Jeremy Rosen
Reward and Punishment

Jeremy Rosen - Reward and Punishment

- Ladies and gentlemen, happy to be back with you on another controversial topic. First of all, I really should just see if there’s any comment. “Did you have an injury?” Joel asks me. Not to my knowledge, but thanks for asking. Anyway, so the issue is generally known as reward and punishment. It comes under the general theological term of benevolence, looking kindly on people. And it is applied theologically to the idea that God looks on us and cares about us. The first main example of heresy within the monotheistic tradition was over this issue, the difference between theism and deism. Deism meant, sure, we accept there’s a God, and the God did create the world, but since then has sat back and let things run their course. And this explains why sometimes bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. It’s part of the way the world or nature runs. Theism, on the other hand, like theology, says, no, God is actually involved in things, that nothing happens on earth without God’s knowledge. And as a result of this, people have come to assume that God rewards the good and punishes the bad, and yet that’s not what we see. So where does this idea actually come from? Actually, it goes back way before the biblical period, the kings of the ancient and near Middle East, going back, as I say, over 4, 5,000 years. Most of them, when they came to power, made a declaration. And we have an example of this archaeologically, the famous Declaration of Esarhaddon of Nimrod. That’s only about 3,000 years old. But all these declarations, by and large, said the same thing. “I am your king, and I promise you that I will look after you.

For as long as you are loyal to me, the rains will fall, your harvest will thrive, you will live at peace surrounded by your children and by your flocks and your herds, your borders will be safe, and you will be happy. But if, on the other hand, you reject me, and you are not loyal to me, then the rains will not fall, your sons and daughters will be taken off into captivity, you will suffer illness and sickness, and your life will be a misery.” Now, people were wise enough at the time to know it doesn’t always work that way. And if the king always was as the king was, the agent of God on earth, everything that happened in his kingdom was thanks to the God. If things went badly, that must be because we disobeyed the God. And if things went well, that was because we obeyed the God, whoever the God might or might not have been. So they will have known that this was really a way of saying, “Guys, I want you to behave,” posting a policeman at every traffic light to make sure that people don’t disobey the law. When they see no policeman there, they’ll Z the speed or go through the light. And that’s really what authority is about, finding a way of imposing your rule. And the way you do it is by persuading people that things will go well if they behave. And so in the Bible, we have this idea repeated both in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy, the so-called Tocheichah rebuke, in which God, assuming it is God, speaking through the Torah, says, “If you obey me, the rains will fall. We say this in the Shema,” “At the right time, you will eat and you’ll be satisfied and you’ll be happy.

But if, on the other hand, you don’t, you’ll have a terrible, horrible time.” And actually, if you look at the two places where this message is given in the Torah, “The blessings, things will be good, things will be fine, you’ll come in peace and go out in peace,” are expressed in a couple of lines. Whereas the rest say, “if you disobey me, you’ll be smashed this way, that way, and the other way,” they go on and on for over a chapter. So there’s an interesting imbalance between the paucity of the blessing and the excess of the punishment. Now, one of the earliest issues that faced the period of the Bible indeed was this question of why bad things are happening. And if you look at the prophets, you will see that this is their message. All the bad things are happening to you because you’ve misbehaved. The question is, were these promises meant to be to us as individuals or to the nation? Because it’s possible that these were just, like Esarhaddon’s confessional declaration, meant to be general to the nation, that if the nation behaved, the nation didn’t behave, not necessary to each individual, if you were a bad boy, you would be punished. So what do we think was the system of reward and punishment? We’re going to see, as the theology develops, that one of the favourite answers in the end, when they saw that things weren’t working well, was to say, “Well, it doesn’t mean in this world. It means in another world.” And the idea of another world and of resurrection of whatever it was is not directly mentioned as such in the Torah. The only hint that there might be of something miraculous comes when we talk about the prophets Elijah and Elisha, and their capacity of bringing children who seems to have died back to life again.

