Reply To: Theological Conundrum (read at your own risk)

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#1090172
Avram in MD
Participant

Patur Aval Assur,

Ok. Thank you everyone for your responses, even though I still think no one actually answered my questions.

Your questions are not new ones. In fact, they were asked long ago in Gan Eden by the snake. I think you have received answers to your question, but you don’t feel like you did because the answers you got were human answers, but you want snake answers.

The point is that if the only reason to serve Hashem out of love is that you feel good about it, then that means that it is completely up to you to decide how to serve Hashem,

If you think that doing things for others out of love only has value because it makes you feel good, then you’re missing the entire point of what it means to be a human being.

and if you don’t want to serve Him out of love

This is where I think we diverge at the human-snake interface. I believe that it is intrinsic to the nature of human beings to want to serve Hashem and to be eternal. This is why Hashem would bother speaking to us at all, as opposed to animals who obey only their bodily instincts. Also, when humans have a yearning, they usually associate the yearning with love. Therefore, your statement that a person would not want to serve Hashem out of love is an impossibility.

So why are we not all perfect servants of Hashem? Because we also have animalistic instincts and desires that confuse us and compete with our eternal aspect. Also, due to this more base type of interaction with the world, Hashem’s presence is hidden, so many people mistakenly express their desire to connect with the eternal through ephemeral things like idolatry, legacy building, etc. Even if a person has never heard of Hashem, they still have a desire to connect with the eternal. The realizations that all of these efforts are ultimately futile is a source of angst and depression. So when Hashem gave us the Torah and showed us how to do it in the real, correct way, it was a source of joy and love.

Unless you use the Ratzon Haborei argument. But no one has yet explained why you should do the ratzon haborei (assuming it won’t affect reward/punishment). Because that’s why you were created? So what – why should that make you have to or even want to do the ratzon Hashem?

If you’re an animal, then I cannot answer you. But that’s ok, because Hashem doesn’t speak to you anyway. If you’re a human, look deep down and you’ll understand that having to explain why you should have to or want to do the ratzon haBorei is superfluous. You just want to do it.

But why shouldn’t you be a bad person?

Isn’t it strange that even the most evil people convince themselves that they are not evil? Bad guys who say, “mwaa hahahaaa, I’m an evil bad guy!” only exist in cartoons.