[Avodah] R Asher Weiss

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2012 at 05:45:07PM -0400, cantorwolberg at cox.net wrote:
: R' Micha wrote: If G-d would prosecute we could never win.

Actually I was quoting RET's post, where he paraphrases a thought given
by RAWeiss.

: Theologically, this statement is troublesome to me.
: HE created us and gave us our nature, as well as 
: the capacity to choose good over evil. Therefore,
: if you say that we could never win, there has to be 
: a flaw in how HE created us...

Only if the word was supposed to run on justice.

Rather, the world is supposed to run on a synthesis of chessed and
din -- "verav Chessed veEmes".

Alternatively, on chessed alone -- "olam chesed yibaneh" -- with the
result that at times the most lovingkind thing to do is to refrain from
stepping in. I like to illustrate the self-control, the restraint,
of gevurah, with how one teaches a toddler to walk. You want to step
in each time the child totters, but the true kindness is to let them
occasionally fall on their rumps. Otherwise they'll never learn to walk.
Gevurah can thus be seen as a derived value from chessed.

But law alone? 

Hashem made us imperfect so that we can improve ourselves. In the image
of the Divine, there will always be more improvement that can be made --
we are always below His Infinite Perfection.

And thus we inherently can't stand up to His Absolute Standard.

But that's not a flaw in how He created us, because He didn't create a
world of justice. The standard isn't His Absolute one. We are made to
live in His Chessed.

GCT!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Good decisions come from experience;
micha at aishdas.org        Experience comes from bad decisions.
http://www.aishdas.org                - Djoha, from a Sepharadi fable
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