Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Uh, as the world around us races forward in search of tomorrow's breakthroughs, join us as we discover the insights that have shaped Jewish life for centuries.
Together, we'll study with Judaism's greatest minds, exploring timeless wisdom that continues to guide and inspire.
You're listening to Inside the Jewish Mind JLI podcast.
God is infinite.
We're not.
So how can we possibly be expected to know him from a Jewish lens? This isn't just a philosophical question, but a very practical one, since this is actually the very first commandment of the entire Torah.
We're not told to blindly believe, but to explore and engage our minds with the reality of God's existence, to truly know Him.
But how far can we really go?
In this 2021 talk, Rabbi Manus Friedman explores this idea and shows how a relationship with God can be built not just through faith, but through genuine understanding.
Let's dive in.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: So I was speaking to a group of, uh, yeshiva boys, and I said, you've been in yeshiva for a number of years. What do you know about God that you didn't know before?
And their answer was almost unanimously, God is unknowable.
I said, for this, you pay tuition, you sit for four years in yeshiva, and you walk away.
We don't know. It's not knowable. Then what have you been studying? What are you doing?
Knowing God rather than believing in God is the first mitzvah in Rambam's major work on all the commandments, on all the mitzvahs. The first commandment is to know God.
The truth is that even the early idolaters, I mean, the serious ones, like back in the time of Avraham, they all believed in God.
They worshiped idols, many idols.
But the God of their God was God.
Their mistake was that they believed that God was unknowable.
So you believe that God exists and he created the world, but that's it. End of subject. There's nothing more to discover.
And so the rest is up to the idols.
In simple words, they believe that God created the world and moved on because he's got bigger and better things to do.
He left the world to the idols who control nature.
The sun, the moon, the earth.
That was traditional work, classical idolatry.
The major principle of idolatry is God is unknowable.
Because if he's unknowable, he's also unlovable.
Because to know him is to love Him.
If you can't get to know him, what do you love?
So if you don't know him, you don't love him. If you don't love him, you don't worship him. You don't worship him. You don't.
You don't serve him.
And if you do, it's all empty and meaningless.
So what is the difference between believing and knowing?
True belief. We use the word very carelessly.
Do you believe there's life on other planets?
That's an improper question.
Because whether you believe or not doesn't make any difference whatsoever. There either is or there isn't.
And if you want to know, go take a look.
It'll take you a while.
I think the nearest star is about 400 light years away.
So, uh, it's not easy, but it's knowable.
You're just too lazy to go look.
So you can't substitute, um, knowing with believing.
So if somebody asks, is there life on other planets? The answer is, I don't know, and I have no time to go look.
But to say, I believe there is or I believe there isn't is pure nonsense.
In fact, we shouldn't even say, I doubt it.
Doubt implies a certain amount of knowledge.
When you really know nothing about it, then there is no doubt.
I don't know. And of this I am sure.
So saying, oh, I doubt it, you know, is there going to be a civil war?
I doubt it. Why don't you just say you don't know?
Keep things simple.
So faith, real belief, means a certainty about something that I cannot know.
Cannot.
Not because I'm too lazy, not because I haven't done the research.
It's unknowable.
So what's unknowable? Is God unknowable?
It depends.
Are you talking about his existence?
You don't know that God exists? Well, then you got to do a little more studying.
Because God's existence is not a subject of, uh, faith.
You can't say, I believe he exists.
That's too impersonal, too distant, too cold and not correct.
So I was arguing with this college, UH, student about, I forget what it was, some mitzvah. Does God really, uh, forbid it? Does he not forbid it? And then suddenly he says, but wait a minute. Don't get the wrong impression.
I don't believe in God.
So the argument was purely academic.
He said, I don't believe in God. I said, I don't understand what he says, I don't believe in God.
I said, I don't understand.
He says, what, you think everybody believes in God?
I don't.
I said, I hear what you're saying. I don't understand.
He says, what don't you understand?
I said, what's God?
He says, I don't know.
Then what don't you believe in?
To say you don't believe in God means there's, uh, a God and you don't want to believe in him.
