Help understanding this hashkafa concept

leah233

Fri, Oct 19 2018, 8:32 am

amother wrote:

We all have bechira. That being said, hashem knows the future and therefore knows exactly what will happen and how the story will end. There is no mystery with hashem. With this in mind, why does hashem create reshaim who are destined for gehenim? Hashem knows they will choose not to do teshuva and he will have to throw them into gehenim. What benefit is there for hashem (who knew this rasha would never do teshuva) to create this person?

The Rambam asked the first question. The basic answer is that happening to know that someone will do something doesn't influence their behavior.

The next few questions seem to be asking why did Hashem create a world where people have bechira even though bechira will cause some people to end up as Resoyim and Gehenim bound.

That's a way harder question to answer because to do so you need to know (1) how much bechira people have (2)how exactly people are being judged (rewarded or punished) based on their nisyonis. But the standard answer of Hashem creating a world so that people will gain schar in Olam H'Ba remains. Without Bechira there would no reason to give schar to anyone.

Ruchel

Sat, Oct 20 2018, 11:25 am

Do we plan to understand an immortal, supernatural being?
Sometimes we cannot understand, and theres a reason kabbala is left to older, very learned chachamim. I personally stopped asking myself questions that will upset me.

imasoftov

Sun, Oct 21 2018, 2:09 am

zaq wrote:

Surely you know the Medrash about a time when the yetzer hara was taken captive. Life ground to a halt. Fields weren’t tilled, businesses weren’t minded, people didn’t marry and children weren’t conceived.

I think you may have confused two separate aggadic sources, and this isn't a terrible mistake, you probably heard them both in the same shiur. And you got the message right.

One, in Yoma 69b, tells how after permanently imprisoning the Yetzer Hara of idolatry, they locked up the Yetzer Hara of s-xual sin for three days, after which "people searched for a fresh egg throughout all of Eretz Yisrael and could not find one".

The other (the place I found it was Bereshit Rabba 9:7 but I'm sure it appears in other places as well and I'm not going to look up each so maybe some variants mention tilling fields, too) says that if not for the Yetzer Hara (here it seems to be a unified evil inclination unlike the specialized yetzers in the first source, I don't think it's saying that men only engage in productive economic activity in order to attract a wife) a man would not build a house, marry a wife, father children, or engage in business.