But we don’t know whether this bringing back to life literally meant that or just that they found a way of curing them, the way good doctors will. And we have a nice chapter in Ezekiel, when he talks about the dead coming back to life, but it’s clear that he is talking about the dead, so to speak, community of Jews in exile coming back to life when they return to the land of Israel. So this idea of reward and punishment is definitely fundamentally there. And we’re going to explore how we can understand that in our modern terms, because almost everything can be understood either rationally or mystically, logically or superstitiously, and we’ll want to explore these possibilities. It’s really not until the 1st century of the common era, and the clear emergence of the Mishnah and the Talmudic tradition that we get this explicit statement, this explicit statement of reward and punishment and reward and punishment coming to us as individuals, as well as to us as a people. And although the idea is that no matter what terrible things happen, in the long term and in the long run, God’s going to take care of us. Somehow that idea seemed to enter into our day-to-day, personal, individual relationship with God and the world. Now, actually in the Mishnah, so the Mishnah, this is the 2nd century, common era, a time particularly when Jewish thinking is challenged by Christian thinking and the ideas that stem from that tradition, as much as from, shall we say, the old Egyptian tradition. Remember, in the old Egyptian tradition and in the ancient near East, everybody believed in life after death, and we’ve discussed this before. The question, of course, was, what were the conditions of this, and why did the Torah not talk about it? Was it because it was taken for granted? Or was it because the Torah was basically a manual of how to behave? But either way, it’s not explicit.

But when we come to the Mishnah, and this famous Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, which is the only section that really concentrates on what we might call theology, we have a fascinating debate about this issue of reward and punishment. And so you have, for example, a man called Antigonus, his Greek name gives the era away, who says, “Why are you worshipping God in the expectation of getting a reward? Why are you doing things in order to get a reward? Do things because they are the morally, ethically right thing to do.” So he, in a sense, dismisses this idea of reward and punishment as being the sort of thing that only a simple person would take seriously. But then in the same book, we have somebody like Rebbe, the compiler of this book, Rabbi Yehuda ha-Nasi, and Rebbe’s view is you should do everything, the unimportant ethical laws and the important ones, because you don’t know what the reward is going to be. You might think something is very important and spend a lot of time on it, and maybe there’s no great reward for that. You may dismiss something that’s trivial, and yet there may be a great reward for that. So he already is saying, “No, there is a clear system of reward and punishment.”‘ and goes on to say you should know that, above you, there are eyes that see, there are ears that hear, and somebody is writing it down in a book. Now, did he mean that literally? Did he really mean there is a book and that God writes things down in a book? I think not, but I think he’s saying imagine somebody who’s looking at you all the time and somebody who’s recording what you do all the time. Wouldn’t you be careful that you are behaving in a good and ethical way? So this idea of reward and punishment seems to be a question of motivation.

Then you have somebody saying, and so far, this is not mentioned anything if you like about an afterlife, but you do have, in the next chapter, the opinion of one of the rabbis, Rabbi Hanina, who says, “Look, life is like a store. You want to go and buy something, you go in and you pay money and you buy something, but then you run up debts, then you’ve got to repay. And if you don’t repay, then you’ll be in trouble.” And he is the first person to say, “And you know when you have to pay your debt when you die and you come to another world.” So clearly he has recognised in this that there is no reward and punishment that’s clearly visible or apparent in this world. If there is a reward and punishment, it’s going to be in some other world. And in this other world, there is a banquet, and we will all come to this banquet and either will get a takeaway or get a cordon bleu, decent meal. But then you have the opinion, which I rather do like, the opinion of a man called Ben Azzai. And Ben Azzai says, “You know, doing a good deed leads to doing another good deed. Doing a bad deed leads to another bad deed, and therefore, the consequence of doing a good deed is its own reward.” You do something, let’s say it’s ethical, you give charity, or indeed you do something ritual, like keeping Shabbat, and you enjoy it and you do it, you’ll continue to enjoy it, and that will be its own reward. And conversely, if you’re a mean, nasty person, and you cheat somebody, you’ll go on cheating because you think that’s a normal thing to do, and that will carry on. And that in the end, so he suggests, is its own punishment. And this idea of doing things for their own sake seems to me to be the most important solution to this issue in theological terms.

And then you have the opinion that I love because this is an opinion of a rabbi who says, “I honestly don’t know.” How often do we hear not only rabbis, theologians, and other good meaning people saying, “You know, there’s a good reason why you die. There’s a good reason why you got this disease. There’s a good reason why things are going bad.” And Rabbi Azzai says, “We honestly don’t know. It’s simply not within our hands to understand either , why good people do well, or , why good people suffer. We just don’t know. But, says a pupil of his, this world is really like a corridor in front of a palace. Prepare yourself in the corridor so that you can enter the palace. Unlike some other opinions, which say, "this world is a veil of tears, everything’s already decided, your fate is decided, and it’s not up to you, nothing you can do, so you might as well eat and drink and be married 'cause tomorrow you will die,” what he essentially is saying is life is, imagine it as a testing ground where, in a sense, if you make a success of it ethically, spiritually, and morally, then that leads to a mythical, or if not a mythical, another world, another dimension. Now, all these statements are statements that illustrate the debate that went on in the Talmud. The Talmud rarely likes to come to conclusions on almost anything, but if it does, it’s on a legal issue, usually.

