Jeremy Rosen
Sin and Free Will

Jeremy Rosen - Sin and Free Will

- So Jeremy, we can just welcome everybody back, Shanah Tova to all our participants and we’ve got a very, very interesting lecture today on sin and free-will, and Jeremy, and I are just chatting about you know, is it in contradiction? And I was just saying, “Absolutely not, we are not sheep!” Whenever you’re ready, ready to go, thanks Jeremy.

• So, welcome back everybody, I wish you all a Shanah Tova, a very happy New Year, wherever you are, whatever you are, whatever new year you celebrate, and we are heading now towards the ‘Day of Atonement’, and the question arises of sin. Now, I hate that word, that word is regalement of guilt, of priests telling me what a terrible person I am, contrasting that with a saint, I’m not a saint, nobody’s a saint. Where does this horrible idea of sin actually come from? Now, if we are Catholic, or some branches of Christianity, you’ll believe in something called ‘Original Sin’, that is to say that human beings are born bad, we’re born selfish, egoistic, nasty, mean and brutish. And it’s only if we actually come to accept the truth, or in the case of Christianity, that is Jesus, we will have grace, and if we have grace, we can overcome this horrible curse of sin. Now, this actually arises the theory from the Bible, from the story of ‘Garden of Eden’ and Adam & Eve. In the first chapter of Genesis it says, “God created this world, and it was good, and he was happy with it.” And into this world come some human beings, and these human beings are plonked in a nice garden where everything is perfect.

But then, in the garden, there’s another way of looking at things, there is the snake, and the snake, the serpent entices Eve to break the law. God has said to Adam & Eve, “Look, this garden, this Eden is all for you, all I want from you is just one thing I don’t want you to do, I don’t want you to eat the fruit of this particular tree, just don’t do that, eat whatever else you like, just one thing I’m asking, it might not make any sense to you, but I’m just asking, do me a favour, don’t eat from this tree.” Well, as we know, Eve looked at this beautiful fruit, and the serpent managed to persuade her it’s worthwhile to eat it, and she ate it, and she gave to her husband to eat, and that was the ‘Original Sin’. You disobeyed God, you had a choice to do the right thing, to do as you were told, but you chose not to, so you were punished, you were driven out of this perfect Garden of Eden, into a harsh, unforgiving, difficult world in which you now have to struggle. Now, that’s one way of looking at what happened, that this original act was an original act of sin, but there’s another way of looking at it, because in Judaism, the concept of ‘Original Sin’ isn’t quite the same as it is in Christianity.

Judaism, or at least going to our understanding of the Bible, comes out with the statement that, human beings have a ‘yetzer’, that is to say a tendency, a tendency to do good, and a tendency to do bad, to make the right decision, and the wrong decision. But in the ‘Book of Genesis’, they say this tendency comes ‘from childhood’, it’s something that develops within us when we see that there are options, we see that if we cry and stamp our foot, and make a noise we get fed, and of course as Sigmund Freud has told us, we start off as a seething mass of desires, and our libido tells us what to do, and then all of a sudden, at some stage we realise, it might pay to exercise control of our egos, and so in comes the superego, and says, “Guys, sometimes you know, if you suppress your immediate desire for something, you might get more later on. You want to play games now, but I’m telling you, if you work hard at your studies, you’ll have more job options later on, if you work hard now.” So, you’ve got two models, the model that sin is something built into us, we are natural sinners, leave us alone, and we’ll sin, or the idea is we’re neutral organisms, but we have choices to make. Now, I’m going to come back to this idea of choices, in due course, but before I get to the idea of choices, we can see from the Torah, from the Bible, that humans have this capacity to do the wrong thing, God has said, “Look, I want you to be like me, what is ‘like me’?

Not in my physical form, but knowing the difference between good and bad, good decisions, and bad decisions.” We can argue about what defines a good decision, or a bad decision, it will vary from place to place, but we do have options, good decisions, and bad decisions. But the Hebrew word, the Hebrew word for this horrible word ‘sin’, there are three words mainly used in the Torah, and a fourth one that comes a bit later. The first one that’s used is the idea of ‘Chet’, ‘Chet’ which is one of the words that are translated very badly as ‘sin’. But ‘Chet’ if you look at it etymologically, means to ‘miss the mark’, it doesn’t mean to blacken yourself, to crowd you in sin, it’s to ‘miss the mark’. So, in modern Hebrew, when you say, “I failed to reach my target.” You say, ‘to miss the target’. And we all miss the target at some stage or another, it doesn’t sink us into this horrible state of sin, we’re not in a state of sin, anymore than we’re permanently in a state of happiness, it’s just that we make the wrong decisions, so ‘Chet’ means to ‘miss the mark’. Then there’s another word ‘Pesha’, ‘Pesha’ simply means ‘you could’ve done better’, you failed to reach a certain standard. Then there is the idea of ‘Avon’, the idea of ‘Avon’ is that you failed to do what would be best for the other person, you’ve created a little vacuum here, and this vacuum can be filled without too much difficulty, if you want to make the effort to fill it. And then there’s another word, which is the most common word nowadays, ‘Avera’, and ‘Avera’ literally means to go off the path, to step off the track.

