Happy New Year for 2014

Happy New Year for 2014

I’m writing this no newsletter to wish you a happy New Year. You can acquire happiness in many ways, beautiful clothes, lots of money, good health, a wonderful family and I wish you all that and more.

But there is another kind of happiness which isn’t dependent on any of these things. I’m referring to a place, not a mood. It’s a place that a person arrives at and strives to stay there forever.

All religions have names for this place; Judaism and Christianity call it salvation or the days of the Messiah, Islam calls it paradise, Buddhists call it Nirvana. It’s a place that one chooses to go to, not a mood that one hopes will come upon one. Making the choice is like deciding to take a long journey. Making the preparations for the journey one needs a map, a guide book and one needs to learn how to read the signs in order not to go astray. It’s a very long and difficult journey; few people have actually reached the destination called the place of happiness. There are no short cuts and there’s no guarantee that one won’t get lost on the way.

All the religions claim to have a book or libraries of books of instructions of how to get to that place

One needs to decide and to believe that the journey is worthwhile.

I believe that a person who chooses to make the journey stands a good chance of living a long life because once you have such a worthwhile goal to aim for, i.e. Happiness then you have something worthwhile living  for and you will stay alive in order to achieve your goal one day

Most people grab opportunities for celebrating because they hope to get in a happy mood; like a birthday party, New Year, Christmas and so on. There’s really nothing in the event itself to make the person be happy. He feels happy because he’s decided to celebrate; there is a cause to celebrate on the New Year, for example, the earth completes another cycle around the sun.

Another circle around the sun is like a long distance athlete who makes another circle of the track and the crowd applauds and encourages him to carry on to the next circle.

I want you to choose to make the journey to the place of happiness. That is my wish for you.

I’m convinced that being happy is a state of being like a place. It’s not a temporary feeling that passes. That is something else which comes from outside and when the stimulus disappears then happiness disappears.

Wishing you a happy New Year and a great no newsday

Yours truly

Leon Gork

Etti's Ballerina Cake for Alma and Jonathan's birthday Fri 20th Dec 2013

National library of Israel hugging the snowman

Genesis 2:16, 17 The creation of free will

Free will – God’s most sublime creation.

 “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Genesis 2:16–17). 

This verse is probably the most brilliant one in the entire bible. I think that it’s the crowning act in God’s creation of man because everything else in the entire Torah flows from this verse.

Through this verse God creates Adam and Eve’s most important characteristic, the characteristic that really and truly makes them human, namely the ability to be disobedient, the ability of free will.

Giving Adam and Eve the opportunity to be disobedient is the true wisdom of God, that’s why I say that it lies at the base of Torah, the book of God’s wisdom the book that teaches man to distinguish between good and evil.

God creates Adam and Eve’s ability to be disobedient, not by saying “let there be disobedience” or “let there be free will”, as He said “let there be light” but by forbidding him to do something impossible, namely by forbidding Adam to attain something absolutely vital to his existence and therefor very attractive and tempting namely the knowledge of good and evil.

It’s unthinkable that Adam and Eve would not want the ability to distinguish between Good and Evil. They obviously want it desperately. Of course they’ll do anything to get it even being disobedient and facing the prospect of death.

God requires evidence of the strength of their desire to attain knowledge of good and evil and they produce this evidence superbly. They are ready to be disobedient to attain it and are ready to die for it. They demonstrate that knowledge of good and evil is something worth dying for. Without this knowledge life isn’t worth living.

We survive because we are ready to die in the name of good. Without this ability we wouldn’t be able to survive. Just imagine what the world would be like if people didn’t know that death was evil; we’d be killing each other. Knowing that death is evil and life is good is vital for survival.

So God’s commandment in the verse above is more like an invitation or a challenge to be disobedient. Sometimes we need to be disobedient and sometimes we need to be obedient. We need the ability to choose. Without that ability we couldn’t be called human beings and God’s creation would not have been perfect.
 
By giving Adam the opportunity to be disobedient God creates in him the ability to choose between being obedient or disobedient. Only once he’s become disobedient can he then become obedient, which is obviously what God wants.
 
If Adam and Eve are going to keep the laws of Torah willingly and happily in the knowledge that they are good, it’s got to be out of their own volition, to keep them because they have chosen the good and rejected the evil, not to keep them because keeping them will atone for some sin they’ve committed, as the three Monotheistic religions wrongly tell us.
 
The ability to be disobedient makes Man an individual different from every other individual. Without this ability we’d be zombies or robots or whatever one calls a creature which doesn’t think for itself and is identical to other creatures like it. Some tyrants in the course of history have tried to take away people’s individuality with disastrous consequences.
 
This ability, linked to his ability to see that death is evil and life is good is absolutely vital to his survival. Just try to imagine what the world would be like if human beings didn’t have the ability to choose between being obedient or disobedient. They could be ordered to kill and they’d do it without thinking just in order to be obedient. Now with the ability to be disobedient they’d have to consider the pros and cons of death and decide whether to obey or not to obey someone who told them to kill.

Here the Torah comes into play by setting the standard of what is good and what is evil. This is why the Torah claims that by keeping its laws life is preserved and by rejecting its laws life is destroyed:

 

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil". (Deu 30:15)

“Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.” (Lev 18:5)

Christianity, Islam and Judaism see Adam and Eve’s disobedience as the spoiling of God’s perfect creation. In fact it’s the exact opposite; their disobedience is the crowning glory of God’s creation. It makes creation perfect.
 
In the light of the above I conclude that it’s utter nonsense to say as Christianity says that Jesus is the one who atones for Adam’s sin, or as Islam says that Adam’s crime brought the wrath of God on the world and since then only obeisance to God and acceptance of the teachings of Mohammed can can ensure man’s entrance into Paradise and as Judaism says that the observance of God’s laws repairs the damage which Adam did to a perfect creation.

Throughout history mankind has been so busy following these nonsensical ideas that they haven’t even stopped to consider whether Adam really damaged God’s creation or actually completed and perfected it by his disobedience. .