But on theological issues, the Talmud is a beautiful storehouse of conflicting different opinions, and we choose the ones that we feel most comfortable with. Now, after the Talmud and its variety of options and only laying down basically certain fundamental principles that are a core element of the Jewish tradition, like its religious tradition, its holy texts, like the idea that God is there, even though God is not defined, and then we have the challenge that is faced, Judaism faced, both from Christianity and from Islam. And both of them turn around to Judaism and say, “What kind of religion are you? We’ve got a solid theological structure, you’ve got just a collection of ideas. We are systematic, you are a bit not airy fairy. You focus on doing things, not on thinking very clearly.” And that was when Jewish philosophers, starting with Philo and then Saadia Gaon in Babylon, Philo was in Alexandria, Saadia Gaon was in Babylon, Maimonides was in Egypt. And Maimonides comes up, they all start coming up with, what are the fundamental beliefs of Judaism? And Maimonides has the most famous collection of 13. Some of the others had collections of merely three, five, seven, not as many as Maimonides. And there’s no reason other than the printing press, which didn’t have a printing press at that time, but other factors as to why one gained credence over the other. In this, Maimonides says very clearly, Maimonides says that we must believe in perfect faith that God bestows good on those who are bad, or on those who are good rather and who keep his commandments and punishes those who transgress his commandments.

Now, there’s a whole debate as to whether Maimonides means these philosophically or merely to address the needs that Jews had at the time to answer the Christian and the Muslim audience. But here you have this very, very clear statement, and he bases it, this statement, on a famous principle that had been absorbed into the daily liturgy that we have of saying these are the things that if we do, we do have some sort of benefit in this world, socially, but the real reward comes in the next world. And what are these things that are supposed to have some degree of reward now but most come later on? Well, the first one is honouring your father and your mother. The 10 commandments. Then the next one is , being kind to people, not necessarily charity but being kind to people. Then the next one they think is very important is going to the study house and going there to study during the day, night. The next thing is bringing in visitors, being hospitable, bringing them in, visiting the sick, finding the money to make sure that brides can get married, making sure people get a decent burial, prayer too, and making peace between individuals, this and between, most important, a man and his wife. But in the end, study is the most important thing because study will encourage you to go on doing all these other good things.

Now, this, again, is one way of looking at what the religious authorities are trying to achieve. They’re trying to achieve the idea that you should behave well and there are benefits to behaving well. But what these benefits are are absolutely intangible. And this is why where I now come to look at how we can make sense of this in the world in which we live today. Do we really think that God is looking at us all the time? Well, it depends, again, are we talking mystically, or are we talking rationally? If we are talking rationally, then we have a problem with how we explain why it is that there is so much suffering, why people often are seem to be punished, but I’m going to look at that in a minute. Or is this just a matter of superstition? Is this just a tool of getting us to behave, a tool of encouragement, enforcement, and maybe even a tool of comfort to make us feel there is something going on in this world that’s beyond our control, and ultimately things are going to work out, but maybe not if with us now, maybe at some later date. After all, God promised Abraham that the Israelites would come out of Egypt, but it would take 400 years of suffering before they do or the prophets prophesied that the temple would be rebuilt. Well, the first one was rebuilt after about 100 years or so, but after that, we’ve been waiting for 2,000 years, and nothing has happened yet. So do we then say that really this is like the old story of the atheist in the foxhole? There’s war going on around, and then he will say, “Oh, please, God, not me.” And in fact, that is what most of us do.