Okay, so you stepped off the track, next time, step back on the track, no big deal, you’re not described as a sinner, you’re described as a human being, who made a bad decision, and you can put it right, there’s no problem about putting it right. So, these words in the Bible, don’t really mean sin the way we think, the sin you’ve sunk to a lower level, you are inviolably damaged, your reputation is ruined forever, you’re a bad person. It’s never used, nobody… Kane, when he killed Able was not described as a ‘bad’ person, he was described as somebody who did the wrong thing. Adam and Eve were not described as ‘bad’ people, they are described as people who made the wrong decision, they had a choice, and they made the wrong choice. And interestingly enough, this question of choice, keeps on cropping up throughout the Bible, the most famous case of course is Pharaoh, and it says of Pharaoh, that God hardened his heart. Now, if we’re talking about God hardening somebody’s heart, that must mean they have no choice, so what does it mean when God says, “I’ve hardened Pharaoh’s heart”?

Well, one way of looking at it is this, imagine you’re in Pharaoh’s position, here you are, the master of the greatest culturally, most advanced empire of your day, and you are the most powerful figure in it, then along comes this non-entity, this guy is a bit of a shepherd, a nomad from somewhere in the Middle East, with some other guy who dots to jump himself up as a priest, and tells you, “You know Pharaoh, this is what you got to do, you got to let these slaves go.” Why the heck should he pay any attention them? It doesn’t make sense. And therefore, Pharaoh’s hardened heart doesn’t mean to say he had no choice, it just means that given who he is, where he is at this particular moment in time, this is the sort of conclusion he is likely to come to. It’s possible when you see evidence to undermine that position, that you will undermine that position, but meanwhile you’re here, absolutely convinced that you are right, and everybody else is wrong, and your actions will be based on that kind of mindset.

So, when we look at what the bible understands as ‘sin’, it is essentially making the wrong decision, stepping out of line, no more than that is what the Torah means by ‘sin’, and it’s something that we can easily cure ourselves, by stepping back on track, and by doing the right thing. Within the ‘10 Commandments’, there’s a famous line that God visits the sins of the fathers on their sons, to so many generations if they’re bad and fewer generations if they’re good. And the question is, what does that mean? To visit the ‘Avon’? The errors, or the shortcomings of our fathers? It certainly doesn’t mean punishment, because later on in the Torah, the Torah says, “You don’t punish a father for a son, and you don’t punish a son for a father.” So, what does it mean in the ‘10 Commandments’, ‘visiting the sins’? I think what it means is, you should know that there are consequences to your actions, your actions can and do impact the next generation, sometimes whether you realise it or not, and so if you put a lot of positive energy into your children and bringing them up, that’s going to have one impact, if you deprive them, it will have another, it doesn’t mean there are any guarantees, children from loving homes can turn into criminals, and children from horrible homes, can turn into wonderful, law-abiding, good citizens.

So, we have to understand that the Bible’s approach is a very humane and humanitarian approach to sin, which doesn’t stain you, there’s no ‘with apologies’ to an American writer, no stain of sin, there is just an action, which is the wrong action, or the inappropriate action, or an action that will have negative consequences. And this was how things were, in the relatively simple world, before philosophy, and before theology, that is how the Bible looked at things rather benignly, and you could always make up for something you did wrong, if it was wrong to another person, you compensated that person if you deprived them, you made up for it in one way or another, and if it was God, it was between you and God to put it right, it was very, very subjective. And there was this term in the Bible called ‘Kapara’, where the term ‘Yom Kippur’ comes from, which is normally translated as ‘to atone’, but actually, ‘Kapara’ means a kind of a white-wash, in other words, you replace yourself, the old guy has gone, and there, there’s the new person here, because you’ve changed your way of looking at things.

So, atonement when we translate it means, “Oh, I’ve done something terrible. I’ve got to find some punishment, I’ve got to lacerate myself, lash my body, suffer like mad, because I’ve done something wrong, but that’s not really what ‘Kapara’ means, ‘Kapara’ really means ‘do a better job’, try to get rid of those things that you didn’t do as well, and you will be able to do a better job. But then, along comes this idea, somewhere around the period of Greek philosophy, and into 2,000 years ago, that maybe we’re not free, maybe we don’t have choices, maybe everything is in the lap of the gods, and only the gods know what’s going to happen, only God knows. And so, when you come to the Mishnah, 2,000 years ago, you have this famous phrase, this famous phrase is ‘everything is foreseen’, that you have given permission to act. So clearly, somebody had suggested we aren’t free to act, and the Talmud is saying, "Yes, you definitely can act, but you should know that everything is foreseen.” Now, what do we mean by ‘everything is foreseen’?

