Avos 3:15

בס׳ד

אבות ג:טו

Everything is foreseen, yet - Choice is still possible; And the world is judged benevolently; And everything depends on the balance of actions.

הַכֹּל צָפוּי, וְהָרְשׁוּת נְתוּנָה, וּבְטוֹב הָעוֹלָם נִדּוֹן. וְהַכֹּל לְפִי רֹב הַמַּעֲשֶׂה:

        Rabbi Aqiva here addresses one of the great moral paradoxes.  If HaShem is truly omniscient - knowing all things - does this imply that he must have knowledge even of events which have yet to occur?  If He does, he must know all of our own future actions.  How, then, can we speak of ourselves as having freedom to obey or disobey divine commandments?  Doesn’t divine pre-knowledge make a sham of our sense of being free?

        The great meforshim have struggled with this passage, and it would be impossible to summarize all their discussions here.  I do think, however, that there is a simple gemara that cuts to the heart of the problem and provides a solution.  It is found in Bavli Berkhos 33b, and is cited by the Vilna Gaon (the Gra) as his only comment on Rabbi Aqiva’s teaching:  “Said Rabbi Hanina: All is in the hands of Heaven except the Awe of Heaven, as it is said: ‘And now, Israel, what does HaShem your God ask of you?  Just this - to revere HaShem your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, and to serve HaShem with all your heart and soul…’ (Devarim 10:12).”  The point is that HaShem is in control of everything about us, except for our response to His will. For this he must depend upon our own decision.  And that decision - obedience or the opposite - is not a foregone conclusion.  We we alone are free to determine the answer to that question.

        How does this gemara address the problem posed by Rabbi Aqiva?  It helps us to realize, first of all, a dimension of the Hebrew original of this mishnah which is lost in most translations, including my own.  The Hebrew says: hakol tzafui va-hareshus nesunah.  In light of the gemara, this means : “All possibilities are known in advance, including the necessity to choose among them.”  That is, our Creator knows us intimately down to our very souls, and places us in a world of His own construction.  He knows in advance what capacities he has “programmed” into us and what sort of life experiences will challenge us.  But neither He nor we know how we will meet those challenges until we meet or fail to meet them.  We are “programmed”, in other words, to be unpredictable.

        From this point of view, HaShem’s omniscience is limited to possibilities. He knows all the infinite range of choices that will condition our lives.  But He - like us - awaits the concrete decision. The world, in this view of things, is hardly a tidy package.  Instead, it is always in process.  HaShem is discovering His Creation’s concrete reality at every second of its unfolding from the infinite dimensions of its possibilities.  In this sense, HaShem is never the one-time-only Creator of the world; rather, He is always creating it - discovering it - as he comes to know its shifting reality.

        If we’ve made some sense of the first part of Rabbi Aqiva’s teaching, the second part is still difficult.  If the world is judged benevolently, what does it mean to say that everything depends upon the balance of actual deeds?  Isn’t this a contradiction?  We should say either: the world is judged benevolently whether or not it deserves it, or: the world is judged strictly, in accord with the balance of deeds. Indeed, the Midrash Shmuel reports that some copies of the Mishnah do read: “the world is judged benevolently, and not in accord with the majority of actions.”  That is, the only reason the world survives despite the over-balance of disobedience is through divine compassion. As a famous midrash on the phrase bereshit bara Elokim has it: “HaShem sought to create the world through the attribute of Judgement (din, represented by the name Elokim), but saw it wouldn’t stand.  So he created it with the attribute of Mercy (hesed, represented by the four letter Divine Name), and then it stood.”  The Mishnah will make a similar point in Avos 5:2, when it discusses the 20 generations that existed from Creation until the time of Avraham Avinu.

        Is there, perhaps, a way of making sense of the version of the mishnah that we have before us?  Once again, the Tiferes Yisroel offers a helpful suggestion. In his opinion, the word “benevolently” (betov) doesn’t imply a smiley-face God sweeping under the table every violation of His will.  Rather, it means that HaShem doesn’t judge the world in a spirit of vengeance; he views us with honest compassion.  He assesses all the possible motives behind our actions, seeking out the most generous interpretation of them.  But the actions are what they are, and ultimately must be evaluated in terms of the balance of transgression and obedience.

        Taken as a whole, this mishnah presents us with an amazing picture of the world’s process.  The actual world is constantly being realized by God and humanity together, as it is condensed into reality from all of its infinite potential. At every moment, God’s infinite powers of knowledge are assessing and evaluating the real state of the world - the actual deeds performed within it - in light of whether the balance of potential good or potential evil has been made concrete. Only HaShem knows the infinite possibilities of existence, and only He can know all the actualities.  And only He can judge the way we have brought actuality into line with all the potentialities He has imagined and made possible.

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