There often lies within each parsha the potential for a disagreement between the Akivan and Ishmaelian perspectives, and although it may appear as a tangled mess of discrete points of dissension, in truth, there is a virtual fault line the separates the Akivan/Ishmalian divide into neatly defined positions that essentially constitute competing worldviews.Much of the disagreement develops forms the fundamental rift between the two perspectives that basically derives from just a few, pivotal elements of contrast. One such element, as we’ve been discussing for the past few weeks, is in regards to the nature of God and his relationship to the finite world He created. Another basic element relates to the nature of the Torah and its relationship to the finite world. Because we took the opportunity of Yisro-Mishpatim to discuss the former issue, we sort of missed fleshing out the latter, but because all of the seemingly unrelated arguments of R’ Akiva and R’ Ishmael tend to hinge upon one (or both) of these fundamental issues, it’s easy enough to tackle the one we’ve missed in an indirect fashion, and this week happens to provide us with a good launchpad.
In respect to the origins of the Torah, the Akivan perspective is that of an eternal Torah. This is not to say that R’ Ishmael contests the durability and everlasting authority of Torah, because the eternal nature of the Torah that the Akivan endorses and the Ishmaelian dismisses is not meant to speak to its future but it its past. The notion that Torah existed with God in heaven prior to Sinai is Akivan in nature and was an innovation in thought — in other words, it’s not halacha l’Moshe miSinai. While the concept of Torah min hashamayim originally meant to convey the notion that the Torah and its directives emanate from God Himself, endorsing the position of a miraculous revelation, a mystical spin took hold of it, morphing it into a claim of the Torah having existed in heaven until Moses went up to heaven to bring it down to earth. Countering this, R’ Ishmael maintained that the Torah did not exist until it was given to Moses and the Israelites — and even then, it was given is separate sections so that some of it came into existence well before other parts, which brings us to this week’s parsha.
After a few weeks of directives regarding the construction of the Mishkan and the fabrication of all types of instruments, vessels and other holy furniture that would both decorate and function within, we finally arrive at Leviticus, the Book of Moses that outlines what should be done in the wandering temple and how exactly it should be done.
The book begins with the instructions relating to bringing a burnt offering of cattle (Leviticus 1:3) and R’ Levi is recorded as stating the following:
Why was the bovine listed first among the sacrifices? It is analogous to the noblewoman slandered by the royal family. The king investigated and, finding the charges baseless, proceeded to make a great feast in her honor and sat her at the head of the table to publicize that she had been cleared of all wrongdoing. So too here, to prevent the gentile nations from making claims against God’s love for Israel saying, “you made a golden calf,” the Holy One, blessed be He, investigated the matter and placed the bovine at the head of the sacrifices to show that Israel had been absolved. (Midrash Tanchuma Emor 15)
This falls neatly in line with the Ishmaelian view that the laws detailing the Mishkan postdated the golden calf, which develops from the notion that the Mishkan itself was a response to the golden calf, another Ishmaelian view. R’ Ishmael understood the command to build a Mishkan as having emanated from God’s mind because Israel sinned. Even Rashi, ever the mystic, sides with R’ Ishmael in saying that there is no necessary order to things in the Torah and explains that the command to build the Mishkan came after the sin of the calf (commentary to Exodus 31:18). The national proclivity towards sacrifice and worship is evident from numerous places in scripture, perhaps most notably in Acharei Mos, where the view of R’ Ishmael seems to be thoroughly supported by the text:
“Lma’an asher yavi’u bnei yisrael es zivcheihem asher heim zovchim al p’nei hasadeh v’hevi’um laHashem…v’lo yizb’chu od es zivcheihem lasi’irim asher heim zonim achareihem…” — “So that the Children of Israel shall bring their sacrifices that they would slaughter in the fields and instead they shall bring them to God…they shall no longer slaughter their sacrifices to the goat-demons after which they strayed…” (Leviticus 17:5-7)
But that was all before Sinai — once the nation experience divine revelation at Sinai, God assumed, so to speak, that foreign worship would be sufficiently attenuated by the very many laws that exist with that aim in sight and when it became quite obvious that such was not the case, He was compelled to provide a permissible outlet for live sacrifice. According to R’ Ishmael, the state of affairs of the Jewish nation was not meant to revolve around blood sacrifice and temple worship for there was to be no temple in any that mirrored what eventually came about. In next week’s haftarah we see a confirmation of this view — that God’s initial plan was not for there to be sacrifices in a temple. In response to the nations idolatry, God admonishes them regarding their mechanical and faithless Temple worship:
“ki lo dibarti es avoseichem v’lo tzivisim b’yom hotzi’i osam mei’Eretz Mitzrayim al divrei olah v’zavach, ki im es hadavar hazeh tzivisi osam leimor shimu b’koli” — for I did not speak with your forefathers, nor did I command them, on the day I took them from the Land of Egypt (a reference to the original transmission of God’s desire at Sinai) concerning different sacrifices, rather it was only this that I commanded them, saying: listen to My voice…” (Jeremiah 7:22)
R’ Levi, as well as his rebbe, R’ Yochanan, and even R’ Pinchas ben Yair (father-in-law to R’ Shimon bar Yochai, the paramount disciple of R’ Akiva himself) were all of the opinion that in the times of Moshiach, the vast majority of the sacrifices will be abolished, although this is not without heavy dissent, for what purpose is the Temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt if not for sacrifices? Perhaps that’s why we have no Temple in Jerusalem today — because we don’t really want one — but this is another issue entirely.
