[Avodah] God who knows the future

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' David Riceman wrote:

> You have left me more confused than before.  I had thought you
> agreed with RMB, who holds that one cannot predicate time of God,
> that all the details of history form a deterministic process, and
> God knows them "outside" of time. ...
>
> You, however, are introducing a distinction between God's
> "knowledge" and God's "foreknowledge".  This is hard to harmonize
> with God's simplicity.  If I understand you correctly God makes
> his decree at some particular point, and it can't be changed by
> any event after that time, even though it won't be known for
> quite some time after that time (remember the gemara is before
> ultrasound or DNA testing).

Yes, exactly. Again, as I wrote before, my source is "Ba'asher hu sham" (Bereshis 21:17). See Rashi there, and/or any of a gazillion Teshuva Drashos which quote it.

Hashem knows what we will do in the future. (Or, as someone wrote me offlist, from His perspective He knows what we DID in the future.) But He does not take any of that into account when He makes His plans.

For example, He knew at Bereshis all of the tefilos an expectant parent would say, before during and after the pregnancy. And all their other mitzvos and aveiros too. Now, there is a certain point, biologically, when the child's sex is determined, and I say that during Bereishis, Hashem looked at the parents up to that point, and made his decision about the child's sex. But anything the parents would do after that point did not work into the calculation.

Up to this point, my source is those drashos on "Ba'asher hu sham". But my logic also tells me other svaros: According to RDR's view on this, why should there be any difference between the tefilos a parent says a minute before the baby is born, and a minute after? Isn't Hashem equally aware of both? The answer, I suspect, is that Hashem follows certain rules, for without them the world would be in chaos.

Just imagine, if a baby would be born and the parent's realization of the baby's sex would cause his tefilos to be so heartfelt that it would cause a science-fictiony time-travel change, and the baby was born as the parent asked. This is exactly the "grandfather paradox" the R' Micha wrote of. Because now that the tefila worked, it never got said.

(If you'd like, we can go off on a tangent and point out that this is indeed what happens with Teshuva. It is indeed against logic for Teshuva to erase the past. It does indeed do that, but because it doesn't affect the physical world, it's not really relevant to this thread.)

After explaining the grandfather paradox, R' Micha Berger wrote:

> This is why I would remove the concept of Hashem knowing now what
> will happen in the future. It avoids understandings in which HQBH
> is the arrow closing a cycle in causality. The cycle would only
> be closed if HQBH would act today based on that knowledge of the
> future, thus causing an effect that precedes its cause within
> time.

I'd suggest that there is an error in the first sentence which becomes revealed by the last sentence. You don't need to remove the *concept* og Hashem knowing the future. It is quite sufficient for Him to not *act* on that knowledge, as I explained above.

"Baasher hu sham" -- Hafoch bah, v'hafoch bah, d'kulo bah.

Akiva Miller

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