Now, in theological terms, God was supposed to know everything, and be everything in the way humans are, but the term in Hebrew ‘foreseen’, just means it’s all open out there, it’s all revealed, everything’s clear out there, we know what the options are, but you have certain options to make, so it’s not as though God is forcing your hand in some way, to say that ‘everything is understood’ makes sense, because after all, the Talmud itself said, “The world runs according to it’s own rules.” There is nature, there’s rain, there are avalanches, there are tornadoes, it has it’s own rules, cold and hot, and therefore, the world functions into some extent a predictable way, we can understand how nature works. But at the same time, there’s another one of my favourite phrases in a Talmud is, “Everything is in the hands of God.” “Apart from catching a cold, and falling into a pit.” Now, it sounds a bit trivial, what the heck does that mean? Essentially, what it means is, the world functions according to certain rules, but if you don’t look where you’re going, if you don’t take care of yourself, if you don’t put an effort in to do things properly, you’re going to end up in a mess. So, there’s no contradiction to saying, we understand what influences people, and changes people, and guides people, but that doesn’t mean to say we can’t make decisions. So for example, having been brought up as a disciplined Englishman, I know that in general if I’m angry, I shouldn’t throw a tantrum, and I shouldn’t need to throw a glass, and smash it against the wall. So, most people who know me, can predict about me, that I’m not going to smash a glass against a wall in a fit of temper, most people who know me will be able to say, that having been brought up in a Jewish family, the chances are I’m more likely to find a partner who’s Jewish, it doesn’t mean necessarily, plenty of Jews don’t, some Jews do, but you can make certain predictions about how people are likely to act.

And after all you can see, I can tell the difference, and I’m sure you can, between an American Ḥasīd, an English Ḥasīd, and an Israeli Ḥasīd, they might be dressed the same way, but believe me, their visceral responses are culturally motivated, and modified, and you can tell the difference, most people could tell the difference between a Frenchman, brought up in a French culture, and an Englishman in English culture, and American in American culture. So, somewhere around, somewhere around the first millennium of theologians, there is an idea that free will is a problem, we might not actually have free will.

Now, Maimonides, who was living 1,000 years ago, was faced with this problem, if God knows everything, how do I have free will? Well, his answer was to say, “Well, God may know everything, but frankly mate, you don’t know what God knows, so you are…” In a sense, he didn’t use this term, “Under the illusion that you have free will, you think you do, you think you make choices.” But he says, “Since we don’t know, we are living in a world where we are faced with decision-making, and we have to make decisions, and although we can predict certain decisions, it doesn’t mean to say that some of us can’t rock the boat, or move from one culture to another from when religion to another, or from one society to another.” So, Maimonides is very clear, the phrase he uses, “We’ve been given permission,” by God, so-to-speak, to make our decisions, and face the consequences, and that’s what’s essential to being a good human being, you make the right choices.

Of course, we’re then going to argue, “Well, what are the right choices?” After all, the right choice for a Christian isn’t necessarily the right choice for a Muslim, isn’t necessarily the right choice for a Jew, and so you can say, there are levels of choices, there are religious levels, social levels, and personal levels. And we were talking before, Wendy and I before this started about, why do so many people follow like sheep? The herd mentality, everybody’s got a mind of their own, but most people choose not to exercise their mind, or they prefer to be led ‘cause it’s easier, because thinking and making decisions requires discipline, and most people don’t like discipline. So, where are we? Can we blame God? Can we say to God, “God, you created this world in a terrible way. You created this world where human beings make decisions, and they make terrible decisions, they kill each other, they murder each other, they torture each other. Couldn’t you have done a better job?” To which, God might reply, “Look, I gave her the choice to fall in love, that’s not bad, if you choose not to fall in love, you’re making the decisions so to speak.”

But the truth is, all these kinds of questions involving God are really, if you’ll excuse me saying so, a waste of time, because God is not a human, God is not Superman, and therefore if we attribute things to God, we are projecting from us onto God, so I’d like to really leave God out of this if I can, and just look at this question of the choices that we have, and the choices that we make. Somewhere, in the Protestant reaction against Catholicism, which was very heart in the 'Original Sin’, which was full of sinners, which was full of lacerations, and horse hair shirts, and of sacrificing, and of lying, and penance for long periods of time, and suffering, and suffering, it influenced Islam, it influenced Judaism, it influenced Christianity, this idea of penance.

And within this came the idea, coming from Protestantism, of something called ‘Predestination’, God knows exactly what to do, you have no choice, it’s been decided before your birth, and therefore no matter what you do, you’re going to go either to heaven or to hell, ‘cause God has already decided, which again is a strong argument against God. Although, to some extent, this idea also finds it’s way into other religious traditions, maybe the idea of karma under Buddhism, but nevertheless, all religions have different sex to them, different elements, different ideologies, and we choose the ideology that tends to attract us most, although most people tend to stick with whatever they’re born into, and that seems to be within the world in which we live, the major determining factor. Most Muslims will stay Muslims, most Christians will stay Christians, most Buddhists will stay Buddhist, and Hindus will stay Hindus, the only acception to this rule is Jews, where most Jews don’t stick with being Jewish, but that’s our strength, and it’s our weakness too.