Last week’s parsha begins with an interesting reference to the Mishkan: “eileh f’kudei haMishkan Mishkan ha’eidus” — “these are the reckonings of the Mishkan, the Tabernacle of Testimony…” (Exodus 38:21) What does the Torah mean when it says it “of testimony”? R’ Ishmael says it’s a testimony to the fact that God forgave Israel.
R’ Akiva does not say such a thing — he cannot say such a thing. According to the School of Akiva, the the Torah pre-existed creation. And not only that, but the Temple also predated creation (Bavli Pesachim 54a [12th wide line] and Nedarim 39b [11th line from the top]). How this can be is nothing short of a tremendous wonder, and suffice it to say that R’ Akiva did not explain it metaphorically. What’s key is that if the Torah existed in toto prior to creation — whether for 974 generations or more or less — there’s no way that anything could have been added along the way. It’s this mystical conviction that drives the Akivan philosophers to make the claims that it does — that the Torah was given all at once and in a specific order and that the Mishkan was part of the original plan — and it’s the lack of said conviction that allows the Ishmaelian school of thought to make the claims it does — that the Torah was given as separate portions over many years and that the order is not necessarily compelling evidence of historical chronology and that Moses did things on his own accord and that things could have been added in later as an afterthought. For R’ Akiva, the notion that the Torah is the blueprint of the world is everything. For R’ Ishmael, it’s a mere colloquialism.
> God assumed, so to speak, that foreign worship would be sufficiently attenuated by the very many laws that exist with that aim in sight and when it became quite obvious that such was not the case, He was compelled to provide a permissible outlet for live sacrifice.
This suggests that either God is not omniscient or that He’s playing a game – even though He knew that the laws in the Torah wouldn’t cure the Bnei Yisroel of idolatry, He pretended as if He thought they would, pretended surprise and anger when they didn’t, and pretended to acquiesce to what He knew would be the outcome all along. Were God not playing a game, as an omnipotent and omniscient Being He could easily have given instructions that would have prevented idolatry.
> In next week’s haftarah we see a confirmation of this view
You’re treating Tanach as if it’s a single homogenous text. Even canonicly, Jeremiah was written after the Beis HaMikdash was destroyed. Is it any surprise that he’s downplaying it’s importance? I know it’s nto a frum thing to ascribe ulterior motives to biblical authors, but it’s convenient that just after the Babylonians destroy the Beis HaMikdash, along comes Yirmiyahu to tell us that, despite the previous centuries when Judaism was defined by sacrifices in the Beis HaMikdash, Hashem wasn’t really interested in sacrifices after all.
1) You’re not the first one to make this point and you won’t be the last — that being said, it’s a great question but it’s not on me as much as it’s on the Torah itself. How does God seemingly react to anything we do when he has the script beforehand? Or perhaps all of his so-called reactions are staged?
It certainly sounds contrived, but I can’t fathom an answer to this — I am finite and assuming that God is finite, it’s odd to expect that we can understand how He does his job. Perhaps you can think of like the relationship you have with your kids. You’d like them to not make a mess, you know they will, yet you somehow still find yourself getting upset when they do.