Otherwise. What are you talking about?
He says, uh, okay, tell me, what's God?
I said, God is the original substance from which the big bang came.
He says, oh, do you believe that?
That's not a belief.
That's a simple logical assumption.
There was an original being from which everything else came.
Everybody agrees with that.
The only question is, what is the nature of that original being?
How talented is that original being?
So if you believe in evolution, you believe that the original being was a subatomic particle or some, uh, explosive gases and they don't know what they're doing.
But that's your God.
The Torah says that that original being knows what he's doing.
Is that a leap of faith?
That's irrational.
The existence of God is a well established fact, if only because he has been the topic of conversation for as long as anyone can remember.
In fact, the further back you go in human history, the more prominent God becomes.
And that's why every little statue found in archaeological digs and so on every statue. This is a woman in prayer.
Why? Well, she's on her knees. Well, maybe she's washing the floor.
No, she's praying everything.
The further back you go, God becomes the only obsession.
So God's existence is no longer a question of faith.
Maybe the day after creation somebody would have asked somebody create this world.
But all these years later I said to this one guy who was real arrogant kid, he says, who is God to tell me what to do?
How's that for good self image?
I said, uh, God. God has gotten his name on the COVID of Time magazine.
I remember there was the article, the feature article was about prayer in public schools. And they couldn't find the picture of God, so they just put the word God in 4 inch type on the COVID I said, when you get your name on the COVID of Time magazine, then you'll ask me why you should listen to God. But in the meantime, he's way ahead of you.
Okay, it's not the COVID of the Rolling Stone, but, uh, Time magazine is also something.
So God's existence is not a subject of faith. And this is what we're told about Avraham.
The greatness of Avraham is not that he didn't believe in idols.
The greatness of Avrohom is That he came to the recognition of who God is, logically.
And that was the big revolution. When he went around destroying his father's idols.
And we make a big deal about it, you know, it was so cute. He broke the little idols and put a big hammer in the hands of the big idol. And when his father came home and said, who broke the idol? He, ah, said that big one.
And the father said, oh, don't be ridiculous.
The idol can't do anything.
She says, so why do you worship it?
The revolution was not that he made fun of idols. Anybody can do that.
The revolution was that he introduced the notion that if you want to relate, uh, to God, you have to know him.
You can't just make something up and worship it or believe it.
So how did Avraham, um, come to the recognition of God?
Logical process.
He looked at the sun, which people were worshiping, and he said, wait a minute, I have talents that the sun doesn't have.
Because the sun can't sing and it can't dance and it can only shine on one half of the planet at a time.
And if a cloud comes between the sun and the earth, it blocks out the sun.
So the logical question is, who did this to the sun?
Every restriction, every limitation is imposed by a stronger force.
If the sun was God, it would have no restrictions.
We see that it does have restrictions. It's not God. There's a stronger power that limits the sun to what it is and nothing more.
That's why we know that everything we see in this world is created. How do we know it's created? Because it has limits and no thing limits itself.
It doesn't make sense.
First of all, why would it?
And secondly, if it limits itself, then it's not really limited.
This is just repressed.
So he comes to the conclusion that the Creator, the original being, must be limitless because who would tell him what to do?
There's no stronger force to put limitations on the created being.
So the Creator himself has no limits.
So do you believe that God is infinite?
No.
If he's God, he's infinite. That's just logical.
Do you believe there's more than one God? No. There can only be one God, because if there are two gods, then each of them has a limit.
Otherwise, uh, how do you know there are 2?
For 2 gods to exist, each God has to end and the other one begins.
But then neither of them is God.
So there can only be one original being. There can only be an infinite being, and it has to be only one.
That's all just logical.
In fact, everybody believes that even if you follow the theory of evolution, there was an original something, only one.
And look what came from it.
That's your God.
So it makes no sense to say that there was an original substance.
Everything in creation comes from it, but it doesn't know what it's doing. It's nonsense.
If it can create everything and therefore has no limits, then who would limit it in its intelligence?
It's just a simple logical assumption. Everything that came from the original being was in the original being. Is that a leap of faith?