So, if we have this idea of 'predetermination’, that everything is determined, and that was part of the Calvinist tradition within Christianity, did it die out? Because most Christians don’t accept the idea of determinism, and predestination, but in our day, it’s come back, and it’s come back with a mighty force, because thanks to scientists, scientists say we can predict so many things about a human being, we understand the brain so well, we can predict everything, and all the people working in Google, and Facebook, and all these people are so busy predicting what we’re going to do, what we’re going to buy, and there’s no question that scientists can predict a great deal about human behaviour, but they still can’t predict everything. In the same way that we thought we could predict everything about the universe, and that we knew exactly about everything including string theories and everything that’s predictable, and unpredictable, and not predictable, and yet, despite that, despite all the money invested, there are still lots of things we don’t know, and I believe that we know a great deal about the brain, and brain surgeons know a phenomenal amount, but there are still many areas that we’re not clear about, and so although we can predict lots of things, we can’t predict everything.

Now, you’ve heard of a American psychologist, a behaviourist called ‘Skinner’, and Skinner worked with his pigeons in little boxes, and was able to predict, of course, we’ve had lots of examples, of experimentation that can predict how human beings are going to act, but none of them can absolutely say everything about everybody. So, we have to draw a distinction between whether we mean free-will means there are no restrictions on you at all, or whether free-will means there is a measure, a degree of choice, and circumstances make a difference. When I was at university, and we were doing exercises in philosophy, we would ask this sort of question, “Who is freer? Has more free-will? Somebody living in the middle of London, where there are traffic lights, and policemen, and rules, and taxation, and their conventions, and there are clubs you have to belong to, and you’ve got to dress in a particular way, and you can’t go around naked. Or somebody living on a desert island with no rules, can do whatever the person wants?” Well, the person, it’s true on the desert island has no restrictions, but what can he do? There’re no galleries to go to, no theatres to go to, nobody to interact with, his options are very, very restricted, and therefore sometimes, having limitations, having disciplines gives you more choice, if you are disciplined academically, you can do more things sometimes, although others will out you, you merely put your mind in a narrow box.

But there are situations where having discipline helps, and that’s one of the reasons why there’s this famous line in the Talmud which explains, in Midrash which explains, why did it say the ‘10 Commandments’ are ‘Engraved in stone’? Engraved in stone, and they say because the word ‘engraved’, also means ‘freedom’, it frees you, it frees you in two ways, one of them is by disciplining yourself to be a nice human being, you have better relationships with other human beings, you have more options. By disciplining yourself to study, you learn more, you can achieve more. So sometimes having religious restrictions, actually enriches your life, it gives you more things to do, so that when we talk about freedom, we have to try to understand what we mean by it, and free-will, free-choice should not mean there are no restrictions, we know we have restrictions. Mike Tyson was never going to be a professor of philosophy, if he is going to be anything, it was going to be a boxer, and similarly Steven Hawking was never going to be a boxer, he was always a brilliant mind, so of course there are limitations, some are more intelligent than others, some are stronger than others, weaker than others, better looking than others, we all have some strength and some weakness, and the odds of course is to choose how to use them effectively, and one of the way of using them effectively is to think, and to decide, not just to act the way we feel like it.

And so, coming back to this idea of having a religious, ethical structure, it’s purpose is not to limit your choice, but to help you make better choices, by presenting one way of looking at things, and getting you to think about it, to challenge, and to examine yourself, to see if you’re coming up to scratch or not. Which is why we have this time of the year, it’s an interesting time of the year in which we should devote time to thinking about, “Have we done well this year? Could we do better? Should we do better next year? Should we make these kind of new year resolutions to be better human beings?” But being human beings, being the way we are, we like images, we like pictures, we like a narrative, and so we have this narrative this year, that we’ve got 10 days before God is going to judge us, and on Yom Kippur, God will be sitting on high, like Michael Angelo Sistine Chapel with lovely white hair, not bald by any means, and looking paternal, and he’s sitting on a golden throne, and he’s surrounded by all these white-wing angels, and all these lovely little , and little naked angels, and he takes out from underneath the throne, this huge, big tome, the Book of Life & Death, and he slaps it out across his thighs, and then he takes out this goose quill, and he starts writing in, “Jeremy Rosen, for some good behaviour in the course of this year, I’ll let you go onto another year, but frankly, you didn’t do well enough, and I expect you to do better next year.”

Like a good headmaster in the end of term report. And so, we imagine, we imagine that we’re standing before this divine tribunal, and this tribunal knows everything we’ve done, there are no secrets in our hidden centres, and we have it played back to us, and we’re so embarrassed by it, and we decided, “I’ve got to be better next year.” Now, do we really think that? Do we really think that happens? Well, some people actually did, there’s for example a nice line in the Talmud which says, “If you want to know if you’re going to live this year, on Rosh Hashanah you should light a candle, and if that candle is still lit by the time you get to Yom Kippur, you’re going to have a good year ahead. And if not, you won’t.” But of course we see in reality it doesn’t work that way, and bad people carry on into another year, and good people die sometimes, as soon as Yom Kippur goes out, and most of us at the other end of Yom Kippur, we go back to the way we were before, is that free-will? Well, it’s our freedom to make choices, you may say that we don’t really have freedom, ‘cause we follow the masses, but I believe that this is the human condition, the human condition is that we are neither saints, nor sinners, and in the famous book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible it says, “There’s no such thing as a human being on earth who only does good and never does wrong.” We all do wrong!