2) Taking the text as we have it and in the way Judaism sees it — as authoritative — if it’s a message from God, then it’s a message from God. These are the words of God to Jeremiah. And I don’t think God is interested in our sacrifices all that much — but if I were an Akivan, I would think otherwise.
> Perhaps you can think of like the relationship you have with your kids. You’d like them to not make a mess, you know they will, yet you somehow still find yourself getting upset when they do.
I get upset because now I have to clean up the mess. But I understand that I’m partly to blame for leaving things where the kids could get to it, or not keeping a close enough eye on them. That idea is even in the Torah: lifnei iver lo sitten michshol. So if God is not just playing a game, then He has to take most of the responsibility for when we mess up.
The proverbial 100 fundamentals Judaism can be boiled down to the 50 top fundamentals which can further be boiled down to the 20 super high fundamentals which can then be further boiled to the 10 and finally to the super high ultra fundamentals — one of which is that we are free to make our own choices. This is an inherent part of reward and punishment, for if we are not choosing our actions, how can we be held accountable for them?
With no obstacles, there can be no choice to avoid obstacles, and with no temptations, there is no overcoming temptation. The reason why we not only shouldn’t judge one another but can’t judge each other is because we cannot stand in one another’s shoes. We can’t read minds, we don’t know what happens behind closed doors and we don’t know who sneaks food parcels to the needy, rings their doorbells and runs away. Beards and tzitzis flying this way and that and long skirts and snoods dragging on the floor are nice (well, some people think they’re nice) but they intrinsically reveal little about a person’s mindset. But that’s just for us — God can read our minds and knows what’s truly inside. How that can be I do no know — it reminds me of that time in What Women Want when Mel Gibson is lying on the psychologist’s couch and keeps going back from one number to another because the psychologist keeps switching the number she’s thinking of in her head.
It’s far beyond me to really understand God. But I don’t think it’s supposed to be far from us to really understand what it is that God wants from us. He wants our minds, but that’s too difficult, so he demands our actions to get to our minds. Once he does that, we can’t step away from that latter demand of action even though all he really wants in essence is our mind — sort of like how he doesn’t care for sacrifices, but once it’s been established, it’s now the new normal and constitutes whats necessary.
Very interesting. The idea of sacrifices has always turned me off to the idea of looking forward to being alive during the time when Moshiach does come. My gut feeling is that when Moshiach comes it will be the ideal time. (the utopian life) Since we are no longer an agricultural or cattle owning society my belief was that how it was when we had the bais hamigdosh was in part a response to what society was at the time and not in reality what the utopian lifestyle will be like. I always believed what people say will be when Moshiach comes has to be wrong. I can not prove it, but it must be wrong since what is being said will be is far from the ideal. Mind you, I am not against eating meat. The idea of having one human being in charge (a king) to rule over the people also turns me off. As the expression goes, democracy is the worst form of government, that is, until you consider all other forms of government.
You bring up another good point — that the Israelites did not receive a king until they asked for one.
As I said last time, Judaism is an odd sort of group. Novel things apparently become integral parts of the religion based on seeming happenstance but then become ossified even after the rationale for integration is far from view. In apparent response to the violations of Aaron’s sons in their drunkeness, there is instruction from on high as to what may and may not be imbibed within a reasonable time of temple service — had this episode not occurred, would it have been permitted to be under the influence of alcohol? This opens the discussion once more of didacticism vs. mimeticism — is the Torah pre-established, or can and does it respond to the people?
Although the future 3rd temple of Messianic times sounds intriguing, I don’t think most of us can really see it. Like you said, it’s built (figuratively) around the idea that all of Jewishkind lives within wagon-distance and we can all drop everything and make our way to it whenever it’s ritually necessary. Imagine living in Los Angelos and you need to go to Jerusalem 3 times a year. And then you’re caught mixing guacamole on Shabbos without a biblical deviation (shinui), and you have to bring a sin-offering. And then your wife has a baby and she has to go for her multiple offerings. And then, of course, there’s the how many funerals you go to a year? After each one, you need to pay a visit to get pure with red heifer ashes, unless you delay and wallow in impurity. But to get from Jerusalem, you accidentally pass by the coffin holding area in LAX — well, that entire trip was for nothing, unless you were able to at least stop by the olive wood factory and pick up a new “bruchim haba’im” sign ’cause your other one fell and cracked. It’s no wonder that anyone who’d appear and say that they’re the Messiah would be shouted down — I don’t think we’ll ever really be ready for him.
