Israel and Humanity - Human freedom
IV.
Human Liberty.
The man, Moses, is it free? It was alleged that no and they did a great legislator the forerunner of this school believes that nowadays possible social existence as well as individual life and morality without freedom. However there is no denying that the language of Moses is likely to lead us to suppose that he believed in human freedom and if he had not seriously relied on this strength, this powerful lever for raising and maintaining the social structure, we do not conceive its mission as a legislator and religious teacher.
His philosophy of criminal law proves it too. Without doubt it is the moral effect of his troubles threatening, salutary example to the punishment of the guilty must have for others, and this could be reconciled with the doctrine of fatalism. But what is even more certain is that Moses contemplates an ideal of justice that demands atonement of the offense and the punishment attached to the crime as the effect to its cause. The law of retaliation itself, if we believe the rabbinic tradition, is not the intention of the legislature Hebrew, although in his language and its forms, appears as the expression most energetic of the non-utilitarian or political justice, but ideal and metaphysical. Now this penal theory can be sustained without the idea of freedom. The examples in the Bible appear to desire a man with a thank you to God, as the hardening of Pharaoh's heart or other similar cases show what happens to human nature when it comes to itself it is as punishment last that God is blind or hardened, in a word, the exception proves the rule, because you would think definitely not talking about divine intervention in a small number of circumstances, if all human acts indiscriminately were the effect, not of free will, but the decree of God or of blind fate. [1] We find further evidence of Moses' faith in human freedom in the proscription of the worship of the stars is a condemnation of fatalism, for alumni, depended on the influence of celestial bodies. For the author of the Pentateuch man, instead of being a slave to the outside world, it remains higher. "Look at the sky and count the stars," says God to Abraham. What the rabbis, about the word looks, Abbet , which means looking up and down, saying that God has raised Abraham above the heavens [2], to show that he is superior to them and instead of being under the yoke of nature, as it would necessarily lacking if we conceive of freedom, he remains the master, being called dominate and subjugate. Can one imagine a more formal denial to the alleged fatalism mosaic?
The resulting moral freedom so that the texts of the Pentateuch is, in our opinion, one of the best arguments against the charge of pantheism that some thought they could do to him. There is no doubt that if the base was pantheism of Hebrew thought, freedom in Scripture would not occupy an important place, because nothing is more repugnant to pantheism as free will. One can even say that freedom is the main and perhaps the only negation, since it is the clearest manifestation of personality and individual autonomy.
The idea that Judaism has given the dignity of man does not without the affirmation of his freedom, and because it is free it is also improved, and we will now examine.
