[Avodah] The Nature of Godlessness

[Moshe Yehuda Gluck via Avodah]

There was a discussion on Areivim about a particular person who was accused
of committing a particularly evil crime. Someone posted, among other
comments, “I will add that the "rabbi" who committed these horrific acts is
objectively G-dless.  Apikores is too mild a term for him.” 

 

My response to this fits more for Avodah than Areivim: 

 

I know this man and most of the other players in this story. And while I
haven’t interviewed him recently to test R’n TK’s assertion, it is my
opinion that as reprehensible as these events are, it doesn’t mean that the
person who committed them is Godless. Is any sinner Godless? More likely, a
sinner like this carries around a huge measure of denial and/or conflict.
But that doesn’t make him or her Godless. The Gemara says, in fact, that
some sinners – during the moment they’re sinning(!) are close to Hashem
(Berachos 63a). I’ll elaborate:

 

In truth, the argument can be made that any time a person sins he or she is
Godless. Tomer Devorah in the first perek makes the contrapositive point –
that Shuras HaDin would dictate that Hashem remove himself from a person at
the time of his sin, resulting in the sinner’s instant death. His response
to that is that Hashem’s mercy is what keeps the person alive – Hashem does
not remove himself from the person, and keeps sustaining him or her even
while he or she is sinning with the very power invested by Hashem in them
that enables them to sin. 

 

But probably most times well-meaning people sin, their sin comes from one of
the following three: ignorance, negligence, or lust. 

 

Ignorance: Not knowing or remembering something is forbidden. 

Negligence: Not caring enough to take care not to inadvertently sin. 

Lust: Being blinded to the evil that one is doing because of the strong
desire to benefit from it. 

 

In all those cases, the person who is sinning is not thinking about Hashem.
He’s – in your terms – “objectively Godless.” 

 

But can he really be called that? Let’s talk about two extremes: The person
who walks in front of another person who is saying Shemoneh Esrei
(relatively minor), vs. the person who is not shomer negiah (relatively
major). In both those cases it’s not that the person is not thinking about
Hashem (which he admittedly is not), but that the person is not thinking
about sin. Or, more succinctly, the person is just not thinking. Not
Godless, but thought-less. And that can sum up all of the three categories –
ignorance, negligence, and lust cause people to sin by not thinking. 

 

So what happens when a person is a thinker? There are two possibilities. The
person can be like Nimrod, "יודע רבונו ומתכוין למרוד בו" – he knows Hashem
and doesn’t listen to him, although he recognized Hashem’s existence. That’s
a plain old Rasha. But he’s not Godless – יודע רבונו.

 

The second possibility is that that person does think about Hashem. He does
think about his actions. He does know how bad it is what he’s doing. In
other areas, not his weakness, he does keep to Hashem’s will. He is יודע
רבונו but he’s not מתכוין למרוד בו. Such a person, I think, is incredibly
conflicted. He knows about Hashem and he’s rebelling against him on the one
hand, while trying to obey him on the other. That person might be evil,
might be scum of the earth, but he’s not Godless. On the contrary. And
although we have to condemn such a person and his horrible actions, and we
don’t envy his punishment in the World to Come, we might also be a little
jealous of his relationship with Hashem. 

 

This may well be the reason the Gemara tells us that a person who says
Lashon Hara about a talmid chacham falls in Gehennom, since the talmid
chacham definitely did Teshuvah (Berachos 19a). How do we know he definitely
did teshuvah? Because a talmid chacham, by definition, is a thinker. He
didn’t indulge in non-thinking – that’s not in his nature. And even if he
had a moment of weakness and did something wrong, he certainly rebounded and
regretted it the next day. (Contrast the talmid chacham with the non-thinker
of before – he just continues blissfully on with his life not realizing or
caring that he sinned. That’s why we are not required to presume that he did
Teshuvah.)

 

A Godless person, properly defined, is one who denies Hashem’s existence
completely. We have no basis, in this case or in many others, to assert that
those are the circumstances we’re dealing with.

 

KT,

MYG

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