Rav Moshe Haim Luzato and the Book of Job

Rav Moshe Haim Luzato has a remarkable approach towards sin that helps to explain the book of Job. The main idea is when one has 51% sin he gets punished in the next world [for the 51% sins] and rewarded for his good deeds in this world. If he has 49% sin or less then he gets punished in this world for his sins and rewarded for his good deeds in the next. [The percentage of sin does not go by just the number of sins, but also their weight.]

He does not tie this in with the book of Job directly, but it still helps to explain the basic issues that come up in the book of Job.

The major problem in the Book of Job is that it seems to be in contradiction to the rest of the Old Testament. The major question is this: Do righteous people suffer?  The answer of the book of Job seems to be "Yes." The rest of the Old Testament answers, "No."
So the רמח''ל Rav Luzato answers as I mentioned above. [In דרך השם and in the other well famous book of dialog, but I forget the title.]
Thus, when the Old Testament calls Job a צדיק and תמים (a saint or a righteous man.) it does not mean without sin. Rather it means 51% good deeds and 49% sins. This corresponds directly with the Rambam who says exactly the same thing in הלכות תשובה (Laws of Repentance.) (The translation in English of תם  for Job is "perfect" but the meaning therefore confuses English speakers who think it means without sin. תם or תמים means more accurately "simple" as in איש תם a simple man).



[The academic world tends to look at the Book of Job as in fact contradicting the rest of the Old Testament as you can hear in the lectures of Christine Hayes at Yale University.]

Sin is a big subject in the Old Testament: that is the question what counts as a sin and how to measure the severity of sins. In the secular world these issues do not come in the same appearance. But there still are sins like lack of tolerance or racism etc. These things however in the Old Testament are not considered sins. Lack of tolerance is praised and to be rid of wicked people  is  a major goal. Racism is also considered a virtue. That is to discern between good and evil even in groups.


[The Christian world dismisses sin since belief nullifies it. The secular world has another set of actions and thoughts that are considered sinful. Being male is considered the primal sin by many people in the USA. That is  a sin for which eternal repentance is declared obligatory.Fasting and prayer are not enough to wipe out that sin.]

Rav Isaac Blazer (the major disciple of Reb Israel Salanter) also goes into the issue of the weight of sins, and shows that one sin can cancel lots of good deeds. He uses this idea to show the importance of learning Musar.

In the two Litvak yeshivas I was in-Shar Yashuv and the Mir of NY the emphasis was on: learning Torah, not to speak lashon hara and kindness in cases of need. That is to say it was considered that certain kinds of good deeds like kindness and learning Torah can cancel sins as the נפש החיים {Soul of Life} by a disciple of the Gra (Reb Haim of Voloshin) brings down.

[Tolerance really began in England as virtue after the disastrous Civil Wars between different Protestant groups.--the dissenters (Puritans, Quakers, etc.) versus the establishment until the Edict of Tolerance. But even then people recognized there were limits to tolerance as Defoe goes into. The colonies in America were supported by the English government all through the 1700's. They did not grow as a result of escaping persecution in England since the Edict had been passed in Parliament.]


Appendix: 1. I have to mention the Gemara in Bava Batra that also takes a negative view of Job. Also the Gemara Shabat--אין יסורים בלי עוון No problems without sin.

2. My own take on all this is thus: that there are major sins [weighty] and minor sins . And that there are major good deeds and minor good deeds. And that Reb Haim from Voloshin was correct that learning Torah  is weighty and can cancel a lot on the other side of the balances. The difference is that I include learning Physics and Metaphysics as the Rambam considered both of these are part of the Oral Law.

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support for the Rambam

The shinning forth of Being of Hegel seems to provide support for the Rambam. After all without that it is hard to see the position of the Rambam that learning Physics and Metaphysics brings one to the fulfillment of the two commandments to (1) Love and (2) Fear God
Even the idea of the Wisdom of God being contained in the work of Creation seems to not bring to what the Rambam is getting at..
However Hegel provides a link in the chain that seems invincible. Hegel wonders about Kant's "mere appearance". (That all we can know is mere appearance.) Hegel wonders about "mere". He says on the contrary the appearance is the shining forth of Being itself. 

