On "The Lord and His Children"
Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:52:45 GMT
On reading The Lord and His Children in The Forward, I’m struck by how un-Jewish the last paragraph is:
And still He wants what He cannot have: Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth, He wants His Children to be a holy nation. Foreknowing they will worship golden cattle, He demands that they love Him and Him alone. In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.
- “Knowing man’s imagination to be evil from his birth…”—What is this, original sin? The Jewish doctrine is that man has a good inclination and an evil inclination, and sinning is what we do when we give in to the evil inclination. G-d wouldn’t pre-ordain us to be evil—wouldn’t that be a sadistic G-d, if he created us and demanded that we not sin while simultaneously programming us to sin? Nobody can really believe this.
- “Foreknowing that they will worship golden cattle…” From what source do we know this? The Torah doesn’t make this claim. Only philosophy would make such a suggestion, but we do not have the god of the philosophers but the G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
- “In His aspect as a father of children one might almost grieve for Him.” Quite an insinuation on the part of the author! What comes to mind is that any pity one might have for G-d because of how sinful people are would be better directed at the problem.