When was the concept of Moshiach invented in Judaism?
The notion of final redemption is early, and the concept of a Messiah — an individual redeemer — can be found in Isaiah:
Sharply speaking, one can contest all other references as not undisputedly speaking of the Messiah, even though that’s how we explain them (such as Isaiah 9:5), but this one is pretty direct.
So I would hardly say that it’s an invented part of Judaism, any more so than any other part of Judaism is “invented.” Judaism is a package deal. The bracha of borei pri ha’eitz — that’s invented and no one argues the point. As for the Messiah…that’s been there all along.
Interesting Dvar,
This presents an interesting question of the nature of the omniscient God. What is the fundamental nature of God’s actions? God exists at all times and in all places, without finitude, boundaries or limits of any sort. It is difficult to imagine that any human action could even be novel to God, as all human action is already known to Him.
I must sIde with idea of the Torah being infinitely existing, if not, one is necessarily attempting to limit His all knowingness.
I am weary, however, to start interpreting the Torah as anything but literally true, as it must be interpreted as a whole. How are we to differentiate between the literal truths and the non-literal? It seems dubious..
Before we begin, we must establish some ground rules, for if I can’t agree with your premises, there’s no way I can agree with your conclusions.
Most likely, you were speaking in the colloquial sense but to be pedantic for a moment, I would have to disagree with your statement that God has no boundaries or limits of any sort. We like to say that He’s free to do whatever he wants, but that’s not truly the case, and let me explain what I mean.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the game Rush Hour (here’s a link to a picture of it, or you can google it yourself) but each vehicle can be slid forward or backward to move it out of the way of the ice cream truck; the point is to successfully clear the way for the ice cream truck to exit the board. When I told my daughter that she can’t make the police car make a right turn because no turns are allowed, my daughter laughed and said, “why don’t we just pick it up off the board?” She was just joking, but when I tell her that you can’t make a turn she could have easily had made a turn and asked what I had meant — because what I really meant was that you can’t turn a vehicle and still be playing by the rules.
In the same sense, perhaps God can do anything He wants. But he has limited himself to playing within the rules, and even when those rules are broken, they are broken in a manner that is consistent with the rules for rule-breaking. We’re not privy to what all these rules are — the first set or the second set — but suffice it to say that there are rules and that God has limitations in that sense.
I don’t know why you feel that you must explain the Torah as having always existed. Where did it exist? When speaking of “the heavens,” we speak of a philosophical place. Moreover, there was no ink and no parchment before the creation of the world — the midrash asks this question (ahh…finally, a rational midrash!) Perhaps it was engraved in gold or silver — but metal hadn’t been created either. Wood…no trees. The midrash concludes that it was written with black fire on white fire (oh well…too good to be true). This fire-on-fire, it explains, was wrapped around the arm of the Almighty, as it’s written “mimino eish das lamo” — “on His right arm a fiery law.” (Deuteronomy 33:2)
This causes an explosion among the commentators, who scramble to explain what in the world (or rather, out of the word) this could possibly mean. Notable greats such as the Rashba and R’ Judah ben Barzillai say it must be allegorical, but perhaps we could have figured that out ourselves, seeing how something is described as having been wrapped around God’s arm.
The Torah is a physical object, and its contents are finite, even when not inscribed on some medium. R’ Akiva explains them as having existed nearly forever — for it does seem to lend great weight to its contents — but from a rational perspective, it’s going too far. It ends up being built up so much that it’s built up too much. In other words, it may appear to be adding, but in the end, it really does nothing but detract, for no explanations are sufficient and it all seems like one big joke except to a 4th grader, a 4th grade morah who thinks like a 4th grader or a 50 year old man who has the rational capacity of a 4th grader.
God can be God without a Torah. You ask good questions and I don’t have all the answers, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions. R’ Saadia Gaon and Maimonides favored non-literal interpretation and had no overarching hesitation due to this fallacy of a snowball effect, so why should we?
> In the same sense, perhaps God can do anything He wants. But he has limited himself to playing within the rules, and even when those rules are broken, they are broken in a manner that is consistent with the rules for rule-breaking.