The question, of course, is whether that is merely an expression of our fear, our anxiety, and we are using God, if you like, as an analyst in the sky or as an outlet for our pain, or do we really expect it to happen? Now, we’ve all come across, I think, people who have been to holy men of one kind or another, and they have been promised that if they do this, that, and the other, or check their Mezuzot, or check something because if something goes wrong, you must have done something to deserve it. That’s the assumption. And after all, that’s an opinion expressed in the Talmud, that if somebody does suffer, then there’s got to be some reason, except there are other rabbis who are going to challenge that. Now, you go to this person, and you write your name on a piece of paper, or you describe what the problem is, and you get a blessing. And you have a 50/50 chance of that blessing coming true. Either you will get better, or you won’t. Now, we have something called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is very popular nowadays in certain circles where the idea goes that when you look at something and you make a judgement about what happened, you do it in the light of previous experience, in light of your tendency already to believe certain things. And then if you get better, you will believe you got better because this guru or this rabbi wrote this cure for you or this charm for you or this red band for you. But you’ll remember the 50% when you did get better as opposed to the 50% when you didn’t, or why your relatives did and your relatives didn’t. And therefore from a logical point of view, you could say this doesn’t really make sense, and yet people seem to need this. Whether we call it a placebo or something else, this tendency to interpret any evidence to confirm what you want to believe or what you already believe and reject any evidence that might go the other way. So if you believe that black cats bring you bad luck, you will focus on that.

And as a result of focusing on that, you’re going to feel very bad. One of the most common questions that we get asked as religious people is this question of, why do bad things happen to good people? And I am faced regularly with a situation in which people will say to me, “Rabbi, my brother died, my sister died, my son is ill, why are all these bad things happening to me?” And yet when you turn around and say, “Oh, yes, but look at all the good things that have happened to you. How come you’ve got a home over your head, you’ve got food to eat, you drive a nice car, you go regularly on holidays, wonderful things are happening to you all the time. Why are you not focusing on them and thanking God for those every day?” Of course, some of us do try to thank God every day for this. So this is the sort of challenge we have. Are we dealing with a theological issue that simply doesn’t make sense in a rational world? Or are we dealing with something which veers towards superstition but veers towards the placebo and makes us feel better? And surely, if it makes us feel better, that should be a good thing and something to appreciate. But then the question is, are you telling me then this is all a load of rubbish? And what I am trying to sell you is so much in our lives depend on our mental state. Even healing from a sickness can often depend on what you feel, if you are feeling upbeat or downbeat. And therefore, one of the roles of gurus or rabbis or priests is to make people feel better. And sometimes this sort of argument does make people feel better.

Sometimes it makes people feel worse. So for example, at a house of mourning, you may hear somebody say something like this, “Look, everybody is allotted a time span by God, and some have a short time span, and some have a long time span. Some people are destined to achieve more, and some people are destined to achieve less. Your lost one merely fulfilled what was a preordained state of affairs, and it was not a question of punishment or a question of reward. And even if it was, we don’t know what the punishment system or the reward system was.” Does that help? Well, for some people, it does. For other people, makes them feel even worse, which is one of the reasons why the tradition originally was, as in the Book of Job, when you go to comfort somebody, you don’t start off with fake arguments. You are Job’s comforters if you do. I don’t think that there is any value, as Antigonus said, in thinking in terms of reward and punishment. There is value in thinking that bad things happen in life. Sometimes we have to struggle, and sometimes we are fortunate and we don’t have to struggle. Do we need to think of this as reward and punishment? Do we need to think of this as divine intervention? That is a very subjective matter. And just as there are some people, I sit at the start, who are rationalists and take a rational view and some people who are mystics and take a mystical view, I’m not going to say for one minute that one is right and the other is wrong. We respond in different ways, and indeed that’s what the rabbi said. The Torah, for example, says in black and white, “Superstition is wrong, magic is wrong.” And yet we see how embedded it is, embedded it is in real life, and throughout the world, people are excessively superstitious, and they carry on because it makes them feel good. It gives them a structure and a way of coping with all the pressures of life that we all have to deal with.

So I would like now to open up ahead of time. Normally, I go on a little bit longer because I want to hear what you have to say and see if we can include these other ideas in the discussion we’re about to have. Yona and Alfred Krummel say, “You choose not to say theodicy.” Oh, yes, you are right. There are so many different words that can be used, and I happen to choose these two of theism and deism, but theodicy is a good one to be. And Mike points out the resurrection should have followed Egyptian beliefs, and it doesn’t appear in the Torah. That is quite correct. It doesn’t. And the question is, why not? Is it because it was taken for granted? The Torah is a book of life and not concerned with what happens afterwards or at least says that you shouldn’t be concerned with what happens afterwards. Or is it, on the other hand, the fact that they did not believe in resurrection or life after death? We can’t know. All we can know is that this idea has become embedded in the Jewish folk religious tradition. It’s an essential part of it. And the idea of benevolence, of God being involved, is also part of that. But that’s something that we cannot explain. There’s a great deal that we can’t explain in life. And it seems to me that one of the functions of religion is to say, “Guys, there’s a lot out there we don’t understand, a lot of stuff you don’t understand. We still don’t understand everything about how the world works and where everything is and what everything is. There’s still more to be learned. So in the meantime, just get on with the best of it.” I think I might have mentioned before the famous debate between the school of Hillel and the School of Shammai in which they said, is it better to have been born or not to have been born? So many of us are suffering, there’s so much terrible things going on in life around us. That was then, that was before the Holocaust.

