[Avodah] What was the point of Avrahams tefilla/debate with Hashem about Sdom?

[Zev Sero via Avodah]

On 11/09/2015 08:45 AM, Marty Bluke via Avodah wrote:
> Agreed. It seems clear to me as well that the prayer in Tanach is for
> a purpose. The attempt to claim that all prayer is to make the person
> better and create/improve theri relationship to Hashem simply does
> not fit with the prayer that we see in Tanach. However, the underlying
> philosophical questions are very strong and are hard to ignore. They raise
> fundamental questions as to how God relates to the world and how tefilla
> could possible work. Personally, these questions bother me greatly.

As Rashi points out, in both Avraham's and Moshe's case they took
Hashem's informing them of His intentions as an *invitation* to try
to stop Him.   In Moshe's case it was pretty explicit: "And now let
Me go so I can end them" is clearly telling Moshe that he is capable of
*not* letting Hashem go, and thus that he *should* not let Him go.
So this "war" was part of His original Will.   He wanted both to form
the intention of destroying the Jews *and* to be dissuaded by Moshe.
He wanted both to form the intention of destroying Sedom, *and* for
Avraham to try to stop Him and to fail.  Yes, He was aware of the
arguments Avraham and Moshe made, and He wanted them to make them.

I think the reason this doesn't seem to make much sense to us is that
we are bound in time and can't understand any non-time-bound phenomenon.
But consider the way a logical "precedes" and its conclusions "follow",
although this preceding and following is not temporal but logical.
(That is the sense in which the Torah "precedes" the world by "2000 years",
which obviously can't be taken literally since there was no time before
the world.  Rather, it logically precedes the world; the world is derived
from and implied by the Torah, and the "alpayim shana" must refer to a
degree of logical precedence.)   In the same way Hashem's "initial"
decision to destroy the Jews, and His "post-argument" decision not to
are part of the same process, which we only see as happening over time
because that's the way our brains are built to see everything.

-- 
Zev Sero               All around myself I will wave the green willow
zev at sero.name          The myrtle and the palm and the citron for a week
                And if anyone should ask me the reason why I'm doing that
                I'll say "It's a Jewish thing; if you have a few minutes
                I'll explain it to you".