There is no such thing as a saint, that’s why Moses was not a saint, why Moses was not perfect, nobody is perfect, we are all human beings who fail, but we mustn’t let this failure get us down, we mustn’t allow the idea of sin to drag us into depression, into frustration, into thinking how terrible we are. No, if we’re knocked down, if we knocked ourselves down, we get up, and we try our best to go forward. And that leads me to the final point I want to make, people often talk about, “What reward do I get for being a good person?” And I don’t see that this is a particularly impressive kind of a question, because just as we say that a rich person is somebody who is satisfied with what he’s got, it’s not a question of possession, it’s a question of attitude. In the same way, reward and punishment is a question of attitude, if you are the sort of person who only cares about physical things, then the sort of reward that you would get, would be something physical, a better plane, a better car, something like that.

If you’re somebody whose interest is academic, your greatest reward is academic pleasure. If your interest is something spiritual, then your reward is in that area. Reward essentially is the consequence of our actions, as punishment is the consequence of our actions, there’s no hocus pocus. And by the same token, most people seem to think that superstition, or that some sort of magic solution can solve the problems for them, and the moment you think that, in my view, you are lost, we are all responsible for ourselves, for our own actions, for our own decisions, we may be influenced, we may be regulated, we may be predictable in so many ways, but in the end, in the end, there’s a famous Chassidic story, I’m sure most of you have heard of a person who said, “When I get to heaven, God is not going to ask me why I wasn’t Moses, he’s going to ask me why I wasn’t me.” And to me, that is the essence of the idea of sin, of repentance, of Rosh Hashanah, and Yom Kippur. And with that, over to you, and to our questions, and answers.

Q&A and Comments:

So, first of all, Audrey says, “To everybody, I say that to all of you listening, may you have a wonderful year, health, happiness, and everything like that, and use your potential to the fullest.”

“Maybe Adam & Eve made the right choice, perhaps they would really have not become a creative entity if they’d stayed in the Garden of Eden, and we would then become God’s helpers.”

I agree, I agree 100%. Again, a line from the Talmud, “The Torah was not given for angels.” If we’d had been angels, we’d be the most boring people out, we’re not boring, 'cause we’re not angels, angels in a sense as Christianity understands them as saintly beings, is not part of our theology.

Q: Rommie, “If we have choice, does that mean God doesn’t know the future? And does God know what will God choose?”

A: I have no idea what God knows, God is not a human being, and so, when we apply any human term to God, it does not make sense. You say to me, “How do you know you’re talking about my brain? My brain cognitively knowing something?” God does not have a brain, so to talk about God knowing, doesn’t make any sense to me, we have to take God out of what we call the representational, the anthropomorphical, as God as being a human being, he is not, and therefore it’s not relevant to know, we can’t know what something non-physical is, 'cause we’re physical beings, we can only know about physical things, and so we have to focus about physical things. What God represents if you like is a gold standard, is the standard of knowing the difference between good decisions, and bad decisions, better decisions, and worse decisions, and he gives us some guidance, but other people will come up with other guidance too.

Q: “What about evil? Perhaps murderous decisions of those diagnosed as psychopaths, at what point does a person’s actions go beyond forgiveness?”

A: Well, this is an excellent point, and this is something that I meant to mention earlier, and I completely forgot to, 'cause I got carried away. When I was young, there was a man at London University, a German refugee called Professor Hans Isaac, and Isaac believed that there was such thing as a criminal gene, and he was attacked, and hounded, and accused of all things, and his career more or less can to a standstill because he dared to suggest that there might be a gene that certain criminals have. Now of course, one of the problems with that is if you do that, what you going to do? If somebody’s got a gene, you’re going to put them in prison before they’ve ever carried anything out? And it was also linked to the idea of eugenics, that some people had different genes, and therefore some people are more inclined to be criminal than others, which of course is in my view unsustainable, and shouldn’t be argued for, but it can be argued that some people have different brains, and some people have different genetic makeups, and therefore I think there may well be a tendency in somebody with a particular genetic makeup, to be less disciplined, to be more susceptible to taking drugs, and if you’re more susceptible to taking drugs, you are more likely to do things out of control, and be out of control at certain stages. Just as if you drink alcohol, you’re more likely to do something stupid when you’re drunk.