So life is so bad, and for 2 ½ years, they argued. And after 2 ½ years, they actually took a vote, and the vote came out that life, better not to have been born. But then they both agreed, but now we have been born, let’s get on with it. Let’s try to make sure we are living as well and as good as we possibly can. Again, the Cromwell family point out this is part of the poetry. The poetry that we have says that you repay the good for the good and the bad for the bad. And this is an expression of hope, but how it works, nobody has yet been able to explain, which is why I go back to the ethics of the fathers, to the Mishnah, and go back to the rabbi who says we cannot explain. He is not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. He’s trying to say we can’t explain. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but I don’t know how it happens or what it means. Doesn’t it say in Kohelet, “Eat, drink, and be merry”? Yes, it does, but it also says, but know that you’ll have to give a reckoning on how you behave. So Kohelet is very keen on the idea that we should make the most of our lives and take advantage of what we have. If we have food, enjoy it. If we have drink, enjoy it, but don’t think that it’s everything. And still in the end, you got to behave a good guy.

Q&A and Comments:

Aretha says, “Refers to my blog.” I wonder which blog you are referring to there, the latest one or some other one? If you tell me which one you’re referring to, I can come to.

Charlie says, “Part of what I love so much about being Jewish is that it encourages us to ask questions and come to our own conclusions about these issues. The most honest person is the one who admits he does not know. None of us possibly could know when it comes to huge questions.” Well, that’s true. And none of us can possibly know what the afterlife is. Life after death, nobody’s come back who’s seen it. And I think that’s right. Asking questions is terribly important, and that’s one of the strengths of our tradition. We’ve always encouraged people to ask questions and not to say, “Just because it says it, that’s it, and you have to do as you’re told.” So asking questions is important. After all, we’ve just been reading from the Torah about the exodus, and it says several times, in the parashah that we read last week, when your children will ask you, “Why are we doing this?” you should give them an answer, part of our tradition, part of our history. And so questioning is essentially good, and I think that’s what we should be focusing on. “The honest person is a person who admits they really don’t know.” Oh, yes, and both in the Talmud and in the Bible, we are told, know how to admit when you are wrong, admit when you are wrong, otherwise you’re going to get caught out if you pretend you know the answer when you don’t. Takes a very wise kid and to ask the sort of question that can make any adult blush with not knowing how to give an answer.

And so Charlie says, “The older I get, the as I seem to understand, to be honest.” Well, I think that’s right. The more we know, the more we realise that we don’t know. And therefore, our challenge is not to get depressed about it, it’s to do as much as we possibly can.

Q: Now, BC says, “I’ve prayed for 20 years to get well without success. Why do I still pray when I don’t believe it will help?”

A: That’s a wonderful question. We’ve discussed before here, whether you think praying is guaranteed to give you a response, and the Hebrew words to pray, lehitpalel, is to express oneself. So when you pray, you are expressing to God or to yourself what you care about, what you want, what matters to you, the pain you’ve been in for 20 years. I’m terribly sorry that you’ve been in pain for 20 years. I don’t believe for one minute it’s because you did something wrong to deserve it. After all, you know, we’ve all done things that deserve some sort of punishment, and we don’t get punished for it. So I just don’t buy that idea you must have done something to deserve it. But why do you pray? Because expressing it is therapeutic. Prayer is therapeutic. Just as giving somebody a blessing says, “I care,” praying to God says, “This is something that matters to me.” I want eventually come and help, but there can never be guarantees. In the same way, we can never guarantee when we walk out in the street, we might not pass somebody who breathes a virus into our face and we get it. So what are we going to do, never go out anywhere? We just carry on living as best we can and take whatever precautions we possibly can to cope.

Q: When did the dowry change for being the man given to the woman?