Like I said, He’s playing a game.
Isn’t playing games with people’s lives immoral?
> The Torah is a physical object, and its contents are finite, even when not inscribed on some medium.
Perhaps the Torah existed in God’s mind. It must have existed in God’s mind, after all, He dictated it to Moshe and Divinely inspired the neviim. Given that God is eternal and unchanging, His memories and thoughts must also be eternal and unchanging. Therefore since we know the Torah existed at the point of dictation in God’s mind, it must have existed eternally and unchanging in god’s mind. Therefore the Torah has existed eternally. QED
Before I respond, let me attempt to adjust your perspective. This won’t be simple, because if you thought your perspective needed adjustment, you’d likely adjust it yourself — why walk around with a perspective in need of adjustment? And you seem to be a rational enough person to realize that — I think you’re subject to a bias that makes you assume some premises that are not necessarily valid.
Life’s a game. Is it not? You get pulled over and you scream at the cop and you’re definitely getting a ticket. You are super nice and you’re even a little cute (and this works better when you’re the opposite gender as the officer) and you might get off with a warning — but the offense was the same in both cases. How’s that? ‘Cause life’s a game.
I recently went to the bursar’s office at school because I’ve apparently been getting late fees charged to my account every semester — I had been misreading the emails letting me know that payments are due and I’ve been late every single semester. I’m nearly graduating and I just realized it now, and they were the ones who told me what the emails really said and meant — when I sincerely said that I had had no idea, the lady clicked her lips and then proceeded to refund me for nearly the entire amount of the late fees. Why? Because life’s a game — in the same circumstances, you can be nice and compassionate and giving and open and courteous and curious and anxious and meek and it will get you much farther than being aggressive and rude. Not always, but usually. Will you continue working the system once you’ve figured it out, or complain that it’s all a game?
So, yeah, life’s a game. So is marriage, so is your job. When a mistake is made, you take the blame and you boss saves face and you get a promotion instead of being fired. Not always, but it very well might happen. Do you refuse to play along? Yes, everyone actually realizes it’s a game and we really call it “playing along” — amazing, isn’t it? Is it immoral to do so? Are we deceiving the cop or the lady working in the bursar’s office or the girl at the checkout counter or the receptionist at the credit card company or at the doctor’s office, or is doing X instead of Y to accomplish A instead of B just the way the world works?
So I question your premise that playing games with people is immoral, but as you might not have anticipated, I’ll agree with you that it’s entirely fitting to describe it as a game if you’re intent is to disparage the manner in which the universe works.
God has a manner in which is interacts with the universe: there’s plan A and then there’s plan B and plan C and so on and so forth. When plan A doesn’t work, God shifts to plan B, and when that falters, plan C. It might be compared to that scene in The Truman Show when Jim Carrey enters the building that he’s never supposed to enter — it’s merely a fascade — so that when he pushes the button for the elevator, the door opens to reveal not an elevator car (for there’s no really an elevator bank or shaft) but he sees the props guys eating doughnuts. The director never anticipated Jim Carrey’s character going into that building, let alone pushing the elevator button.
So when God gives whatever he gave to Moses on Sinai and tells him to descend, for the people are sinning and He threatens to exterminate the nation and Moses pleads for their acquittal and God decides not to destroy them — man alive! — how many changes of heart does that add up to, yet this is God we’re talking about, right? Didn’t he see it coming?
So God has in mind to go ahead with plan A and only deviates if the person deviates, and we call that free will. In a very true sense, the issue at hand here is not one of immorality or of anything more paradoxical than the apparent paradox of divine omniscience existing alongside human free will.
On your second point, you use the fact that God dictated the Torah to Moses as evidence that it must have existed in God’s mind for all time — there is a profound fallacy in that, because it could have just as easily existed in God’s mind but one second prior to the dictation on and around Sinai.
Then you bring up God’s eternal nature and the corresponding eternal nature of His memory and foresight. That, once again, is merely the issue of omniscience vs. free will. But the point is that R’ Akiva and his mystical colleagues do not claim that it existed in his mind — they claim that it existed in physical form, and that is what R’ Ishmael and his colleagues, and also many of the swing vote independents, come to contest.