So, I do believe that there are these elements within us, that push us, or lead us in certain directions, make us more susceptible to doing wrong things than others. But that doesn’t mean to say we can control them, sometimes we have to use medicine to control them, sometimes we can use our own energy to control them, but the fact is, we do live in a world of punishment, we do live in a world in which, when people do things wrong, that we think are going to endanger society, or endanger themselves, we take measures to stop them doing it, sometimes by sending them for psychiatric treatment, sometimes by putting them in jail, and disciplining them in some way. So, we do believe that punishment in a sense, has a purpose, there are some saying, “No, it doesn’t have a purpose, it’s pure retribution, pure retribution, lock 'em away, and that’s it.” I don’t agree with that, we don’t have that idea in the Torah, putting people in prison is not part of the biblical tradition, you get somebody in society to try to work it better, and be better there, not lock them away. But in our society, we do like to think that prison should be recuperative, or correctional in some way, even though the fact is that most systems don’t work that way, I wish they would. So therefore, I like to leave God, and determination, and genes, all these things as something to refer to, but not as something that we take to mean that we have no choice.

Elena, “Cup or a handle?”

Look, there are all kinds of ways, of trying to atone, there were sacrifices in the Temple, there are people who take chickens and whirl them around their head, and say there, “Buck for the grace of God go I, and may all my sins go into those chickens.” I can’t identify with anything like that, I feel sorry for the poor chickens, and I think the people doing that are heaping more problems, as far as God is concerned on their heads, although as I said, I don’t know that God is involved in this, but I think if God cares about me, he must care about chickens too, and therefore I don’t think he’s very happy about swinging 'em around the head.

Q: “So, what was the definition of Bashert? How do we define it?” Elaine says.

A; Ooh, that’s a good question. 'Bashert’ means ‘it’s all ordained’, and there are some people who say it is ordained. Let me give you an example. There is a Talmud, the Gemara which says that 40 days before a child is born, a voice goes out on Mount Sinai and says, “‘X’ is going to marry ‘Y’, and ‘Y’ is going to marry ‘X’.” So in that sense, everything is ordained, two lines later, the very same Talmud says, “A man and a woman marry according to their own deeds.” So, it’s who you are that decides who your spouse is going to be.

Q: You have two different versions in the same Talmud, is one right, and the other wrong?

A: No, I don’t think so, I think what they’re saying is this… Look, if you grow up in a very closed environment, the chances are you’re going to marry somebody from that closed environment, and it’s going to be somebody of roughly a certain age range, which narrows down the chances very seriously. If on the other hand, you don’t live in a very closed environment, or if you rebel against it, you’re more likely to make your own choices, and we see this around us all the time, we see how people who think they know what the right decision is, to find love wherever they want to, it rarely doesn’t work, and very often when people are put together because they share certain common ideas, and common values, and common backgrounds,, and ideas, it does work, never 100%, there are plenty of exceptions to all the rules, but I think what the Torah is saying is, these, if you like, energies, are at play, there’s the energy of situation, where you were brought up, who your parents are, what control they have over you, and there are those decisions that you were able to make by yourself. Interesting, the Gemara comes up with another answer, it says, “You know, the one which is ordained on Mount Sinai, that is your first marriage, and the one that you make up your mind about, that’s your second marriage.” As if you have to go through two, until you finally get it right. So, Bashert is a nice concept, but it’s like anything else, you can it in different ways, like believing in spirits, and Shedim, and curses, and superstition, the Talmud and the Zohar are chockablock full of superstition, full of superstitions from mediaeval years and beyond, and before, because this is what very often people need, and sometimes if you don’t have doctors, and others to help you, that’s all you’ve got to fall back on, but it doesn’t mean to say that you have to follow them, and I believe that a thinking person, acts on the basis of thought, consideration, and not random theories, or random blessings, or anything like that.

Elaine, “So, what…” So, you know, you said definition of types, so let’s go on.

Q: “Why do we need to atone on Yom Kippur, when the Torah says, ‘On this day of atonement will be made for you’?”

A: Well, no. What the Torah says, what the Torah says, you can atone any day of the year, the whole system of sacrifices was based on the idea you could atone any time you wanted to, and you could atone any time you wanted to, to another person, what the Torah says is, “Yom Kippur atones sins between you and God.” This is a God time, you’ve got to put everything you’ve done wrong to another human being right before you even get to Yom Kippur. So, Yom Kippur is basically for you on a spiritual level, you in relation to God, not to any other person, but otherwise, we can atone every day of the year, and we can atone to God every day of the year, but this is not saying… This is a concentrated time, you might not have time, you might get carried away, so I’m giving you a special time to focus on it, and really put your mind to this relationship with God.

Q: Penance, “Why a Nazir?”

A: A Nazarite is somebody who decides to be strict, who says, “Look you know, I drank too much alcohol, I got into trouble, I’m going to ban myself from alcohol for a while.” Or just says, “You know, I want to be stricter.” So, we have this option, interestingly enough, the Torah says that a Nazarite, somebody who tries to be holier, has to bring a sin offering when his time is up, ‘cause he can do it for 30 days, for a year, for two years, whatever it is, when it’s over, he’s got to give it up, and it says, “Give a sin offering? Why? He’s being holier, he shouldn’t have to give a sin offering, he should be congratulated.” And the answer that the Talmud gives is, “No, because he is trying to be better than necessary, if you stick to the rules, you’ll do fine.” You don’t have to be super-super, hyper-hyper, extra kosher-kosher.