A: Well, you ask a very good question. Dowry, where does the dowry idea come from? Well, actually, it goes back to Babylonian and earlier days when there was paying money for a bride, because very often, brides came into a house, and they brought their goods, their work, and that enabled the family to thrive. And so this idea of a dowry goes back long before Judaism. There is no obligation to give a dowry at all. It’s entirely a matter of custom. I can say with absolute confidence I never received any dowry as far as I was concerned, and I never wanted to, and I don’t think it’s right to, but that’s a different question. That’s my own particular view. Unfortunately, it is very common, and it’s a huge problem in certain parts of the world where if you don’t have a dowry, your daughter doesn’t get married, and the result of this is that you impoverish yourself in order to marry off your daughter. I said before what the daughter brought into the marriage was the reason for the dowry. That’s only one half of it. The other half of it is now somebody’s going to have to pay to look after and feed the daughter, and therefore there should be compensation for that.

Q: Rita asks, “Understanding and knowing are two different dimensions.” Again, I agree. “To know something doesn’t presuppose we understand.” Well, yes, I don’t understand relativity, but I know what the formula is. “Doesn’t reward come from the feeling one has done something good in the world?”

A: Well, yes, I think that’s precisely what that quote I gave from the Pirkei Avot, from the Mishnah. The reward for a good deed is another good deed. And the punishment for a bad deed is you do another bad deed, you go on swindling people.

“There are various points in Torah God actually says, if you don’t follow commandments, there will be consequences.” Yes, He does or She or It says that. And as I try to say at the beginning, what does that mean? Is that rather like saying, “If you don’t obey the law, you will be punished”? But sometimes people get away without being punished. I think what God is trying to do, just as the ancient kings were trying to do, was to find ways of persuading people to be good. People need to be motivated sometimes to be good, and therefore this was a form of motivation. And I see it as being essentially a form of motivation rather than a guarantee of a promise, because we see these promises are not adhered to, and yet they can still motivate us.

“Going back to the comments of Shema,” Stephen says, “that seemingly explicit about reward and punishment.” Well, yes, and once again, there are two sides to it. One of them, it doesn’t say to you as an individual necessarily, it could be to you as a nation. It should be saying the nation will thrive if the nation does well, and the nation will be punished if the nation becomes corrupt. But even if you take it to mean you as an individual, again, I come back to it, is this just encouragement in trying to get you to behave in whichever way you can? I’m not certain it is a guarantee. And if you think it is a guarantee, then unfortunately you are faced with a problem. Then why does God not intervene to stop things like the Holocaust? Why does God not intervene to stop the horrible crusades and all those things that happened in the Khmelnytsky massacres or Putin? If you take it literally, you would have to expect God to do that. And if God doesn’t do that, then you have to reinterpret it in a different way.

“A very good 10-year-old’s first reaction when told that his parents were getting divorced was, 'What did I do wrong?’” Yes, I know, I’ve heard of lots of examples of that. “It’s my fault, and this is really unfair,” but that’s how people have come to think, that if you do something, bad things happen, it’s because you did something to deserve it. And it’s all part of a narrative which should not be taken literally, in my opinion.

Q: Is it true that certainty of reward and punishment was a fact in the expansion of Christianity and Islam?

A: I don’t think so. I mean, I think that the expansion of Christianity and Islam was primarily for political purposes. They were able to ally themselves with the most powerful empires of the time. They were the state religion of that time, whether it was Christianity or Islam, and that’s how we were able to spread. It is true that both Christianity and Islam in a sense started off as reform movements, and they started off hoping that Jews would join them because basically it’s the same idea, we’re just making life a lot easier for them, in the same way that Martin Luther thought that the Jews would join him when he challenged the authority of the Pope, and when they didn’t, then he turned against them. I believe that the theological side to all among monotheistic religions is very similar on ethical standards. There are, of course, fundamental differences in the character of Jesus, the character of Muhammad and so forth and so on. I’m not saying they’re identical by any means, but they share certain common basic ideas. And just as Christianity started off by approaching and seeing itself as a Jewish reform movement and addressing the Jews initially until the split came later and they separated and went their different ways, they became competitors. And because they had all the tools of power, they were able to humiliate the Jews whenever they had a chance.

Q: Mike, “When did the word toil was changed?”

