Instead of using one of our usual translations, I’m going to start with the character of Reb Saunders the tzaddik in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I’ve mentioned here before that The Chosen has been one of the books that has had the most profound and lasting influence on me. I can’t really imagine that I’d be blogging about Scripture without having read The Chosen at an impressionable age. There are problems with the impetus to Scripture being a novel, but then we live with problems all the time.
For those of you who don’t know the book, it’s told first-person by a teenage boy who is modern Orthodox; his father is a yeshiva teacher, and he studies talmud himself, both at school and with his father, but he wears his tzitzes on the inside, if you know what I mean. He becomes friends with the brilliant (and only somewhat maladjusted) son of a local chassidic rebbe. Daniel is struggling with the stifling world of the chasids; Reuben is struggling with the modern world as well. It’s nearly halfway through the book that Danny brings Reuben to services at his father’s place. This being a chasidic community, it’s not just a service, but a singalong, a meal, and something else as well. I’m picking it up after the meal is over, they’ve been singing for a while, and they have said the Grace. Reb Saunders is speaking.
“The great and holy Rabban Gamaliel,” he said, “taught us the following: ‘Do His will as if it were thy will, that He may do thy will as if it were His will. Nullify thy will before His will that He may nullify the will of others before thy will.’ What does this mean? It means that if we do as the Master of the Universe wishes, then He will do as we wish. A question immediately presents itself. What does it mean to say that the Master of the Universe will do what we wish? He is after all the Master of the Universe, the Creator of heaven and earth, the King of kings. And what are we? Do we not say every day, ‘Are not all the mighty as naught before Thee, the men of renown as though they had not been, the wise as if without knowledge, and the men of understanding as if without discernment’? What are we that the Master of the Universe should do our will?”
Reb Saunders paused, and I saw two of the old men who were sitting at our table look at each other and nod. He swayed back and forth in his leather chair, his fingers stroking his beard, and continued to speak in a quiet singsong voice.
“All men come into the world in the same way. We are born in pain, for it is written, ‘In pain shall ye bring forth children.’ We are born naked and without strength. Like dust are we born. Like dust can the child be blown about, like dust is his life, like dust is his strength. And like dust do many remain all their lives, until they are put away in dust, in a place of worms and maggots. Will the Master of the Universe obey the will of a man whose life is dust? What is the great and holy Rabban Gamaliel teaching us?” His voice was beginning to rise now. “What is his telling us? What does it mean to say the Master of the Universe will do our will? The will of men who remain dust? Impossible! The will of what men, then? We must say, the will of men who do not remain dust. But how can we raise ourselves above dust? Listen, listen to me, for this is a mighty thing the rabbis teach us.”
I’ll stop there with The Chosen. Reb Samuels goes on for a couple of pages, and there’s more yet after that. Reb Samuels answers his question that it is the study of Torah that raises a man above dust, that it is specifically a Jew who is engaged in the study of Torah who has his will become the will of the Divine. And Gentle Readers will have likely figured out that Your Humble Blogger follows that path, at least to the extent that I study the Scripture to attempt to ascertain the will of the Divine, to do the Divine’s will as if it were my will.
Where Reb Samuels questions the appropriateness of the Divine doing the will of a human, I question the idea of individual will within this context. Actually, I question the idea of individual will at all, but we’ll get to that soon enough, I imagine. For now, let’s assume that individual will exists, even if it’s difficult to define clearly, and that we are probably roughly talking about the same thing when we talk about it. If I want the Divine to do my will, what is my will? I’d like good weather tomorrow, when I really should do some gardening. I’d like the plants to grow well, particularly the Rose of Sharon trees, which are a little shabby-looking. I’d like all the dandelions to pull themselves out of the ground and die, preferably already in the big bag of garden cuttings out on the curb. I’d like my children to be well-behaved, healthy, clever, good and strong. I’d like a good night’s sleep. I’d like to have our mortgage paid off. I’d like the Giants to sweep this series. I’d like to see both Waiting for Godots, and I’d rather like to act in one. I’d like to keep my hair. I’d like the Republican Party to work to persuade people to responsible participation. I’d like the climate to be all better now. I’d like to go into space, but comfortably. I’d like to know I was helping people. I’d like to have mental discipline.
Hmph. I wrote out a nice positivist categorization of kinds of individual will, and how they relate to the verse, but I don’t think there was much of anything to them in the end, so I’ll skip them. Let’s see if I can look into the verse without any more lists. It won’t be easy; I do love me some lists. Anyway, there are different kinds of individual will, and some of them definitely seem like there’s no way for the Divine to do that particular will as if it were his will (I’d like Dick Cheney to die and be reborn as a chandelier; I’d like to be able to hold my breath for an hour), so the verse can’t be talking about that. Those are, in Reb Saunders words, dust. But when we restrict the will to something that isn’t dust, we run into a tautology: we know those aspects of individual will which conflict with the Divine will must be dust (from the first part of the verse), so it is only those aspects of individual will which are in common with the Divine Will that are fulfilled by the second part, and therefore the categories of individual will (properly understood and not dusty) and Divine Will are not actually two categories but a single category. Which, unfortunately, deprives the verse of any actual meaning. I don’t like that.
For the verse to have meaning, there must be some aspect of your will that is both different from the Divine Will and not in conflict with the Divine Will.
Think about that for a moment.
I think I’ve reached the limits of logic on this one. Let’s start over in a new note.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.