There is a difference between social interactions being a “game” in the sense that there are certain rules which can be used to manipulate situations, even when that contravenes other rules, such as those of the legal system, and God playing a game with human lives the same way we might play video games. It would be immoral if it is within a person’s power to easily and without effort save someone else from suffering but he refrains from doing so because of a game he is playing. God should be held to the same standards.
What is moral and what is the opposite of it that constitutes immorality?
As an analogy: life is not too meaningful for any one monarch butterfly in particular. The species as a whole exists and its purpose is fulfilled by that existance but, luckily, they are not sentient. It’s sort of like the movie Antz — in the end, the screen pans out and you realize that all the drama, romance, danger and thrill revolved around the 433rd out of 7 million ant colonies in the park.
In essence, God doesn’t necessarily care about the individual organisms that populate the universe because that’s not the point of their existence. The individual does not count. Judaism maintains that for the human race, the opposite is true — each person counts. God cares about people individually and each person’s actions are weighed and measured and assessed and used as a means of bestowing merit or correction and things that no mortal can possibly judge, such as bisecting circumstances and psychology and emotions, come to mitigate the divine response to these actions.
Without temptation, there can be no reward. Without the ability to fail, there cannot be punishment for failure and without punishment for failure there is little motivation to avoid failure. If we’re all running around on a game board and if we fall off track we’re caught be a secure line and brought back onto the board to start from where we fell or even from the beginning, the risk is not real and so our drive will be reduced or absent.
So God let’s us jump off bridges and drink gallons of lighter fluid and down an entire bottle of Percocet and shoot ourselves in the head with hollow points because that’s how he designed nature — to be natural.
So do miracles occur — I’d say yes, in that it’s existentially possible for miracles to occur. I think anyone who subscribes to classical rabbinical Judaism must agree to that statement. But do they occur, in the sense that last week some kid was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and then all of a sudden the doctors can’t find it on the CT scan and the headaches are gone — I’d be more skeptical. It’s more likely that the initial diagnosis was incorrect than a miracle occurred.
So I think it’s far from the truth to say that God either does or must or even should save humans from trouble and pain and suffering because it would trample on his apparently more important policy of allowing free will. How far this hakpada on maintaining a world full of free will goes I don’t think anyone can say. It’s a terrible thing that the Frenchman and his two children were killed last week outside of the yeshiva, but it’s very important to God that the gunman had the free will to deviate from what’s moral in your eyes and kill 3 people for no apparent reason. God could have made that guy’s motorcyle get a flat tire on the way to the hit or he could have delayed that father and his two sons by giving them a flat tire, or had either of them pulled over for running a red light, or a million other possible permutations of changes in events, but whether or not God does that is subject to tremendous debate and we have no way of knowing, really, because we can only know what He wants us to know and I’d say He wouldn’t want us to know about this stuff, but maybe I’m wrong.
> So I think it’s far from the truth to say that God either does or must or even should save humans from trouble and pain and suffering because it would trample on his apparently more important policy of allowing free will.
Which is the mesilas yesharim’s answer. And why must we have free will? (Leaving aside the fact that the universe appears to be deterministic and there is no mechanism to allow for free will.) So that we may earn olam habo, because we wouldn’t appreciate it fully if it weren’t earned. And why couldn’t God, in His omnipotence, create us so that we could fully appreciate a reward we hadn’t earned?
It seems your answer would be because that’s how He set up the game. It’s completely arbitrary.
A better answer may be that God’s omnipotence is limited to what is possible, and it just so happens that it is impossible for any intelligence to fully appreciate something it didn’t earn. So, just as God can’t make square circles, He can’t make a sentient creature that will fully appreciate a reward it didn’t earn. Unfortunately, I think that such a view today would put one at the fringes of Orthodoxy, and would be considered kefirah by most of the OJ world.
Hypothetical questions often appear quite intriguing at first, and their unknown but alleged answers appear quite confirmatory, assuming one succeeds in slanting said hypothetical question to create the hole one is trying to reveal, but the question is all too often nothing but a fallacy.
