The Implications of Free Will

Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost
by Rabbi Balfour Brickner

(Page 6 of 6)

The notion that God cannot command our moral choices is reflected through a well-known line found in the Talmud, Judaism's definitive postbiblical authority. There, in tractate Berakot 33b, we read that "everything is in the hands of God except the fear of God." By "fear" the writer meant respect for, not dread of. The writer was exact. He wanted to convey the idea that God cannot force humanity to respect the Divinity or to follow God's wishes. People must freely choose to do that.

This is a remarkable thought, especially when one considers that it was written in the first century by men of great faith, who believed that God was both omniscient and omnipotent. There is also biblical precedent for it. In the wilderness, Moses rejected God's demand that he speak to the rock to bring water from it. Moses struck the rock instead (Num. 20). King Saul lost his throne because he chose to reject a divine commandment to totally destroy the Amalekites (1 Sam. 15). The Book of Jonah is the story of a man fleeing from God's explicit command to go to Nineveh and urge its citizens to repent. These incidents illustrate the idea that God cannot force people to do what God would like them to do. People must choose of their own free will. And they do, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

If we assume that God is all-knowing and wants what is best for us (there is an old saying, "If God is not good, he is not God"), how could God have allowed Hitler to destroy six million Jews in the Holocaust and twenty million people during World War II? How could God allow Serbs and Albanians to butcher each other in Kosovo? How could a God who we presume wants the best for humanity allow African tribes to slaughter one another in Uganda? How does God allow all the terrors that stalk our earth each day, sometimes perpetrated by individuals and institutions that have the temerity to call themselves religious?

Is there anyone anywhere in the world who has not asked himself or herself these questions, sometimes finding his or her inadequate response sufficient justification to abandon all forms of organized religion? Comments such as "It is God's will" or "It is in the hands of Allah" neither satisfy nor justify such actions.

Does God allow these tragedies to happen? Yes. Does God want them to happen? No.

Where was God at Auschwitz? One Jewish writer bitterly observed that during the Holocaust, God went up the chimneys of the crematoriums in the smoke of burning flesh. Such an answer only produces a sneer, and life cannot be lived by sneers. Cynicism does not answer the question, Where was God during this terrible time? There must be a response with which one can live and still find some meaning in a belief system that includes Divinity.

I believe that God cried at Auschwitz. What do I mean by that? Do I think God actually shed tears? Since I do not believe in an anthropomorphic God, one that possesses human qualities, I cannot mean that God literally cried. I speak metaphorically. Because we believe in a Divinity that is life-affirming, life-giving, life-enhancing, we can say only that God must have been deeply saddened - saddened to the point of tears when seeing the brutality that we chose to inflict on one another during this terrible time. Since God gave humanity the free will to act in whatever way it chose, God could not interfere. God could only silently witness and weep at the barbarity.

I believe that God cries wherever and whenever people selfishly and childishly choose to slaughter one another. God hates that behavior, but God cannot do anything about it. The moment God granted humanity free will was the moment God limited God's own self. God is finite. Does that sound like blasphemy? To some, yes. Not to me. My belief system must preserve free will, and I know that free will in some ways limits God. We have enormous knowledge at our command.

We know a lot about how our universe functions. That knowledge allows us to put people on the moon, or in orbit, or on space stations. Because most of this knowledge is so technical, we tend to ignore much of it, often preferring instead to live by preconceived ideas, some of which are at wide variance with the truths our new knowledge has given us. That causes some problems, which I will discuss later on when I write about the modern dilemmas science poses for religion.

We know how to make things grow better now than ever before in the history of the world. We can and do greatly enhance the nutritional value of food. We know how to grow more in less space. We can improve the breeding of living creatures used for food. In fact, we have created a situation in which no one in the world needs to go hungry. If people starve (and millions do), it is for political reasons and not because we have not learned how to make more and better food available. For reasons that upon examination often seem as cruel as they are bizarre and irrational, we have chosen not to exercise our more humane options.