A: or toil. I’m not certain what you mean by toil, “was changed to studying when was the woman need not convert Jacob, Moses, Moses wise converted.” Well, I don’t know what the first part is talking about, but if you are talking about conversion, conversion changed over time. It changed from the time when initially in the biblical period, if you came to live within a community, you adopted their gods, you adopted their religion, you adopted their wife in the way that Ruth says in the book of Ruth, your God is my God, your people are my people, and that was how it happened. There was no clear ceremony of conversion. It wasn’t until much later that the idea developed into a formal structure. Not sure when. It is Ezra who brought the first laws in against priests marrying out of the faith and possibly that’s when conversion became more structured. But the actual structure of conversion didn’t come really until what we would call the oral law, the Talmudic period. And initially, Jews were able to convert and willing to convert, but never thought you had to convert in order to be a good person. And so they thought a good Christian could be a good person, a good Muslim could be a good person. You don’t have to, whereas both Islam and Christianity think you’ve got to be Muslim and a Christian, otherwise you’re not, don’t get there. We always believed you could get to heaven if you were a good person. And so we didn’t force, but we encouraged people to come, but only if we’ve certain they were sincere. And so for example, going back to the Talmud, if somebody came and said, I want to convert, our initial reaction was, “Are you sure? Do you really want to? You know, I’m not going to encourage you to, but I’ve got to be convinced you’re genuine. And if you’re genuine, then by all means.”

“All Israel has a portion in the world to come.” Indeed. That already goes back to the Mishnah with which of what is part of, but the main source is in the Mishnah in Sanhedrin. It says all people have a portion in the world to come, but there are certain people who don’t. And who are the people who don’t have a portion in the world to come? It says those who don’t believe in the world to come. But the main thing that the Torah is concerned about, or the Talmud is concerned about is not rejecting. And so in that chapter that talks about all Israel has a portion in the world to come and it talks about these are the people who don’t have a portion in the world to come, it refers simply to people who say, “No, all this is a load of rubbish. There’s no such thing. The Torah is not important. Being a good person is not important. These ideas are not important.” There’s no command in the Torah which says you must believe because belief is very subjective, you can’t force. You can only put some compulsion on people to behave in a particular way. And so the result of this is, again, I think this is another example, like the Shema that we’ve mentioned, in which you are encouraging people to be good, do the right thing.

James, sorry, Charlie, or Marita agree, James agree, “It’s heartbreaking, no child should ever responsible divorced parents.”

Yes, Lorna, “Trouble is that good, bad are relative concepts.” Yes, that’s right. They are relative up to a point. You know, what’s good for one person is bad for another. That’s true outside of Judaism. It’s even true in a way in Judaism. It’s good for a priest to perform in the temple. It’s not good for somebody who’s not a priest to perform in the temple. I don’t believe in relative good, relative bad absolutely. There’s always some things that are absolutely bad and some things that are absolutely good. But what is good and what is bad in the religious world essentially means, what is good for me? So it’s good for me to keep Shabbat, good for me to keep the ritual laws of Judaism, and it’s bad if I don’t, within the context of Judaism. It’s good within the context of a democracy to vote, but it’s bad in the context of Marxism to vote if it undermines the authority. Some people take it’s good to say the end justifies the means, and other people say it’s wrong for the end to justify the means. So there are, in a sense, different standards, and good and bad are indeed relative. But what we should do is choose a system for ourselves of what is good and then stick to it.

“Promise of survival is for the people as a whole, not to people or groups think of the Holocaust.” Well, yes, John. That’s one way of looking at it. We have survived. That is miraculous. That is God’s promise and the promise and the prophets that we’d always come back from the brink. She'ar yashuv, a remnant would always come back. That is part of our tradition, indeed it is.

Riva says, “Perhaps prayer should, instead of asking for help, be to say thank you.” Well, yes, we start off every day in Jewish ritual prayer by saying, “Modeh ani lefanekha,” I thank you God for me, for my body functioning, for all the good things in life. So thanksgiving for us is every day of the year.

Charlie, “I try my best every day to be kind to others in nature.” Yes, indeed, Laurence, Kelvin,

Q: “More often I’ve found that no good deed goes unpunished. Why should I do any more good deeds?”

A: Well, you are right if that’s the only reason for doing it, if you do the good deed because you hope to be rewarded. My father put it this way, don’t expect to be rewarded for a good deed. Very often, you are not, but do it because it’s the right thing to do.

We’re coming back to Ben Azzai. Do it because it’s the right thing to do. One good deed follows another good deed. You’re not appreciated. Sadly, that’s life. That’s life.

Q: “What about the idea of reward and punishment as a user manual? Certain behaviours like smoking or overeating are more likely to lead to something bad happening.”

A: Yes, I think that’s a very good point. A lot of things are likely to happen and be dangerous, and reward and punishment is very much a user manual. But I would say it’s a user manual to encourage, but not a guarantee.