Why couldn’t God create us to appreciate unearned reward? That sure does sound like a great question, but it’s really not. Because it’s a fundamental aspect of reward, and if you change that, there is nothing left. It’s like asking why we can’t create something from nothing or go back in time and change things. The universe is as the universe is and formulating alternate universes where you assume that everything remains the same except for the very precise thing you’d like to see changed is far from promising. Could things be another way? Sure, there could be 2 dimensions or 4 dimensions instead of 3 and if we lived in one of those types of universes, we’d all be wondering, “what’s that crazy guy talking about when he says we could have 3 dimensions — that doesn’t make any sense!” Well, to those people living in the 2- and 4-dimensions of space universes, it doesn’t make any sense to have 3, just like we can’t imagine what it would really be like to have 2 or 4. That’s the problem with “why?” questions…there’s almost no limit to the imagination and therefor there’s almost no limit to hypothetical questions as to why God really had to make a world with X or without Y. But it makes sense to us, living here, that unearned reward is not reward. It’s like a married bachelor — there cannot be one because the essence of a bachelor is that he’s unmarried. So too, reward doesn’t just mean money or goods or services — it’s an idea. Sure, it manifests as money or goods or services, but it doesn’t have to, like when you do something nice for someone and no body knows about it and we say that the compassionate and magnanimous action you performed is its own reward. So to ask why we can’t appreciate an unearned reward is like asking why there can’t be a married bachelor — the one asking such questions understands neither bachelorhood nor rewardhood.
Ha — I figured I’d answer your post paragraph by paragraph and I’m just now reading your third paragraph and it looks like you had me all figured me out before I even began responding. 🙂
And to that I respond that kefirah is a too-oft-thrown around term, as is the term Orthodoxy (capital O) and orthodoxy (lower case o), the latter of which describes a manner of observance consistent with certain ideals X and inconsistent with other ideals Y and the former of which describes the somewhat cohesive group that professes to conform to the latter. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t and that’s on the large scale — sometimes individual members do and sometimes they don’t, as well. When is one considered outside the realm of Orthodoxy? Sometimes, such as relative to socially acceptable ritual deviations, one may be well outside of orthodoxy before he or she even comes up on the radar as a deviant of Orthodoxy. But relative to philosophical deviation, which are much less socially acceptable, it might very well be that one is ejected from Orthodoxy while still being well within the confines of orthodoxy. It’s a profoundly curious and interesting thing — this split of O/o — and one must be somewhat of a philosopher to even grasp the nuances, but suffice it to say that there has been no central authoritative body of orthodoxy since perhaps the time prophecy ended, and there has been no central authoritative body of Orthodoxy for I don’t how long exactly, but there’s definitely not one now…and as such, it’s a very philosophical thing to indeed suggest that anyone is on the fringes of Orthodoxy, for the term has been co-opted by so many that it almost means whatever you want it to mean, such that it has been rendered virtually meaningless — and if you don’t believe me, just look at the demographics question on any religiously-oriented Jewish singles website or form. And if it weren’t for political correctness and the ridiculous secular categories like “non-Asian non-Latino non-Native American/Eskimo white,” it would appear silly to everyone (and not just me, and perhaps you), but if they can make 12 classifications out of 4, why can’t we, right?
It’s after midnight and I can’t very well ask my spiritual adviser now but all that I wrote is what I thought would be a fitting response — I will email him now and ask him what he thinks of this point: the limits of divine omnipotence. He may find this to be untrue, in which case I might reconsider after a good argument in favor of his side and against mine — I’ll keep you posted.
And as a matter of fact, I happen to have a tremendous regard for the fringes of orthodoxy and I wear them every day and I even wear them out so people can see that I do…and you can quote me on that.
***See follow-up below***
When you say G-d cares about the individual besides the entire Jewish nation I can not be sure. When we celebrate the Jews leaving Egypt we don’t talk about the 80% who did not make it through. Of all the individual people who were put into slavery and all the people who were born during the 210 years of slavery we never talk about those people who died and never saw a day of their life in which they were not slaves. What about the children who were killed and put into the walls of the buildings. Were they all judged by the merits of their own actions? Even the 20% who left Egypt how many of them made it to Israel. Yes, the Jewish nation was saved but the Jewish individual people were not. How can you say G-d cares about the Jewish people as individuals. This same question can be asked about all the Jewish suffering that occurred in history.
The death of 80% of the nation is but one interpretation of the term chamushim (Exodus 13:18) — other understandings of that term exist.