Mutual Aid groups

Mutual Aid groups seems like a natural development in the Christian world since kindness towards others is considered the major goal in life and the major way of serving God. But when this is applied to the institutions that are supposedly learning Torah,the whole concept seems to fall flat on its face.  As my learning partner expressed it "They are just private country clubs."
But to gain respectability they do have to present an image of helping others. But in fact the whole thing seems like a kind of scam. Naive people of college age are drawn in by the scam but later experience shows that they are not what they present to the outside world. And woe to the individual that gets taken in by the scam.
There are however legitimate places like the great NY Litvak yeshivas [e.g. Mir, Torah VeDaat, Haim Berlin] that pretty much stick with the basic formula of Reb Haim From Voloshin about what a yeshiva is supposed to be.

I am wondering about the issue of yeshivas and I can see the point of Reb Haim in starting the Yeshiva Movement. [That seems all the more important in so far as the contracts that the "Kahal" had held in Poland were about to be nullified starting with the Russian Czar.]
Still outside of the few great Litvak Yeshivas in NY and Bnei Brak, the whole things looks like a scam.  A way to make easy money. Besides the fact that almost every yeshiva in Israel was made by vegetable stand owners that could not make living any other way than getting a few people to sign up and getting an automatic income--and the people that signed up were mainly interested in getting out of serving in the IDF.
[However I have heard great things about off shoots of Ponoviz, like Tifrah [תפרח]  and in Netivot I was very impressed with Rav Montag's yeshiva which is continuation of Yeshivat HaNegev. 

attacks on Hegel

Hegel has received a series of attacks. The first was in Germany in 1843-1845. Also WWI spelled the end of Idealism and the beginning of  dumb movements in philosophy. But even people that accepted some of his ideas in part like Marx and Kierkegaard were certainly no Hegelians

To me it seems the weak part of Hegel is in politics. When he ties ideas to politics that where he seems to have gotten off on a wrong foot.
Even the attacks on Hegel from Karl Popper and  Dr. Kelley Ross seem to focus mostly on the way his metaphysical system was subsequently applied to politics. But that is what seems to be the weakest part of his system.

[On the other hand looking at the founding fathers of the USA I tend to be very impressed. It seems to me that the geniuses of England and the USA spent a lot of time and thought on politics and that is where their expertise was. In Germany the great minds there simply spent their best efforts in other directions].

But I am not saying the system of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson would be applicable to China or Russia. The founding fathers of the USA were definitely basing themselves on England especially the England of the 1700's. But  that whole foundation depends on the kind of people the English were. You could not transfer that to czarist Russia where the problems were very different.The Czars had an empire that was composed of many groups with high percentages of criminal DNA and bad genes. James Madison had to write a Constitution for people that had good intentions, but their good intentions conflicted with other people's good intentions. That is a whole other ball game. 

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There is a certain amount of support for respect towards Jesus which can be found in the words of Rav Avraham Abulafia. He is more well known for going to debate a certain pope. Orders were given to arrest him as soon as he  got to Rome but everyone that tried to lay a hand on him died. His attitude can be found easily in his writings. He thought the Catholics were not on the right path. Not just because of ביטול המצוות nullification of the commandments; but also because of the problem of idolatry.  Still his attitude towards Jesus himself is different; and is certainly one of respect.
The way I tend to look at this is that sometimes a saint is born to bring some higher aspect of things into the world. Not only that, but that once they have come into the world -then it is no longer possible to get to that aspect of things without faith in that saint.

We find in the Ari that at the breaking of the vessels שבירת הכלים that the trait of kindness (חסד) fell into foundation (יסוד). And that is what I think happened in this case.


This type of attitude is not usually well received, but it seems to me to be accurate.

I was asked that Rav Abulafia also brings a גמטריה (numerical value of the letters that reflects badly on Jesus.  I have  a few answers for that, but the basic one is that it is fairly well known that גמטריות are often used as זה לעומת זה [This against that]. For example the numerical value of the name of Moses is the same as שמד [heresy] with the value of the word itself being equal to 1.


[In this way I can understand a little of how people with faith in Jesus often act out of kindness that is not found elsewhere.]  [It is fairly well known that the Rishonim say that the Jesus referred to in the Talmud is not the same person because of the fact that the one is the Talmud was in the era of a person that lived around 100 B.C.]

[You can see support for this also in the beginning of Nahar Shalom by Rav Shalom Sharabi and in the Ari himself. Not to mention the well known treatment of this subject by Rav Yaakov Emden.]

Even if this opinion is not very PC [Politically Correct] and is rather unpopular there does not seem to be any reason to reject it.We find that ירבעם בן נבט Jeroboam was afraid of losing the support of the people if they would go up to Jerusalem so he fell into sin. So we see that losing popularity is not  a reason to reject what is true,