Wednesday, July 09, 2008
How do we administer the freedom we have?
Rabbi Yonason Goldson offers a useful commentary on the subject of free will in his "Ethics of the Fathers" column last week on the aish.com Jewish learning website. In it Goldson addresses the gap between God's omniscience and omnipotence, on one side, and humanity's ability to make choices, on the other. For example:
"...On the one hand, God has created malachim - heavenly angels of pure spirituality that can do nothing other than perform His will; on the other hand, He has created animals, creatures that are purely physical and unable to follow any course of action other than their natural impulses. Only human beings possess a spiritual soul clothed in a physical body; only human beings possess the potential to transcend the physical and cling to the spiritual by an act of free will...."
"...[T]he Almighty knows when the ultimate redemption will come. But we do not. Neither do we know whether we are meant to struggle with poverty or with wealth, with conflict or with comfort, with success or with failure. Whatever our lot in life, it is the struggle that matters. We will be judged not for our successes or our failures, but according the effort we exert to choose wisely and rightly in accordance with the divine will..."
July 6, 2008
"...On the one hand, God has created malachim - heavenly angels of pure spirituality that can do nothing other than perform His will; on the other hand, He has created animals, creatures that are purely physical and unable to follow any course of action other than their natural impulses. Only human beings possess a spiritual soul clothed in a physical body; only human beings possess the potential to transcend the physical and cling to the spiritual by an act of free will...."
"...[T]he Almighty knows when the ultimate redemption will come. But we do not. Neither do we know whether we are meant to struggle with poverty or with wealth, with conflict or with comfort, with success or with failure. Whatever our lot in life, it is the struggle that matters. We will be judged not for our successes or our failures, but according the effort we exert to choose wisely and rightly in accordance with the divine will..."
July 6, 2008
Labels: ethics, free will, jewish spirituality
