holy One, blessed be He, arranged for the luminaries to be eclipsed on a particular day.
But the question still remains, because this again seems to negate free choice: did the Holy One, blessed be He, determine in advance that people would commit these sins? (Although one could say that the Holy One, blessed be He, knew that statistically such sins would occur, but gave free choice as to who would decide to carry them out.)
Answer
I think that according to the sages of the Talmud, these are not events fixed in advance by the laws of nature, but acts of the Holy One, blessed be He. I explained here in the past that this is how they understood, for example, the determination of the fetus's sex (and therefore they permitted praying for it before it was formed, but not afterward).
Discussion on Answer
To the questioner,
As for the Maharal's approach,
First, he does not say exactly what one might perhaps understand from your words. He does not say that therefore the Holy One, blessed be He, arranged for them to be eclipsed on that specific day, as though on that special day there are special spiritual problems, but rather about the phenomenon as a whole—that the root of the imperfection in nature, which is expressed in the eclipse of the luminaries, is also the root of the imperfection in human nature, which is expressed in the personal eclipse represented by these sins.
Second, he explicitly asks your question there: "And perhaps you will say, if so, a person is compelled to sin. This is not difficult, for certainly the entire world is not altogether righteous until the time when 'the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring' is fulfilled, and then there will be no deficiency at all in the eclipse of the luminaries, for then it is said, 'Then the moon shall be confounded and the sun ashamed' …"
Can someone explain to me why, according to the Talmud, an eclipse of the luminaries is a negative thing, and how that is expressed in practice with regard to the luminaries?
How is the connection between an eclipse of the luminaries and human knowledge and choice expressed? In other words, what is the connection between the eclipse and a person's future sin?
Shai, it doesn't matter whether the Holy One, blessed be He, causes every event or whether there are fixed laws. The question is whether the conduct of the world is fixed or not. Even if there is no law, but God's conduct proceeds in fixed patterns, it's the same thing as far as I'm concerned. Today we understand that eclipses are events that can be predicted in advance—that is, they are natural events. Even if the Holy One, blessed be He, causes them anew each time, He does so according to fixed laws.
Can the same thing be said about earthquakes and the like? And if so, can it also be said regarding rainfall and the land yielding its produce, as the Torah itself says—that this depends on the faithfulness of the Jewish people to the Torah?? I'm confused about this issue and longing for someone to finally make order in these matters for us. Thanks, and may you be rewarded for the commandment.
Absolutely. At least in our day, it seems that everything proceeds by way of nature. The proof is that rain can be forecast in advance, and as knowledge advances, the forecasts become more accurate and extend farther ahead.
See a possible explanation here:
The 17th of Tammuz 5778
To Shimon — greetings,
With all the technological progress (satellite imagery and supercomputers), weather can be predicted ahead only for a range of… five days! And even then there are unpredictable things. Small changes here and there can produce major changes in the situation. In the area of earthquake prediction as well, the warning range is very short.
Precisely in the area of solar and lunar eclipses, the ancients had good computational ability. Certainly the sages, who were experts in calculating the course of the sun and moon to the point of being able to calculate the calendar in advance, presumably also knew the cyclicality of eclipses.
It may be that the intent of the sages' words about an eclipse of the luminaries as a sign for good or bad is not that the eclipse is the result of good deeds or their opposite, but rather that the time of the eclipse is a favorable time or a time when the attribute of judgment is strained (as they said that the days of Adar are conducive to salvation and success, whereas in the days of Av the attribute of judgment is strained).
And as Maharal wrote, the festivals fall in seasons of the year when the weather is balanced and comfortable, whereas the fasts on which calamities occurred fall at the height of summer or the height of winter, when the climate is extreme in heat or cold—following Maharal's view that divinity is revealed in balance.
However, there are also statements in the sages about eclipses of the luminaries as a punishment, and perhaps those refer to situations in which the light of the sun or moon is obscured because of haze or clouds. It may be that the sages also called such weather-based obscurations of the luminaries 'the luminaries are eclipsed,' and in those cases one can indeed see signs of "hiding of the Face" due to human actions.
With blessings,
Shatz Levinger
How can this question actually be decided?
How do I know that there is a fixed natural order? Maybe God really does renew the laws of nature at every moment, and there is no necessity that they will still exist a minute from now.