RaYBaSH’s Ponderings of the Perkei Avot
Chapter 3:18-19
By: Yehudah ben Shomeyr
All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted. The world is judged with goodness, but in accordance with the amount of man's positive deeds.”
I would like to focus on this last sentence, verse 19.
This tells me that predestination and free will go hand in hand.
Logic, Linear
time, 1+2=3 thinking; these are the traits of a finite created being such as
ourselves. Things such as the concept of eternity and seeming paradoxes,
contradictions and conundrums like predestination verses free will, throw our
minds and an aviator’s death roll.
God on the other
hand is an uncreated, Uncaused Cause. He is Infinite and above and beyond our
constraints of time and logic. Only He can be everywhere and nowhere all at
once.
Above all, if only
one word could be used to define God it would be Holy. That is His main
attribute, that is the essence of who He is. A Holy God cannot be in the
presence of sin, which according to I John 3:4, is anything that is against His
Torah. Evil and Predestination; willing His creation, made in His image to only
be created for the purpose of being sent to hell which as the Brit Chadasha
(New Testament) says was prepared for the devil and his angels. That would be
like birthing twins and raising one and throwing the other into a furnace. And
if we, as “evil” humans know how to give our children good gifts; bread instead
of a stone, a fish instead of a snake (Matthew 7:7-12); how much more so is God
good?
No, God didn’t
create Evil, He just created the possibility (free will) for it to arise. The
Rabbi’s and Sages of the Talmud and Tanya say even evil (sometimes called the
klipah or sirta archa) though not apart of God, (yet allowed by God to come to
be by agency of free will) does not transgress His will but works in conjunction
with it to ultimately allow God’s perfect will to come about. It is our choice
to allow that to be or not. For instance, if we are presented with a temptation
we can succumb and fall which is out of His will, or we can resist and overcome
and as a result become stronger and be closer to God. Though He knows the beginning from the end,
He gave us the gift of choice to accept or reject Him, His Torah and Messiah.
We are “predestine” in the since that God knows, we have the free will because
even though He knows we still have the choice to choose. God doesn’t want a
bunch of pre-programmed robots serving Him. Do you think God predestine that
Lucifer should fall? Did He want it to happen? I don’t think so. Obviously
Satan’s fall, as ours, didn’t catch God off guard but He allowed it to happen
all because of Free Will. I know, I know, many of you are already forming lines
of circular logic to try to say what I am proposing is an oxymoron, a
contradiction in terms. “I can’t have it both ways; it’s got to be one way of
the other”. Is anything impossible for God? G-d forbid, by no means. Who are we
to put Him in a neat defined box to satisfy our curiosity of the unknown and
possibly the unknowable?
“Some people think there is a logical
conflict between predestination and free will choice, but in reality there is
no conflict, because predestination accounts for men's free will choices.
Predestination says that the reason YHWH already knows who is and is not
predestined to the adoption as sons is because He has already seen every
decision each and every person will ever make...” – www.nazareneisrael.org
I believe free
will and predestination go hand in hand and work together much like Law and
Grace. Two seemingly diametrically opposed views, yet they work in conjunction
with each other, that for the most part both issues (Law and Grace –
Predestination and Free Will) Modern Christians cannot seem to grasp as both
existing and working together in unity. I think part of the problem is that
many are looking at these issues from a Western Philosophical standpoint and
not from a Hebraic Theological stand point. It is absurd to believe sin, which
a Holy God abhors and cannot be near, is in His will. Yes, ADONAI knew mankind
was going to fall, yet it wasn't His perfect will. It was His permissive will.
He allowed this thing to happened, because even though HE knows all, He allows
us to choose. I will not pretend I know everything on this matter, for something’s
we will truly never know until we reach the World to Come. Because how can
finite creation pretend to understand certain aspects of an Infinite God?
Just like Forrest
Gump at his Mama’s grave told her something to the effect; “Lt. Dan believes in
fate, Jenny thinks it’s all a matter of chance… I think it’s a little bit of
both.”
In the words of Rebbe Nachman:
"There are certain questions which trouble many people, such as the problem of how free will can exist if G-d knows the future. It is necessary to realize that it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand these matters. The answers to such questions lie in the sphere of wisdom that is so transcendent that the human mind is unable to attain it. This wisdom can never enter the human mind. It encompasses the mind from outside. One who apprehends this wisdom would not be human at all, he would be an angel. It is precisely the fact that we do not understand these questions about free will that actually gives us the freedom we have. In time to come, when men's minds will expand and the secrets of free will and providence will be revealed, free will as such will disappear. Man's mind will emerge from its limits and he will become like and angel - with free will."
And as Forrest
Gump said:
“That’s all I have
to say about that.”
Shalom,
-- Yehudah ben
Shomeyr
