Rambam on Prophecies That Seem to Contradict Free Will (Rabbi Dovid Gottleib) (Jewish Philosophy)

already we've seen two potential contradictions between Free Will and other parts of the tradition one was from the fact that there are so many Commandments that it doesn't seem like you have the freedom to lead your own life and then we talked about God's forn knowledge and Free Will today I want to share with you what the rambam says about verses in the Torah and in the prophets where you look at the content of the verses and realize that they are statements uh recording prophecy it can seem to cause a problem for free will I'll have to see how to solve it um I'll translate for you what the ra this is the sixth chapter of the laws of chuva there are many verses in the Torah and in the prophets that appear to contradict the F the principle of Free Will and most people who read these verses are uh tripped up by them and it will seem to them that the Creator decrees on a person that he shall do good or do evil and it's not the person's own mind the person's own heart person's own will that is under his control to determine what he does and I'll explain this great principle to you and you'll understand how to expl to uh interpret those verses when a person or a group a city a nation commit a transgression and the transgression was done with their Free Will with their own decision C BR who decides how they should be punished and there's a variety of different ways of being punished some are punished in this world some are punished in the next World some are punished in both some are punished through the things that are dear to him now um all of these consequences of the transgressions that he's performed apply only when he has not done chuva if he does chuva then no further punishment can apply not in this world not in the next World yes he puts it CH is a a is like a barrier so a person does chuva no punishment can follow there might be suffering but not all suffering is punishment for example if a person falls breaks his leg the orthopedist or the surgeon may have to do things to him that are painful but he's not being punished it's just he's fixing the problem and that might be painful no punishment can apply to a person who does chah and just like a person can perform a transgression with his Free Will so he can do Chua with his free will that means he can repair what he has done now among the various outcomes of of transgression there could be a person who performed such a great crime or such a large number of crimes that the Justice would require that he must be punished for his crime there shouldn't be any way to avoid it so now we have a potential contradiction on the one hand he's performed this crime on the second hand we have Chua available and because Chua is available there's always a way to fix it and avoid punishment and on the third hand we have certain crimes which must be punished well if Chu is available then there's possibility he won't be punished and if you decide that he has to be punished the only way to engineer that is to prevent him from doing chuva and there are times when will prevent a person from doing chuva the reader isn't aware of the background all the reader sees is I'm not going to let you do Chua the the prime example that the r discusses at length is God hardening Pharaoh's heart not to let the Jewish people go even though Moses comes to him it says I want you to and God is commanding you to let them go but from the sixth plague on first plague first five plag is not so but the first six plag on says God hardened Pharaoh's heart and he wasn't able to do it because God took away his Free Will so the naive reader says well look at that God took away his Free Will so that means we don't always have free will and God's going to punish him because he's continuing to do to to do evil so uh um isn't it unjust that God should punish him after taking away his Free Will minded he says you're not taking into account the rest of the context look at it this way for the first five plagues each time God said to him let the people go and he didn't of his own completely free will after those five failures that Justice requires that he be punished and if he still has the possibility if still has the ability to do free will then there's a possibility he won't be punished so the only solution is to stop him from from having free will this is exactly the way in which the decision is made now let me let me put this in sort of brutal simplistic terms which I think will make the point a little bit more intuitive I worked on this for a long time and uh some time ago I had a very sophisticated and extensive philosophical discussion of the whole thing and then a few years ago I realized that the whole thing was unnecessary it's really not that difficult it's really not that sophisticated so now you get the the simple treatment let me ask you a background question how strong how extensive is God's commitment to our Free Will pretty extensive pretty extensive pretty is there something about the world world something that everyone knows about the world which sets an absolute limit on Free Will how about death yeah I can live forever and you only have free will when you're alive alive in this world so death that's an absolute limit and then there's something called Sleep which deprives you of 30% of your life where you don't exercise free will this definitely a fixed limit on the amount of free will you have in terms of the amount of time you have to exercise Free Will no one says what do you mean die how can you die if you die that's the end of Free Will that's certainly inappropriate it's impossible no it's not you have the time of life to exercise Free Will and then it's over okay let's put it this way after the five plagues the Divine judgment is it's all that's all if he if if Pharaoh dropped dead after the fifth plague no one would have any complaints no