So if from a subatomic particle we eventually got emotions and intelligence and idealism, then all of that must have existed in that particle.
M. Otherwise, where did it come from? And don't tell me over billions of years. The amount of time is not the issue.
Where did it come from if it wasn't in the original?
None of this has anything to do with faith.
Where does faith begin?
In that which is unknowable.
What's unknowable?
God's purpose.
How are you going to know God's purpose?
How do you find evidence for why God created the world?
M That's where the Torah comes in.
It is an unknowable.
You can observe everything I do. You can. You can chart it, you can measure it, you can. You can describe it. But why did I do it?
How, uh, are you going to know?
How can you know?
So what is unknowable?
God's desire.
Obviously, if he created the world he wanted to.
He wanted what?
That's unknowable.
The only way to find an answer to that question is to ask him.
You can't guess.
You can't even guess why a human being does what a human being does.
That's the unknowable.
See, that's the hidden world.
The hidden world is God's thinking behind what God does.
So when we see a pandemic, we know what God is doing.
Do you know why?
Do you know what he's thinking?
You m can't.
Because thought intention is the hidden world.
So unless he tells you, you cannot know.
Here's where the Torah comes in. Logically, if God created the world, there must be a reason.
If there is a reason, he must communicate it.
So when your grandfather says there was an event at Mount Sinai where God came down and gave us the Torah, you say, oh, okay. So that's when it happened, because it had to happen.
And there's no counterclaim.
In all of history, with all of our fantastic imagination, no one has Ever come up with a claim that God spoke to, uh, to the world at some other location?
There are some pretty popular mountains in the world.
And nobody claims. No, it was on our mountain.
No, Mount Sinai. Everybody knows.
So what did God tell us when he came down?
He basically told us who he is.
He revealed himself.
What does it mean to reveal himself?
To reveal his purpose.
The unknowable.
Now that God has given us the Torah, we now know the unknowable.
Studying Torah means getting to know God.
It's tragic when people study Torah and miss that aspect.
Now they know the commandments. They haven't gotten to know the commander.
That's tragic.
So when I ask these yeshiva students, what do you know about God? And they say, God is unknowable, the teacher, I think, forgot to finish the sentence.
The unknowable God makes himself known through Torah.
So is God unknowable?
Are you talking before Mount Sinai or after Mount Sinai?
By nature, whatever that means. By nature, God is unknowable.
What part of him is unknowable?
His purpose, his intention.
That he created the world is obvious and logical. Why? Well, you can't know that.
So this unknowable, um, God came down to Mount Sinai to make Himself knowable.
Why?
Because he wants to be our God.
So let's discover one thing about God right here, right now, besides the fact that he created the world and he runs the world and he is the master of the universe.
God created the world because he wanted a relationship.
And we know this from one of the things that God said during the process of creation.
If you remember, God created all this stuff in the first five days of creation. And on the sixth day, he created the first human being.
When God created Adam, God said, it is not good for man to exist alone. I will create him a helpmate. And then he created chava.
And the question, of course, is, what was the need for that statement?
It's such a glaring, uh, exception to the story.
On the first day, God created light. And on the second day, the heavens. And on the third day, the grass and the trees. And on the fourth day, and he didn't say, I think we need a moon to shine at night. I'll create a moon.
He created the moon.
When he creates Adam, there is still a need to create chava.
So just go ahead and create her.
What's the need for the statement? It is not good for man to be alone, so I'll create chava.
Why? Creating chava needed to be justified.
Had to find an excuse. The Creator.
It's like the comedian says about the airline pilots.
He said, we're going to take it up to 30,000ft and we're going to go. Just do what you need to do. Uh, I'm not checking on you. You're the pilot. Just go ahead and fly the plane and land where it's supposed to.
How you going to do it? That's your business. I don't care.
So God needs to create, Chava. Go right ahead. You're the creator and you're hot. Now. You know you're on a roll.
So all of a sudden, God says, no, no, no, I need to do something. Go ahead and do it.
Don't apologize.