Q: “Did Kane make the wrong choice?”

A: Yes, of course he made the wrong choice, he might not have realised he was making the wrong choice at the time, according to Martin Buber, he’d not been told not to murder, so he didn’t know that murder was wrong, but it was pretty clear afterwards, 'cause God turns 'round to him, and he says to him very clearly, “Look Kane, you did wrong, if you do the right thing, you can put it right, but if you do the wrong thing, you’ll be enslaved to your ego, to sin, you’ll be enslaved to it. So, you did wrong, but put it right, and you can.” Kane unfortunately, was in such a terrible state of depressive maniac, he couldn’t overcome it, he was so insulted, he just had to resort to violence.

“Catholic Protestants had much greater staying record than Jews.”

Well, I don’t know what you mean by 'staying record’, I mean, we’ve been around for much longer than they have, so you’ll have to explain what you mean by ‘staying’.

Jerry, “Shanah Tova.” Thank you. Thank you Amy, that’s very sweet.

Q: Rommie, “Is the threat of punishment for sin as we read on Yom Kippur? Doesn’t it also take away free will if we act out of fear?”

A: Well yes, I mean, I don’t think we should act out of fear, I think we should act out of respect, and the term Yirah, ‘awe’ does not mean fear, the days of awe are not days of frightened, being frightened in Hebrew means ‘Lafahed’, but it means respect, respecting God, respecting values, respecting barriers. So, I think that the threat of punishment, ought not to be there, I think it’s there because so many people react that way, after all, you and I know we’re more likely to abide by the law if there’s a police car tailing us as we drive, we’re less likely to do something wrong if we think somebody’s watching us. So, human beings, what we are, maybe we do need deterrents, and deterrents work. And so, this is a former deterrent, but I don’t think it’s a very noble basis to act simply because you’re frightened, I’d rather act because it’s the right thing to do.

Thank you very much Rose, that’s really sweet, thank you.

Amaya Lee Michaels, “I think Abraham made the wrong choice when he obeys…”

It doesn’t say who he obeys is, but yes, Abraham definitely made some questionable choices, questionable choices about saying, “No, my wife isn’t my wife, she’s my sister.” He might’ve done it to save his life, there were choices that he made, and choices that he thought was right, he thought it was right to go and sacrifice his son, God had to turn around, and say, “No Abraham, you’re wrong! I don’t want you to go that far.” And that’s the beauty, that all these characters in the Torah, actually show how human they are, not one of them is a saint, not one of them is perfect, although some people like to say they all were and we just don’t understand, and they didn’t do anything wrong, and they were perfect. But that’s projecting from a Christian saintly point of view back on the Bible, when you actually look at the text, it’s pretty clear.

Q: “How free-will of human being is working alongside God’s will?”

A: Well, you know, all I know about God’s will, all I can know is what the Torah says, because I can’t get a clear black and white answer from God, I feel God’s presence very powerfully, I sense it very powerfully, but in the end, what God is saying is, “I’ve told you what to do, I told you what my standards are, I expect you to follow them.” So you know, I think my freedom is exercised in following what God wants me to do, and I’m happy doing that, because so far I’ve seen it worked out pretty well, I haven’t found a better way yet, I’m still prepared to hear one if somebody says they’ve got a better way, but I’m still hearing. “As genes are more determined by nature, how much was there for free choice?” Because I think genes, even they account for 90%, and we don’t know how much they do yet, there’s still an element of unpredictability, ‘cause we see how unpredictable human beings are, and we see that people can change, and can make wrong decisions, and then make up for them, and atone for them, so we actually have evidence that humans are not all zombies, if we were all zombies, and all computer-driven, and all automatons, then you might be right, but clearly we’re not like that, look how many stupid mistakes we keep on making, day in, day out, even when we know they’re mistakes.

Thank you very much Carla, I really appreciate that.

Q: And Ellie, “I often wonder how we do Teshuva, really change?”

A: Do we really change? Well you know, it’s interesting because the term 'Teshuva’ means ‘to come back’, and actually, in the Torah, it is used in last week’s reading of the Torah, God coming back to us, and we coming back to God, so in other words, the term ‘Teshuva’ means, ‘getting back to a good place’, ‘coming to a good place’, and that is something that we ourselves can do if we make the effort, the trouble is, we often forget to, just as we often forget to pray, we’ve forgotten sometimes to brush our teeth, or whatever it is we forget, we humans are forgetful. And discipline is important, but sometimes discipline can go too far, my father always used to say this, there’s a lovely line in the Book of Psalms, which says, “Turn from evil, and do good.” He says, “You know, I’ve noticed amongst some religious people, they’re so busy turning from evil, they never get to doing good.” The other way is much better, do good, and that automatically in a sense will keep you out of getting into trouble. And I like that approach.

Q: “Cause and effect. Do you think humans have any impact on God? What do Jews believe about reciprocity with God?”