one would say yeah but maybe he'll do Chu tomorrow yeah but you could always say that and if you say that no one will ever die so here what's being said is after the five plagues as far as chuva and punishment is concerned punishment is necessary and Cha can't and and and nothing nothing should stop it and actually there would be no loss if he died all together and lost the ability to Chu I need him to stay alive I have certain purposes God says I have certain purposes for him to stay alive but the opportunity to fix what he's done wrong no he's lost that he's lost it just as if he died yeah I thought there was another interpretation I don't know if I heard it from you or someone else that it was the the hardening of his heart wasn't so that he would lose his free will but so we maintained it yes there isman says that and when I I when I first read that I thought to myself wow I read these verses they seem to be simple enough and clear enough and absolutely clear that what they were saying and then I read M I said boy oh boy you have to be more cautious and you have to be more imaginative so it works like this sometimes circumstances overwhelm a person to the point where he can't respond he's paralyzed and can't respond my example is in in boxing that's the end of the eighth round and the Box Fighters been taking a terrible pun beating and there's a minute between rounds and he goes back to the stool where where his his coach is and he says it's over I can't do it call a TKO TKO technical knockout and and let me get out of here I I can't go back and fight him he's psychologically beaten what does the coach say to him yes you can it'll be better if you do he'll only win on points won't be a TKO be better for your record maybe you'll get a lucky punch try again he restores his self-confidence so as to restore his Free Will so that he can now make the decision to go back and fight and this is what the ran says ran says after five plagues Pharaoh was was beaten the sixth plague actually he was beaten and he would let he would let the Jew Jewish people go not by free will just because he was beaten so God strengthened his heart to restore his ability to make a free decision so he'll make another free decision and he'll be responsible for that crime as well so the verses don't tell you which way to interpret it but I'm dealing now with with my's interpretation and how it's How we understand it vis a free will that's but you're right the verses don't demand that that this problem problem should arise I'm just curious how to I don't want to dist distract the um first interpretation but to that because it I can see that the side where it makes sense where Hashem is is making sure is like punishing him in a sense for for what he did but if he if it's if the interpret if it's really what happened was as do said it where it's that the the he he maintained his Free Will for the whole time what does that say about our loss of Free Will in in certain circumstances or do do we do we ever lose Free Will and well I think from makar's point of view um uh let me expand on on the point a little bit and and I think you're asking something which you know touches some core issues um let's say they have a very unhappy marriage and in particular the husband is not treating his wife appropriately she goes to the court and explains her position and they say you're right I say to the husband give your wife a divorce and he refuses there's a lot of talk about this in certain political literature so the strict Jewish law is they tell him give her a divorce or else and if he's imagined enough to ask what's the or else the else is we'll beat you until you do that's Jewish law a man does not get away with refusing to give a get you hear about cases where women don't get the divorce that they that's only because Jewish law isn't enforced if Jewish law were enforced she'd get it right away calling down to Thea for one last consultation and it always now however we have a rule that this has to be done willingly so the says my man quotes it you beat him until he says I want to do it so the onlooker said what do you mean you beat him until he he wants to do it Sur he doesn't want to do it what he wants to do is avoid the beating what do you mean beat him until he says he wants to do it and here's the secret the secret is that everyone has some motivation to do the right thing if you believe in a Creator and believe in the Torah that he gave you you automatically have some motivation to do what the Creator said some motivation of course human beings are complex they have lots of motivations and some of them aren't Noble and some of them are vicious and he's making a decision what to do now when the right thing that you have to do is very hard because you have contradictory motivations we could help you out out by removing some of those contradictory motivations the idea of beating him is to make the contradictory motivations so painful that they fail to move him anymore and there's much easier for his good side to make the decision to do what the court tells him to do and to give the divorce so when he says I want to it's not a joke he's not just mouthing syllables that have no connection to reality cuz part of him really does want to part of him really did want to before just because it's right it's just that other parts of him were bitterly opposed and he was deciding to go with them if you take off the effect of the other ones it much easier for him to make the right decision so that's the idea of makos you beat him then when he does the right thing he does it still willingly but that's only if he does have a part of himself that wants to do the right thing some commentators on the rambam have asked the question what would happen if a person didn't have that let's take a person who was an atheist doesn't believe in God doesn't believe in the Torah doesn't believe in the Jewish history when you beat