No gardener would ever permit his or her garden to get so far out of balance, so totally discordant, as we have allowed the world to become in matters of food distribution and elementary well-being. A garden is a world in microcosm. For either to flourish, greed needs to be rooted out, whether it comes from a too-powerful weed, a rampant plant in a garden, or a ruler or political system that, in order to accumulate wealth, ignores the poor and hungry of its population. A beautiful garden is an ecologically balanced place, where sunlight, moisture, insects, plants, and birds all have specifically interdependent roles to play. When one gets out of balance, the entire space suffers. The gardener's job is to maintain that God-given balance. Considering the many hostile forces unconsciously at work to destroy that balance, it is amazing that we have as many wonderful garden spaces as we do. The parallel with the world today is obvious.

We know what individuals and societies need to stay alive, to grow, to live in peace. We know, for example, that a grossly unequal distribution of goods and wealth in a community will give rise to discontent, jealousy, and a struggle to redress the imbalance by those who feel deprived. It is in our self-interest as individuals and as people in a community to see that the necessary resources, food, shelter, and work, which give individuals a sense of self-worth, are available to all. There will always be those who have more and those who have less, but we have learned that we cannot accept a situation in which too few have too much and too many have too little. Such a situation breeds discontent and enmity. We know that greed can eventually destroy us and our environment. We can choose to create social situations in which economic equity becomes the norm and greed is controlled. When we permit one society to sink into poverty, we create a situation that is ripe for the rise of one who promises to "save" the people and restore their former glory. Hitler might never have come to power had Germany not been destroyed economically after its 1918 military defeat. America went through a similar challenge during the Great Depression in the early 1930s. Only a democratic process that brought to power a government that understood the needs of an economically and socially sick America saved it from chaos and disaster.

Similarly, the choices we make as individuals - be they in life partners, vocations, the number of children we sire, the educational routes we pursue or ignore- all determine whether our lives are miserable or joyous. Our present and our future are in our own hands. So where does all this leave God?

When things go wrong, we have a tendency to blame God. But God deserves more and better from us. We know, or at least by now we should know, that God is not responsible for the disasters we create by our own poor social choices. We cannot blame God for our apparent unwillingness to tackle the problems of our inner cities or to improve public education by committing the resources needed for better schools and teachers. We cannot blame God for the human greed that has created and allows to continue the environmental and atmospheric destruction now occurring worldwide, affecting our air, our oceans, and our very lives.

It is we who have made these poor choices. As we do, and because God gave us free will to make these choices, all God can do is weep. This is what I meant by a finite God. God is self-limited. God cannot, on the one hand, grant humanity free will and, on the other hand, interfere every time we make a bad choice. God has restricted God's own power to interfere. The situation is analogous to a child with a parent. At some point in a child's development, the parent has to let the child make his or her own choices. As parents, all we can do is hope and pray that what we have given our children in terms of training, love, and guidance will positively influence their decisions. When the choices are wrong, even as we might have foreseen, all we can do is be there to pick up the pieces, extend our love, reassure, comfort, and keep on going. My father (may he rest in peace) would regularly tell me, especially at moments when I had made a really stupid choice, "I cannot put my head on your shoulders."

We need constantly to remind ourselves that in the realm of social relationships, God does not do. God is. We do.

What we do makes the difference between whether God is expressed or denied in the world. We are the recipients of a tremendous gift, a great garden: earth and its environments. We are placed in the middle of it. We are also the recipients of a great responsibility: to use our free will. What shall we plant? Where shall we plant it? What shall we move or remove? What shall we harvest? We make the choices. God watches. God waits. And above all, God hopes.

Copyright © 2002 by Rabbi Balfour Brickner

About the Author

BALFOUR BRICKNER has been a rabbi for half a century and still he lives to tell the tale. His career began in Washington, DC where he was the founding rabbi of Temple Sinai, a congregation he built and served for a decade. In 1961 he moved to New York City to join the national executive staff of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the central organization of Reform Judaism.