A Letter to Members of The Woke
About Truth and Justice
*
Rabbi Z Aviner
*
Noahidesevenommandments.com
.
My friends, you claim to understand the world better than ever before. That the world is built on injustice and lies.
Let’s Discuss these two points- Injustice and truth.
You see the human history as a story of the oppressor and the oppressed, of the powerful and the powerless, of masters and slaves.
Thus,
The whites have taken advantage of the blacks,
the factory owners of the workers,
the bankers of the poor,
the colonial powers of the natives,
the feudalist of the vassals,
the husbands of the wives,
the males of the females,
the smart and learned of the uneducated.
All system of justice, you say, are designed
to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of the few elites.
Moreover, you claim, there is no such a thing as objective truth. Each individual or a social entity has its own truth, based on its Iself-interest
Good or evil are also relative concepts. What is good for the wolf, is bad for the lamb.
You say that you follow the philosopher Kant and believe only in things you can touch, see, smell or hear.
You therefore don’t believe in God nor in His revelation on Sinai,
as described in the Bible. What is the Bible, you say, if not an ancient bronze age myth?
.
You believe only in science, since it is based on reality
and produces technology we can touch, smell and see.
You also follow Kant and believe in the right of every individual and society to choose its own morality and laws.
This freedom extends even to the right of the individual to choose its own gender and lifestyle.
So big is your distrust in external authorities,
that you don’t even promote an idealistic utopia for Mankind.
After all, you say, history shows that all such idealistic movements have turned dictatorial, with terrible cost of wars and human life.
You therefore reject any attempt to frame the future of Mankind within a predictable box, as colorful and promising it might seem.
But it is not only the future that you don’t trust, you don’t even know the present. We live under a sea oof misinformation and false news, perpetrated by the wild social media and supplemented by the new AI.
How could anyone trust our government anymore?
What is left in your hand, is the passion to destroy the past and the present, without a passion to build. Your generation therefore tends to shy away from creating families and bearing children, leaving you with a sense of emptiness and deep nihilism.
But I suspect, my friends, that despite your despair and deep nihilism, you would have been thrilled to discover evidence for the truthfulness of the Torah and the existence of its giver – God.
Holding such a solid proof in your hands would anchor your moral values on the ground and consolidate your conception of right and wrong, good and evil. Such a solid proof would help you to withstand the enormous chaotic assault of heresy and nihilism in which we live.
But unfortunately, such a proof is extremely rare or impossible to find.
For the existence of God is concealed from us by design, for the sake of our moral trial. If everyone could easily see or perceive Him, who would dare to commit a sin?
Had He executed His rewards and retributions readily
and in the open, who would be fool enough to violate His Commandments?
And yet, at Sinai, He broke that concealment and revealed Himself to Mankind to give Israel His Torah, in which He delineates His moral code and values. No such revelation happened before or after.
You may ask, is the story true?
Isn’t it another ancient myth, another lie?
To find out, let’s examine the first chapter by which Moses opens his five books, namely the story of Genesis.
Here, unexpectedly, the chapter does not present the Torah Laws, as it would be expected, but rather the CREATOR, God, His Names, and His action –namely that He created the world in Six Days or stages.
Why does the Torah choose to start this way?
Why starting with a story of CREATION?
Many sages have raised that question and have offered their explanations.
Some have said that the Genesis story is an allegory,
or that the animals mentioned here are Holy Beasts or Heavenly creatures. Still, what is the purpose of presenting this mysterious allegory at the beginning of the books?
Some say that Moses started with CREATION to establish God’s authority to give the Land of Israel to whoever He wishes.
If anyone would challenge the right of Israel to settle in that land, he should be shown that this lies in the CREATOR power to give the Holy Land to Israel and to no other.
Again, why did Moses choose to establish God’s authority, by telling us a mythical, allegorical story?
Now my friends, I too wondered about the meaning and the validity of the story of Genesis, till I came across of a scientific account of the history of Earth, a summary of everything we know from science about the evolution of life,
from small seeds to full grown Man.
You can see that scientific report compared to Genesis
in another video I’ve recently made.
As it turns out, Moses’ account in Genesis does match perfectly well the scientific story, which is a real miracle.
For how could Moses, or anyone else, tell such a credible story , 3500 years ago, if not by receiving the information from the outside?
We know what Moses learned about Creation while growing in Pharaoh house. The Egyptian mythical story is still inscribed on their Temple’s walls in detail. As we read it we find out that there is nothing in their story that can come even close to what our science is telling us today about CREATION.
And that is also true regarding all other stories of CREATION told by the ancient in Moses’ time. All are full of fierce rivalry between the different gods, along with their ugly sexual perversions.
In contrast, Moses’ story is clean, factual, telling us the true history of Planet Earth Day by Day, Stage by Stage, in a way that is completely supported by our science. No such story could be conceived by a mere human mind in Mose’s time.
As you see, my friends, the very science that we all trust, is confirming us the validity of Moses’ Torah.
In fact, it is only nowadays in our 21th century that we have accumulated enough knowledge to appreciate the miraculous nature of Genesis story.
As we know now, Moses’ story is not an allegory but more importantly – a miraculous account of the true history of the evolution. It takes us from the primordial stage of Earth as a hot, chaotic place of streaming lava, to the current stage that we see today.
On that road of development, it describes the appearance of dry land, the first vegetation, the first mobile life in the water, then birds in the sky followed by amphibians in swamps, exactly in the order that science says. Then came the cattle like, the beasts, the huge snakes and the mammals. Moses’ account is so accurate, that it covers also the major catastrophes that hit our planet in-between the six stages or six Days.
Hence my friends, there is no escape but to recognize the unbelievable truth about the miraculous nature of Moses’ account of Genesis. It is something that you long for – holding a true miracle in your hands that can’t be denied even by the most skeptical scientific mind.
Here Kant’s teaching is fully fulfilled – you don’t need to believe in clerical authorities or in any tradition to tell you that Genesis is true. You simply read it and compare it to the History Channel secular report of the history of our planet.
And since the story is true, so is the existence of God tand His revelation to Moses is true.
Now we may understand
why did Moses elect to begin the Torah with such a truthful story about God and CREATION.
Perhaps, as a true prophet, he knew that a day would come and a young, sophisticated generation, who trusts science, would long for a miracle in their hands to anchor their trust in God and His moral message.
He therefore opened his five books by presenting God, and at the same time giving us a story about Creation that we can validate. Once we’ve found that the story is credible, we would have no choice but to take the Torah’s moral messages seriously.
What indeed are the main messages of Genesis story?
The chapter starts by saying that at Creation, the CREATOR set on the Throne of Justice as a Judge, in Hebrew Ea-Lo-Hee-M. As a Judge, His judgment follows the Absolute Truth and Absolute Justice.
Hence, unlike what the Wolk people say, there is such things as Truth and Justice, and they are divine, only that they are corrupt by human biased and injustice.
Moreover, Genesis also tells us that the CREATOR EaLoHeeM made Adam in His image and form. Adam therefore can and should emulate the Creator and thrive to establish courts-of justice in every city and every district, as the Fifth Noahite Commandment says. I
n those Courts of Laws, Adam should thrive to reach the truth and implement truthful justice, as humanly possible.
Although each nation can build its own judiciary system and set up its constitution according to its unique culture and customs,
the words of God given in the Torah should serve all nations as a constitution for all constitutions. This task is an essential part of our trial, one of the reason for our life on Planet Earth.