Observing the universe as an instrument in understanding the universe, as R’ Saadia Gaon was quite fond of recommending, we can see that God values free will over almost anything else — even preservation of life. So when I run my finger through the phone book and pick someone at random, drive to his house and kill him and his family and burn his house down, it’s not necessarily because that person deserved any of it — hence the meaning of, “ah, what a terrible thing that happened to those kids!” If we maintained that everyone gets what they deserved in this life, we’d never lament such a thing.
And what about when someone dies because of complications of lung cancer because he smoked 2 packs a day for 40 years? We laugh now, but it used to be considered in line with good health to smoke after heavy meals. So we have some fat millionaire who smokes after every meal and he dies so early even though he was kind to widows and orphans and spread the word of God and tithed 20% of his earnings to the local charities and we can’t even blame his deteriorated health on his personal ignorance or neglect, for it was conventional wisdom of the time that smoking was healthy. The world works the way the world works. There’s going to be random things that happen and whether or not God plans out all random things or just interferes when He wishes and hides in the seemingly random things is a big part of the hashgocha pratis debate — how much is God involved? Does he control which leaf falls on which blade of grass? Does he control which chromosome goes or fails to go with which other chromosome? They may seem very similar at first glance, but the latter can result in a much more profoundly catastrophic event, such as the birth of a trisomy 21 baby — do the parents of such a child deserve that child or does it just happen? I think we’re at a loss to answer that question.
So I don’t think the children in Egypt or the children of the Holocaust were judged — they were just murdered via the free will of others.
And no one said that all members of Judaism will make it through — Judaism as a whole will make it through, and that’s the only promise. Individuals along the way will falter and fail.
And you ask how the individuals were saved? They apparently were not. Judaism teaches that we can each have a relationship with God. That’s all it means — it doesn’t mean we’ll make it. It doesn’t mean that good things will happen. Contrived it certainly does sound, but this world is not the be all and end all, so weighing our merits against our rewards in this lifetime will always leave us coming up short if we really value such seemingly insignificant things as saying that kind word to the widow and giving that dollar to the poor man, and we do put such heavy value on these things. Think of all the wonderful things we’re supposed to do to receive merit — eating kosher and wearing tzitzis and learning torah and making 100 brachos a day. If we really do these things, our merit is nearly incalculable for even the best accountants — so where’s all that reward? I don’t know, but I don’t have to know. He does.
In conclusion, suffering poses no trouble because it’s your premise that’s flawed.
***Follow-up from above***
So I’ve spoken with my advisers and they agree with what I’ve said. It can be said that there are limits to divine omnipotence, insofar as God chooses to limit Himself by the very existence of the laws of nature and by specific terminology that produces inherent paradoxes.
If the definition of the rock I speculate that god cannot lift is indeed “a rock that God cannot lift,” than I’m finished before I even begin — in a sense, I’ve created a paradox and of course it will be that God cannot lift it. Mathematics is pretty objective, and so when one gives the example of a rectangular triangle as one of the very many limits of divine omnipotence, it is more acceptable to one’s mind, but “a rock that He cannot lift” is just as mutually exclusive to “a rock that He can lift” as a married bachelor or a number that is both even and odd, or something else that, by definition, is impossible.
And God limiting His own omnipotence by the institution of the laws of nature is not a drawback to His power — it’s just a fuzzy area that we normally don’t discuss, but that certainly does bring up some fascinating issues. Sort of resembling the genie trick that Alladin pulled on Jafar in the original Disney film, a theoretically omnipotent genie still has limits, in that he is a inhabitant of the lamp under duress. An all powerful dictator cannot give away his dictatorship to someone else in any meaningful way and still remain the powerful dictator — does that mean that his power is not absolute? Well, yes and no. It’s just one of those things that we sort of never deal with — you can think of it as the seam of his all powerful cloak which may very well reveal some inherent flaws in the fabric, but that we like to sew under and hide from everyone’s view.
And indeed because of the very confusing and difficult nature of these types of issues, this topic is not generally put out for public consumption. Imagine high school-age children being briefed on this — either their immature minds would not be able to fully grasp the subtleties of the subject matter or the teacher would be ill-equipped to deal with questions, or both. So we don’t talk about this, we don’t teach it, we steer people from it and when people do approach the religious authority with such questions and it cannot be established that the question is coming from a place of true sincerity and of superior mind and comprehension, the answer will be a smirk, a chuckle and a response along the lines of, “Ah…the question of all questions!” — but nothing further.