So what is the need for that statement?
That is a very revealing statement because God was talking about himself.
Once. God creates a human being, now he needs to make himself known.
So he says, do you know why I'm doing all this? It's not good to be alone.
And who was more alone than God before creation?
So God says, it's because it's not good to be alone that I am going to create from now on. In other words, now I'm going to communicate so that we have a relationship and I'm not alone anymore.
Which leads us to another fascinating question.
Is it not good to be alone?
I think most of the time we would prefer to be alone.
God says, it's not good to be alone. But wherever you go, people are always saying, leave me alone.
So is it good to be alone or not?
Not good to be alone.
We're not talking about people who are handicapped, who can't fry an egg.
We're talking about people who are capable. If you're completely capable, you can parallel park yourself and you can fry an egg and you can do laundry.
Aren't you better off alone?
So you can say, for most human beings, it's not practical to be alone because you're not so capable, you need some help.
But that's not what it says.
God didn't say it's not practical. God didn't say, it's, um, dangerous to be alone. He said, it's not good.
Why is it not good?
So essentially, God is saying, I am perfect.
I can fry an egg if I need to.
I can do anything.
I am all powerful, all knowing and almighty.
But there's just me. And that's not good.
Not good.
It's doable, it's practical, it's workable, it's fine, but it's not good.
There's no goodness when you're perfect.
I think that's the first message in the Torah.
In the beginning, God created. Okay, stop right there.
God is perfect, right?
All knowing, all powerful, almighty, eternal, infinite.
Yeah.
He creates a world. Why?
If you're that perfect, why would you create a world?
Why would you create anything?
You're already perfect.
Leave good enough alone.
So this God explains.
Right after creating Adam, you're probably wondering, why would I, a perfect being, create anything?
So the first lesson that God gives us is being perfect is not all it's cranked up to be.
How would you like to be perfect?
Imagine you meet somebody who's perfect, eternal, infinite.
What do you say?
Rifka last night asked, what would you say to God if you met him?
Yeah, what would you say?
He's absolutely perfect. What are you going to tell him? The latest.
Have you heard.
Have you heard the one about the rabbi who walked? Yeah, he heard them all.
What are you going to say?
You talk to somebody who is eternal and perfect. So, uh, what's new?
Nothing.
Uh, what are your plans for the weekend?
Nothing.
It's horrible to be perfect.
That's what God is telling us.
Just in the first words of boracious.
In the beginning, God, you know, Mr. Perfect, created.
Now, what does that tell you?
So the first lesson in Torah is, don't be perfect. Nobody's going to like you.
So even if you could be perfect, don't go there.
So why did God create the world? Because he was perfect, perfectly alone.
So now the question is, what's wrong with being alone? What's not good?
There's m. No answer.
We have that same feeling.
Even if I was perfect, I wouldn't want to be alone.
Why?
You can't say. Because you're lonely? No. No. Then I'm not perfect.
Perfect means I don't need anyone to comfort me, or to support me, or to protect me, or to compliment me, or to love me.
I'm perfect. I'm missing none of that.
And yet can't be alone.
Why?
We don't know. The only answer is we are created in God's image. God doesn't like being alone, so we don't like being alone.
So what is that? That's simply the truest, deepest impulse in God.
So what do we now know about God that we didn't know before?
There's a certain humility on top of the perfection.
In addition to being absolutely perfect and all powerful, God is humble.
What does his humility consist of?
I'm not enough.
I'm, um, perfect and infinite, but not enough.
Why? What's missing.
It's just me.
So what's wrong with that?
It's a divine feature. I don't know what to call it. You can't say nature. But it is godly, uh, to not feel satisfied with self.
Why?
It's not good.
There's no goodness to being perfect.
When does goodness begin? When you're in a relationship.
When you need another.
That's the beginning of everything, and that's humility.
I think the more dramatic and better way to describe it is God's vulnerability to be vulnerable means you're not content with being you.
That's the real vulnerability.
The byproduct of that is if I'm not content to be without you.
If I'm not content to be without you, you can hurt me by not being available.