him could very well be that no part of him wanted independent to do it when he will say I want to it'll just be syllables it'll just be syllables to stop the beating and then according to those commentators it won't work it won't work so now let's go to Pharaoh the the the um plagues are accumulating now I'm taking n's picture now the Ran's picture and after the six place plague he's beaten and since he's beaten he's going to let them go just to avoid the pressure there's no I really want to in there in that action at all well if somebody does something just because he's beaten by the pressure there's no free will there at all and there's no free will there at all then he's not going to be responsible for what he's doing the ramban wants to see if responsible for all 10 and since there's no nothing in him that wants to do the right thing the only way to make him responsible is to take off some of the pressure or to enable him to resist the pressure and that's what what raan understands to be doing he strengthens his heart so that he will be able to make a a freedom will decision in spite of the pressure and then he'll be responsible for it that's very very different from amman's picture of what's going on yeah um can you on how the suffering is not punishment how the suffering is the punishment is not punishment oh um let me try uh um let's suppose that a damages B's property now and let's say for one thing we say well you have to pay for the damage is is paying for the damage punishment let me ask another question suppose a borrows money from B borrows money and now the time is up and B goes to the court and the court says yeah the the contract is valid and a owes the money pay him the money is the court punishing a no paying back money you you borrowed isn't punishment you just owe the money if a person damages somebody else's property he owes the money punishment would be will do will make you pay double to discourage other people from doing it or to punish you because you because of your bad will that would be a punishment but just making up what you what you lost isn't a punishment so not all suffering as a consequence of Your Action is punishment when the when a damages B's property and we say okay we're going to take 10,000 000 out of your bank account that's painful for him but it's not punishment it's repairing what he did wrong so before he does to shua it's punishment after he does to shua it could be used as suffering yeah but I mean not when you use the word it it sounds like it's theary same thing no there are different types of of sufferings and they have different relationships to the thing that happened and without Chua it'll be not only a matter of making up the loss but also punitive uh action but punitive action you won't have afterwards after after Chu there'll just be some things that have to be done to make up for what happened a person's action can cause a deterioration on his his own character and that also would be something that have to be repaired and that might be painful r a very interesting remark here he says that when you do Chua part jua is regretting what you did regret is painful you think I did that and and you have that sinking feeling in your stomach how could I have done that how could I have done that and you feel terrible about doing it and that's good that's the way you should feel that's part of doing chuva but that's painful he says that could be the all the pain that you need but that's that's not making it up to the other person that's just you're carrying around that that pain so that's that's not that's not punishment that's repairing the damage you did to yourself okay that's my so now when it when it comes to to to Pharaoh that's what my monity says is going on and that means that when you see a person who's put in a position where he he loses his free will you don't automatically assume something's gone wrong the plan of the creation is is being frustrated people need free will otherwise they're no different from mice and and that's the whole purpose to be different from mice no it could be that there's background to the event which you don't know where the person forfeited his right to have the free will that he has and I would make this similar it's not identical but it's similar to the case that we spoke about a couple of times where the person gets drunk and then drives his car he didn't give his keys to his friends and then he smashes into something and when he's accused of the crash he said well I didn't choose to crash I didn't make a decision to crash and we saying to his yeah that's true what you did was you made a decision to get drunk by getting drunk you lost your free will but then what happened is because you made the free free decision to lose your free will so since a person can make a decision to cancel his Free Will so and that has consequences so here too when he makes a decision to commit certain crimes and thereby loses his free will it's a similar similar idea the person's actions cause him to lose his free will we know that can happen here has happening because go of divine intervention God takes it away from him because he wants to make sure that he'll be punished now I've used a certain phraseology which is the normal way to say these things but it's a little sloppy uh and I I'll I'll Express why it's how it's sloppy by pointing out how a person could ask a question Rabbi you keep saying that there's no other way to do it you know you you're making it sound like God has no choices you know he's really stuck and the only way for him to to hand situation is by um by taking away Pharaoh's Free Will um surely God should have other options but how are you putting limits of what God can do surely God could say he has done Chua but I'm punishing him anyway if really Justice demands that he be punished then simply punish him even if he does chuba you don't have to think CH away and that that