Q&A: Faith in the Jewish Tradition
Faith in the Jewish Tradition
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I listen to many of your talks and would appreciate some clarification —
Young people today are, for the most part, less occupied with the question of whether God exists. More than that, a large portion of them would agree that some kind of power exists that is responsible for everything around us.
The question that is usually asked, and that occupies me, is this: even if such a power exists, how can one know what it wants from us? How do you know that the entire Torah and the commandments as we know them today are באמת the divine will for the Jewish people.
Is this only a question of trust — trust in the great sages of Israel, trust in our sages throughout the generations and in the writings transmitted to us from them — or do we have a way to reach this conclusion logically on our own?
Thank you
Answer
My book The Necessary Being is devoted to these questions. In the first four talks I prove the existence of God, and in the fifth talk I explain the move to religious commitment. You can look there. In my book Paths Among the Standing Ones (the third in that trilogy), I also explain how to relate to the halakhic corpus we have and to the question of its authenticity. This is not something for a short answer.