But the hurt is not what makes you vulnerable.
What makes you vulnerable is the humility.
Without you, I'm not complete.
That's what it means when psychology says being vulnerable comes from strength, not from weakness.
It's not the hurt that makes you vulnerable.
It's the need that allows you to be hurt. If you didn't need anybody, you'd never get hurt.
So what do we now know about God?
God is not content to be without us.
With us, he is content.
That little piece of information makes God a lot more lovable than a, um, moment ago.
Because how can you love God?
You sit in yeshiva. Let me reveal this to you. You sit in yeshiva and you study about God. And what do you learn about God? That he is infinite and you're not. He is everything you're not. He is true, you're not. He is virtuous and you're not.
He is unknowable, unreachable, um, invulnerable.
And you should love him with all your heart.
That's where most people get up and quit, because that doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
You're a tiny, insignificant nothing to Him.
But you should love him with all your heart.
So. So, first of all, that's totally illogical.
There's too much distance for any kind of love.
But m worse than that is this unknowable, unreachable, untouchable. God puts you through some really difficult times.
I mean, look at history.
When was the last time we had a good weekend?
So not only can't I reach him, I don't know him. He doesn't care about me. I don't affect him.
But he puts me through all of this and then tells me to love him.
This is like the Abused wife syndrome.
So anybody with a little intelligence and a little decency would walk away from religion.
The only thing that makes any sense is that if you feel pain, then God feels infinite pain.
If you have an urgent need to see the world better, improved, more livable, more. More noble, then his need for that is much greater than yours.
You feel compelled to fix the world. Tikkun olam.
You feel a need to fix the world. It's not your creation.
It's his creation. If you feel a need to fix it, imagine what he feels.
Uh, like the angels who cried to God when the sages were being massacred. And God said, in effect, you're an angel to cry over people's pain. But these people are not your children. They're my children.
So you're telling me that this is painful?
So we've discovered another thing about God.
If, in fact he doesn't want to be alone, and only with us does he feel content, then every pain we suffer, every disappointment we suffer.
His suffering is infinitely greater.
Which means being his creation, and particularly the Jewish people, being his chosen nation, makes him even more vulnerable.
It's not just that he needs us.
He agonizes over us.
Otherwise, again, it's not a relationship.
So to not be alone, God has to give us freedom of choice.
Because if we're just robots, he's still alone.
And that's why the angels didn't do it for him.
He created angels before he created Adam.
But he was not content with angels, because when you are with an angel, you're basically alone.
Because angels don't have freedom of choice.
So when does God stop being alone? On the Friday of creation.
That's when we celebrate Rosh Hashanah.
So this month that we are in today, the month of El, preparation time for Rosh Hashanah.
What are we preparing for?
We m. Are preparing for our anniversary.
The anniversary of our relationship.
And this relationship is the ultimate relationship.
The best features of what a relationship should be.
The first thing is, without you, I'm not complete.
Not because I need something from you.
I don't need anything from you. I'm already perfect.
Okay, so this is another important insight.
If you're going to get married, you have to be perfect first.
Do not marry before you're perfect.
Now you tell me.
And perfect doesn't mean be like God. Perfect means I, uh, don't care anymore.
My perfection is no longer interesting.
That makes you perfect.
So you get 20 years to work on your own perfection.
More than that. Enough already.
You're about as Perfect as you're going to get, it's kind of downhill from there, right?
So when you lose interest in being perfect, now you're perfect enough to be married.
So people ask, how do I know if I'm ready to get married?
So there's a simple test.
In the morning, when you look in the mirror, what is your reaction?
So there are two kinds of people. Some people look at the mirror and they are absolutely.
They're absolutely mesmerized.
They're fascinated.
Wow, that face in the mirror.
So interesting or so problematic, but fascinating.
If that's your reaction, don't get married.
If you look in the mirror in the morning and say, oh, you again.
I know you.
Time for a new face in the mirror. Then you get married.
Then you're like God.
See, when you look in the mirror and it's just, uh, me again.
That's how God felt.
And he said, that's it. Enough of this. I'm going to create some trouble.