objection of the critic is correct it's 100% correct there's no abstract logic saying God has to do it this way God can't do it any other way when we say that this is the only option left to what we mean is this having made the decision already to put Chua at the top of the priorities having decided that Chua should never be ineffective that's God's decision he decided to give chuva that all powerful effect given that he made that decision then the only way to protect against losing the punishment is to take away the take away chuva of course you could have set it up differently he could have said I'm offering you chuva sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't so when we talk about Sometimes using the vocabulary that had to do with this way we don't mean abstractly he doesn't have power what we mean is he made decisions of of such and such a kind and having his Mak having made those decisions leaves him only this option available of course he didn't have to make those decisions he could have set the world in a different way so um there's really no limit on what he can do there's only once he's done one thing then the other things have to respect that that first thing that he did okay so that's one type of case where you R was using this as a general idea when you see someone who loses his free will and you're inclined to say well then God took away his Free Will so well it's not fair and it's against the nature of man and then purpose of existence no this could be one explanation for why that's not correct so people then ask well how often does this happen when I didn't study for the exam last time till the night before maybe I didn't have free will maybe I'm not responsible and U I think the right answer is maybe but the only cases that are unre are very extreme cases of people who do very extreme evil so there's no reason to to generalize it to the casual casual things in life and I think when a person ask the question deep down he knows he could have done it differently he knows he made a bad decision and that's why he feels guilty because if you really couldn't have done otherwise you you shouldn't feel guilty could feel bad but don't feel guilty it's sort of like when you trip and you fall against someone and knock him down and you say oh I'm so sorry you don't mean I'm guilty please forgive me because you're not guilty you tripped you didn't plan to trip you weren't careless just sometimes it happens people trip you just you feel sorry for the person that this happened to him just as if you were walking next to him and somebody tossed a a flower pot from the from the from a porch and hit him in the head I'm so sorry that happened to you sorry that doesn't mean I'm guilty it just means I feel I feel bad for you so um the uh the loss of Free Will anyway in this case will be will be justified that's one type of yeah sorry that's one type of case there's another type of case where there are verses that say God says to Moses or to other prophets that in the future the Jewish people will worship idols or it said about Jews and also about non-jews and the naive thought is well is saying this is going to happen and he's running the world so um doesn't that mean that either he's making it happen or the fact that he says it's going to happen means it can't happen any it can't not happen and that being the case there's no there's no free will now notice that this is different from what we worked on yesterday and the day before God's for knowledge we said about God's foreign knowledge is that he gets the foreign Knowledge from our free will but here he's making a proclamation in history that this is what's going to happen before it happens and that Proclamation is something which which then it's public people know about it then they they they feel that they have no choice to to operate so the ra has a different treatment here and it I think it it benefits from a little bit of an extended um description or Exposition what he says is in those cases the statements are all General no one is named by name not even a date is given it's not a question you don't know which generation it is that's going to happen to so when no one is named by name when a person or a generation does it we can say to them you didn't have to do it even given God's statement you didn't have to do it and therefore you are guilty let's take a very a very precise and and and wellknown case God says to Abraham I'm making a covenant with you and part of the Covenant is that your descendants will be in a land that's not their own and will be uh oppressed and enslaved and then I'm going to free them from there and the nation that enslaved them will be punished and here R mentions this Evar mentions this the critic says well wait a minute if God set it up that the nation that's that's that's enslaving them is is going to enslave them then why they why is he punishing them either because he set it up that it will happen God set it up that way or if he said it's going to happen he wants it to happen why should they be punished that's a good question and they're very answers to it my M's answer works like this imagine a particular Egyptian who oppressed Jews and he dies and now his soul is being judged I said to him you oppress Jews you're going to pay for that and he says what do you mean the Creator said it should happen so they say to him the Creator didn't say you should do it let's say there were 3,000 Egyptians who oppressed Jews God said that there should be oppression 2,999 is enough God's statement would have come become true perfectly with 2,999 you didn't have to be the 3,000th so your contribution wasn't necessary for making God's statement true and therefore it's no excuse for you now if he's clever the Egyptian will say but what if all 3000 had said that they hadn't done it then wouldn't that contradict God's statement that there should be oppression let's imagine the judge says