I am very excited for the opportunity to share words of Torah with you. Each week, in this spot, I look to share an idea I've found that speaks to me and that I think will resonate with you as well. This week, I share an excerpt from an article by Rabbi Noson Weisz entitled ‘Who Says I Have To’ sharing a deep idea about the Jewish people's acceptance of the Mitzvot and its impact on the world.
[...] For whose benefit were we given the Mitzvot? As God, by definition, is already perfect and lacks nothing, the performance of the Mitzvot cannot bring Him any benefit. The beneficiaries of the Mitzvot must therefore be the very people who perform them. But if they are for our benefit, not God's, how can we relate to the idea that God commanded us to perform them? [...]
It turns out [...] that while God created the world for man to enjoy, there are two sorts of enjoyment. If we contrast the enjoyments with each other we find that God offers the enjoyment provided by the Noachide world entirely free of charge without the need of any human response. But the perfect enjoyment made possible by the performance of the Sinaic Mitzvot requires the assistance and active co-operation of human beings. The perfect enjoyment on offer consists of communion with the Perfect Being. Since there is nothing less enjoyable than being compelled to keep company with anyone, the only way to offer this perfect enjoyment is for human beings to choose it freely.
However, in order to be in a position to freely choose whether to keep God company, one must have the alternative of choosing not to be in God's company at all. But wherever God is absent there is a lack of perfection by definition; human beings must therefore live in a less than perfect world. But a less than perfect world is only so because of all the unpleasant things which are a part of it. If this world was entirely free of travail and tragedy, and inundated with perfect joy, it would be perfect, and there would be no getting away from God's company at all.
We now have the answer to the source of all the problems in the world. The Jew cannot live in a perfect world because he must do something with the world, which means he must freely choose to commune with God by doing the Mitzvot. To have this freedom of choice there must be a way of living without communing with God. The Jewish world cannot be perfect, as perfection comes from God and living in a perfect world would necessarily force all its inhabitants into communion with God. As the Jew and the Noachide share a common world, the Noachide human being must also live in this less than perfect world so that the Jew can choose to do Mitzvot freely.
We are finally fully equipped to deal with the apparent inner contradiction of voluntary commandments. The commandments are truly commandments because they are a necessity of existence. God has no interest in a world without Mitzvot because the perfect joy of communion with God does not exist in such a world. But they must be voluntarily accepted because if they were coerced then even communion with God could not possibly provide perfect joy. Enforced relationships cannot be perfect by definition. [...]
Once the Jews voluntarily submitted themselves to the necessity of Torah, the world can exist for everyone to enjoy. [The question is, a]re you willing to do something with the world besides simply enjoy it? [...] If you are, then why don't you find out how to fix the evil? How do you know that that is not the very task you were set? In fact, if you ponder this essay, you will see that that is precisely the definition of the human task.
Have a Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Davies
Rabbi@SOICherryHill.org