And he gave us freedom of choice.
And now he's not alone.
So what does he want from us?
Another little piece of information about God? Does he want something from you?
Well, uh, it seems like.
Have you read the Torah?
It seems like he wants 613 things from you, just for starters.
But that's not true.
He just wants you.
He wants you to be beside Him.
That's all.
So just the fact that he created you and the fact that you exist, that's what he needs.
But he doesn't want you against him.
He wants you with him.
So here's the final thought.
You observe Shabbos.
You're sitting at your Shabbos table, and the chairs around the table are empty because your children don't want to sit at the table, because they're not Shabbos. Observant.
Uh, what disturbs you about that? What bothers you about that?
That the observance of Shabbos is being violated?
No.
It's that you're sitting at a table without your children.
It's not their Shabbos observance that bothers you.
It's the alienation.
You're not on the same page.
They're not on the same page.
So here's what God says.
I created the world in six days. That's what I do during the week. But on Shabbos, I rest.
So rest with me.
Why?
So that you're with me.
It's not the Shabbos.
It's the togetherness.
One of the saddest conversations I had was this mother who says that she doesn't get along with her teenage daughter.
There's just no relationship.
So I said, when you go out to do an errand, ask your daughter to come with you, be together for a while.
She says, why?
I said, oh, I know what your problem is now.
Why should you ask your daughter to come with you?
I said, just to be together.
She says, what will we talk about?
I said, you have to prepare speeches for your daughter.
Just to be together.
That's all a mother wants. That's all a daughter wants. Do it.
God just wants us to be together because he doesn't want to be by Himself without you.
So what does he want? He wants you there.
Now, where is there?
So God tells us, during the week, I'm out there creating. So come with me and help me create.
Do all sorts of labor and make the world better.
But on, uh, Shabbos, I don't do that. Shabbos, I rest.
So rest with me.
Why?
What do you mean, why?
I want you beside me.
So the entire Torah tells us where God is on every issue, on every question, on every idea, so that we can be with him wherever he is.
So God says, I don't like pork, so you shouldn't like it either.
I don't like stealing. So don't.
That's what the Torah is all about.
It's an intimate love letter inviting us to be with him at all times, under all circumstances.
Like a big one.
I hate pain.
So when you see pain, you should hate it too.
And that's how we became civilized human beings, by imitating God, the Jew being the chosen people and a nation of priests. We have to imitate God in more ways than anybody else, but it's the same idea.
So now we know something about God.
Not just something.
The ultimate.
Now we've gotten to the essence of God, what don't we know? We still don't know how all the suffering of history helps God attain His ultimate goal, that ultimately all human beings will be with him, beside him, on the same page, with him in everything.
How does the suffering lead to that?
It's a mystery.
But that's just a factual thing.
What we do know about God is who he really is.
How he manipulates the world to come to its perfection. Uh, uh. Too complicated.
He'll have to tell us.
But what we do know about him is what makes him lovable. What makes us indispensable to him and makes him indispensable to us.
In today's world, it's beginning to dawn on all human beings there is no alternative to God.
They used to can't we be good people without religion?
Can't we be moral without God? The answer is no.
Without God, you wouldn't even want to be moral. Uh, you would want to be perfect.
Have all the money, all the power, all the fame. That's all you would want.
It's only because we are created in God's image. And he doesn't want to be perfect. He wants to be good.
And goodness begins when you need someone besides yourself.
Uh, so that's basically what we put into this book. If you weren't here yesterday, we spoke about it yesterday. It's out there.
Somebody's going to be selling it.
Part of the book is getting to know God.
And as a result, you're better equipped to be married. You're better equipped to raise children.
Because when you're on the same page with God, you have a lot to offer.
Thank, uh, you for listening.
[00:49:21] Speaker A: That's all for today. Thanks for listening to Inside the Jewish Mind, a JLI podcast.
Be sure to join us every week for fresh insights and timeless Jewish ideas.
As always, stay curious, keep learning, and we'll see you next time.
[00:49:37] Speaker B: Mhm.
Sa.