yes that's true so the the the Egyptian says well then why are you holding me responsible because if you holding me responsible you're telling me what I should have done presumably you have that same attitude towards every individual that means your attitude is that no one should have done it and your attitude that no one should have done it your attitude is that God's will should not have come true that's what you're accusing me of I don't know how you feel about that argument when I first heard I thought gee that sounds very clever not sure what's wrong with it but it leaves me with a little itch like you really really is that that's the way it's supposed to go so I thought of a parable to try to explain this I hope the parable helps let's imagine that there 10 people in jail and the the king says look um I'm offering an opportunity for somebody to get out of jail and here's how it works there's going to be a race and the first four who come in assuming they all come in within an hour the first four will be released and the other six will not be released the other six will be killed that's the that's the deal so the day of the race comes and here's what happens all 10 run and physically they're all capable of making it there in under an hour three make it there in under an hour and seven do not so the king says all right these three um will go free and the Seven will be killed so one of the seven says but but this this is this isn't fair you know you you set it up that people are going to be killed the king says but you didn't have to be killed you could have made it under an hour you know that only three made it you could have been the fourth and if you had been the fourth you wouldn't have been killed so you're guilty of not saving your own life and that's why I'm killing you so the guy says well yeah but I suppose you're going to say something to each one of the seven each one you're going to say you could have made it but we couldn't all have made it you said it's only the first four only one of us could have made it so you set it up in such a way that somebody had to die I think that's true but I don't think it matters to each one the king can say you could have saved your life yeah in a world in which everybody gets there in under an hour and I pick out the first four and free them and kill the other six then you could say for those six there was nothing they could have done cu the other four got there before them and then I set it up in such a way that they're going to be K that people are going to be killed and you could have a question about my my motives and my morals but it didn't happen that way so what happens is this in the real world when the guy is told you sacrificed your own life in the real world that's true the only complaint he has this is similar what we said about free will before I'm realizing now the the complaint he has is yeah in the real world it's true that I could have said save my life but there's another world which isn't real it's only imaginary didn't happen it won't happen in that imaginary world I wouldn't have had a chance and the King says yeah true but so what we're not living in that world we're living in this world this world only three people made it and there was a fourth slot and every one of you could have taken that fourth slot so every one of you sacrificed his own life so then if there's a complaint at all it's a kind of abstract complaint yeah but what kind of morals do you have King where you set up a a condition where it could have happened that it would have been unjust okay it's interesting but nothing to do with you that's not a defense against your being executed because it didn't happen that way the real world didn't happen that way so I think that's that's similar to what we can what we can say here yes there should be apress again there are other answers to this question nman has other answers but M man's answers is is like this on the Bas of logical analysis to each Egyptian God can say you could have saved your neck you didn't have to oppress Jews and if you if you had done the right thing my decree would have come true on the basis of everybody else and he could say it to each one of the individuals because it's true for each one of the individuals and therefore God didn't take away their free will At All by decreeing that there shall be this kind of uh oppression that is not a contradiction to Free Will at all okay so you see that these things are there are subtle subtle points that I place here and this applies equally to Jews and to non-jews because there are predictions here of what Jews will do and predictions what non-jews will do here and I I want to stress this point because I hadn't argued with somebody many years ago very intelligent person and well educated person who told me that chuba doesn't work for non-jews just just doesn't work I myself was not very well educated at the time and I didn't have all the sources available but um here is some evidence that that's simply not the case there was a city named nve and Jonah the prophet was sent by the Creator to go to them and to say your crimes are terrible and you are now standing in the face of a terrible punishment and you have to do chuva and they did chuva they did a spectacular chuva the king ordered the people to put on sackcloth and to and to fast and to to pray to cry out and to return all the stolen money which was really the crime for which they were threatened and when in the end it says that God saw that they returned all the stolen money and doesn't credit them with their sackcloth and Ashes and the and the the fasting and the praying but they they they corrected and they were saved from the from the from the disaster they did Chua and it was accepted and and it made a difference so that there's no question that Chua applies to non-jews and someone when I made this remark said okay maybe chuva can save non-jews from punishment