A: What the Torah says, and what says indeed in reading throughout this week is this idea that… God wants a relationship with us, and we want a relationship with God, but the trouble is, we keep on pushing ourselves apart, so it’s the relationship that we want, it’s true that we can’t know God, in the sense of knowing another person, in the sense of knowing how to perform a particular task, but we can engage with this additional dimension, and that’s why the Torah says, “When we push God away, God will hide from us.” In a sense, he’s so upset, that he moves away. Now, that’s a metaphor, of course it’s a metaphor, but it’s rather like saying ‘with love’, love has to go both ways, you can love somebody, unrequited love, but real love involves a two-way interaction, and I love my interaction with God, it’s an experience, but God doesn’t give me messages saying, “Invest in this stock, and not in that stock.” It’s an experience of something, it’s an emotion, it’s a passion, and that’s something that the longer I’m away from it, the more alienated I am, and the closer I am to it, the nearer I am to it, and the more I feel it. And in a sense, this is the metaphor, “You feel alienated from God? Think what God feels if you don’t love God, and he feels alienated from you.” “Cause and effect between this tournament says your mind talk, then comes effect.”

Yes, you know, I think I’m suspicious of all absolute theories, I think theories are useful, they point direction, we should never take a theory to use the word as gospel, gospel, it doesn’t care whether it’s a woke theory, or a racial theory, or anything like that, all these theories have shown to be poppycock, and don’t stand up. So you know, I’m suspicious of theories, as Sir Isiah Berlin once said, “If you ever come across somebody who says he’s the soul possessor of truth, run away, as fast as you can.”

Patricia Gamania, “Happy birthday on Shabbat Shuvah.” Thank you very much. Actually, it’s true, my birthday is on Shabbat Shuvah, but I was also born , so my Jewish birthday’s just gone by, but that’s sweet of you, thank you.

“In science, the time past, present and future are one, can equate to biblical all-knowing.”

That’s a very good point, because the Hebrew name for God, combines the Hebrew letters which mean, ‘past, present & future’. So, God is beyond and above time, and matter, and therefore past, present and future are in that sense, one. For us human beings, we’re stuck in time, we’re stuck in the material world, after all, time is a material construct, it’s the time it takes to go from one place to another, or from one orbit, or from one planet to go around. So yes, I think that’s a very good way of talking about God as being beyond time, and therefore time is irrelevant to understanding what God knows.

“Rambam was a huge enemy of superstition.”

Absolutely, he hated superstition with a passion, and most of his followers nowadays are the most superstitious people you’ll come across on earth, it’s absolutely unbelievable. For example, all these funny Simanim that we have on Rosh Hashanah that you know, “If I eat a carrot, then it’s going to remove all our enemies, and all the bad decrees. And if I eat beetroot, it will remove all bad things.” And things like that, these Simanim, they are superstitious, they’re fun, most views in the Gemara say they’re meaningless, but some say they are meaningful, because people took them seriously, people still do, they’re harmless. But if you lead your life according to superstition, you’re in deep trouble, so yes.

Q: “What’s your take on saying Tehillim in a crisis?”

A: Saying Tehillim in a crisis does you good, it gives you something to do, somebody’s sick, “What can I do? I don’t know what to do.” It makes you feel better, it makes you feel you’re doing something, and if you think God’s paying attention, well good luck to you. But I think that it’s main purpose like prayer, is for the good it does to you, and it also does good to a person in sick, to feel that people are caring enough to do something. So, if you look at it that way, then it is creative, if you look at it as, “If I don’t say 10 Tehillim, this guy’s going to die, and if I say 11 Tehillim, he’s going to live.” Well of course, that’s rubbish.

“Maybe God leaves us to make choice.”

Yes, I think we do make choices.

“I refer to your comment, Catholics and Protestants.”

Jerry, I’m still not sure, I was talking about them all taking on various ideas, but I’m not certain what you mean, you have to be more specific, come back with more information, I’ll answer it later on.

Reva Form, “In the gene theories, the old argument will hinder your environment, Hitler’s heart was hardened by evil thoughts.”

Yes, that’s a good point, I think there’s an example of a man, who probably had more of a fair share of criminal genes, a guy who was physiologically challenged, that guy was sick. Now, where did that sickness come from? Did it come from his mother? From his father? Did it come from experiences he went to? But definitely a sick man.

Judith, thank you. Phil, “We want to thank you for discussion.” Thank you Carol, and Phil. Judith, “Sinner repentance.” Thank you so much. Ellie, bless you. Thank you very much, Ellie.

I think that’s covered everybody as far as I can see, and therefore, thank you everybody for listening, I wish you all, and I hope to see you sometime the other side… Oh no, actually if you’re going to listen to me and Trudy next week, we’ll be on ‘Survivor of the Jews’, otherwise, later on, after the festivals are over. Thank you very much, everybody.

• Thank you very, very much Jeremy, that was outstanding as usual.

• Thank you, ah you’re so sweet. Thank you very, very much. Ah, you’re raining heavily. Yes, it’s raining now. Take care, I hope everything goes well.

• Thank you so much, and happy birthday.

• Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

• [Wendy] Thank you, chat soon. Thank you everybody for joining us.

• Bye.

• [Wendy] Bye-bye.