“Jacob Abraham gave dowries not to the woman, toil, as Adam was told, he must.” Oh, well, yes, that’s quite true. They gave presents. They gave presents to the bride’s family to agree to the deal, so they certainly forked out.

Q: Marcia from Toronto, “What if God intervened in the Holocaust, but we don’t recognise that intervention? Apparently, the Nazis got bogged down in an area of Greece which delayed their getting to Russia, so they ended up stuck there during the winter, the resulting negative impact on the Nazis.”

A: Well, yes, you can come up with all kinds of issues like that. You could say that what blocked them was Leningrad, Stalingrad rather, which stopped them getting to the oil fields of the east, which they needed to refuel their armed machinery. By and large, the Germans were more successful, man for man, than any other army, apart from that particular block. But even then, the reason was the Russians had so many more people to throw into the battle. There could be all kinds of reasons, but nevertheless, it’s difficult and impossible to know, which is why I really have no patience for people who say, you know why the holocaust happened is because people misbehaved. Well, it’s interesting. If that’s so, why were so many people who didn’t misbehave killed in the Holocaust? It really doesn’t make sense. We can’t know the mind of God, so to speak. Assuming that God has a mind, we cannot know. The Torah itself says, no person can understand me, no person can know God, and therefore we deal in the material world that we live in and in the context of the material world in which we live in, good and bad, not necessarily reward or punished, we have to do the best for ourselves.

Again, the Crawfords got right, “Christianity made a fundamental difference between the idea of only through the name shall you approach a Father, personal relationship with God was replaced by eradication personal responsibility.” Well, that’s an argument. I mean there are many Christians will disagree with that, but nevertheless it’s an important argument.

Q: Shelley, “Who do you think wrote the Torah, God or wise people?”

A: That’s an excellent question, and it’s something that I hope to deal with in my next lecture, so you’ll have to wait till then.

“We as humanity do pay the price for wrong behaviour. Global warming, in spite of prophetic documentary warning by Al Gore.” Oh, yes, the man who drives around, flies around in a plane spewing out an oil and stuff like that. The world is full of hypocrites, I’m afraid.

“And of course, tragically, there’s always collateral damage, innocent people in a tsunami.” You are quite right, Riva. I think we are responsible for nature, and we have failed, and Judaism does require us to be good guardians of the natural world.

Q: “What about the evil impulse?” says Monty.

A: Well, that’s very good. You know, Christianity talks about original sin and about the fact that all human beings are born bad, and it’s only by coming to Christianity or receiving Jesus they could be good. That’s one point of view. There are other points of view in Christianity too, so I’m not suggesting that’s the only one. We do not believe in original sin. We do believe in the first example of a sin, but not that all people are bad, but that people do have different impulses, a good impulse and a bad impulse. We are born with a certain ego. That ego can be good, it can be bad, and it’s up to us to make sure that there’s a constant battle going on between these two tendencies that we have. And so it is the tendency, the yetzer, the yetzer hara, the tendency to say, “I want, I need now,” as opposed to deferred pleasure, which is a question of self-control, which is an example of the good tendency. Life is a struggle, constantly battling between those two.

“The one prayer” says Marcia, “I always find is answered is the prayer for strength to face what needs to be faced one day at a time.” Well, I think that’s a lovely prayer to have, but there, your example is of a prayer which is saying, “I, I need the strength in order to cope,” and not that strength is going to come magically from somewhere. You’re not going to become fit if you don’t start exercising. You’re not going to become a good person if you don’t work at being a good person.

Q: “Why do we assume we can recognise the process of reward,” says Rodney, “and punishment?”

A: Well, the truth of the matter is we can’t. We think we do because when bad things happen and happen perfectly naturally, for example, when you get older, they happen naturally, you can try to do things to stop, but in the end there’s going to come a moment when you can’t, we’re all going to die. And similarly, we don’t know where sicknesses are going to come. Sometimes sicknesses come from some genetic disorder, in which case they were built into our body when we were born. So we can’t say we’ve deserved that because it’s nothing to do with our actions. Charlie says, “To attempt to justify the Shoah is absolutely indefensible. It happened because of antisemitism.” Well, antisemitism was certainly why it happened and the hatred of our people, why it happened. But there again, if you want to look for reasons, there are plenty of reasons we can find. The issue is primarily, how do we understand the idea of God? How do we understand the idea of God intervening? This is such a personal, subjective idea, and all I can come back is to reply with that wonderful response, we cannot know, so we have to get on, as Hillel said, with the best we can in our life.

Thank you very much for listening, and hope to see you next time.