in this world but it can't save them from their souls being punished in the world to come so um I said well look at amones here here amities is saying that he wants if if if Pharaoh will do chuva he won't be punished in this world or the next world he escapes all of it that's why he's got to be stopped from doing Chua otherwise he could do he could he could do Chua and he and he could be punished in the next World so it seems clear that the the Chua of a nanu also is effective in preventing him in preventing him from being punished in the next world as well so the the availability of chuva is something which um exists for non-jew as well as it does for as as well as it does for Jews that's and there's a third uh way to to see this I I haven't mentioned this before but Rabbi taught me this um let's let's take it in very general terms in the ancient world there were a lot of idol worshippers idol worship is a capital crime even for non-jews what happens let's go step by step what would happen if a Jew worships an idol there and there our Witnesses and he and he and he's warned and he does it anyway what's the penalty penalty for idol worship is death supp suppose he does Chua he does Chua he regrets it he destroys the idol he um makes it clear that he would never do it again chuva has no effect on a this worldly punishment it has no effect on the court the court cannot um released a person from his from his punishment on the grounds that he did chuva there's no such thing what about a non-jew what about a non-jew Who who worships Idols he does so he was told he shouldn't do so and he did on purpose and so and so on if they do chuva they avoid punishment there were people who were Idol worshippers who became Jewish converts why wer they just punished kill them and indeed showby this there's a ramban very very I think little known ramban but when the sh Le killed out the people in Shem to free Dina who was held as a captive their sister and to recover her so yaka is very upset he says to them you've made my life difficult and so they say shall he treat our daughter like a harlot and that's the end of the discussion but later on at the end of his life when Jacob is giving blessings to his children to shim and Ley he has very bitter things to say the question is why is Ja is is is yakob so upset what what's moving him at the time he says the people of the surrounding area will will come and and destroy us and so and so on raan says look in the story with SH they kidnapped Dina the prince of the land give and then they come and they say Let's Make a Deal will uh make peace with one another and we'll integrate with one another and the guy who raped her says you know I want to marry her and I'll pay you whatever you want there's the marriage price and we all we don't have a good time and the brothers say to to the people of Shem um you you have to be circumcised if you're not circumcised like us we can't do it so they decide to circumcise they do it and then sh Le kill them all out so ran explains that yov was says look they took this dramatic drastic step of all circumcising themselves Maybe they would have developed into people who were living the way wants them to live in which case you should not have killed them here the ran is picturing chuva and he's saying if it could be anticipated that they were going to do chuva you shouldn't have killed them that means the Chua would work so here's another example example of where CHA works for nonu um this this is a fact how shall I put it there are many differences between the responsibilities of Jews and non-jews and the penalties of non-jews Jews and non-jews and the place that they occupy in the responsibility for the world this difference that we don't have that that if they do something wrong there's no way back the idea of being able to repair what you've done wrong applies to non-jews as well as applies to Jews I'm hesitating because I don't know how to put it into a larger philosophical context you know what I would like to be able to do is say Okay Jews and non-jews are different in ways one through six but if you look at them carefully you can see that one through six don't affect chuva that's why chuva is one of the differences I'm not able to do that so I feel as an incompleteness in my in my understanding and my in my description but as they say in in Yiddish them the facts okay yeah both these cases are before the Torah was given so um are we effectively calling them we're not we're calling them non-hebrews or we're calling them non-jews well um let's put it this way the population before the Torah was given is either all all what we call non-jews Patriarchs kept the Torah before it was given voluntarily they weren't commanded to to keep it when the Torah became given then the Jewish people had to keep it that was the major transition there is a difference of opinion as to whether Abraham Isaac and Jacob and all their descendants had a special status unlike the rest of the population of the world and could be called Jewish in some sense or other Jewish with quotation marks or not and they were just like everybody else so if they were just like everybody else then what we're saying about that period of time applies just as it apply and it continues to apply um if not then they're different but the non-jewish world isn't different so it won't make any difference in terms of the availability of Chua for non-jews the giving of the Torah changed our status didn't change their status so even though there was certain minor detailed changes but they didn't change their General status and the examples that my monties brings about predicting in the future that groups are going to to sin and wondering whether that takes away their ability to do Chua that's for for non-jews as well there are cases in the prophets where they talk about non-jews doing that so it's clear from myties that applies after afterwards as well okay