Q&A: Cosmic Justice
Cosmic Justice
Question
In response to your article about Haredi duality, someone commented that in her opinion the state will not endure because it violates God’s constitution and desecrates God’s name, and so on. I’m not getting into the question of whether that is true or not—whether a state is forbidden to desecrate God’s name—but rather into a different question: do you think there is cosmic justice in the world, such that at some point a day will come when great wrongs are corrected? It seems to me that the Chafetz Chaim said that an idea born in sin has no more than 80 years of existence (something like that), and people said that this is why the Soviet Union fell, because it was essentially born in sin.
As for our case, assuming that Zionism really is a sin (in my opinion it is not, but I’m speaking hypothetically), do you think God directs things or will cause it so that in the end there will be justice, and at some point the secular Zionist entity will cease to exist? In other words, is there cosmic justice in the world that causes wrongs to eventually come to an end?
Answer
I wrote there that her remarks are logically absurd. I was discussing the question of whether we want the state to succeed, and she replies with the claim that in practice it won’t happen. If it won’t happen, then she should leave here and run away from the place.
As for the factual question—whether the state will endure—I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet. I assume she isn’t either. I will only say that nothing can be learned about such matters from the words of the Torah and the Prophets. For some reason, up to now all the God-fearing people throughout the generations did not manage to return to the Land of Israel, while the heretics of Zionism did. Meanwhile, the state exists and is fairly successful, despite all that. What will happen later? We’ll wait and see. So these simplistic slogans that apply verses from the Torah and the Prophets to our current situation do not impress me very much.
In general, my view is that God is usually not involved in the world, and therefore I do not assume that He will intervene here either.