If a man cries out [to God] over what is past, his prayer is vain. Thus if his wife was with child and he said,
May it be thy will that my wife shall bear a male,this prayer is vain. If he was returning from a journey and heard a sound of lamentation in the city and said,May it be thy will that they [which make lamentation] be not of my house,this prayer is in vain.m. Berakoth 9:3
This seems to suggest a closed relationship between cause and effect in certain ancient Jewish perspectives. Certainly it was believed God could interfere to bring change, but perhaps some believed any such interference would only take place within the relationship between cause and effect that already existed. Perhaps a pulling and tugging of the strings to bring about a new design without actually destroying one string or creating another. If true, God would be bound to work within and by the rules of his own creation and nothing new could be inserted from outside. It is certainly attractive in a number of ways. It means, for instance, that anything we could know about God would be entirely based on the world in which we exist. No leaps of imagination or non-rational, existentialist propositions required. And yet, if so, it could also have a serious disadvantage in that it might make it difficult for one to comprehend what in the natural order was moved or purposed by God from what in the natural order wasn’t, because in both cases, the evidence one was measuring might be exactly the same. A miracle would cease to be a miracle in any sense other than that its natural order was not discernible.
It reminds me of a question I asked a good friend not too long ago about whether he believed creation was a one-time event after which nothing new was interjected or whether God did or could create something new and creation could be more than a one-time event. He favored the one-time creation, and would therefore probably agree with this quote. What say you, Mit the Destroyer?
The Mishnaic Musings are a periodic series of posts where I reflect on one thing or another in the compendium of the Oral Law (the Mishnah) as I read through it for the first time. Quoted portions are taken from Hebert Danby’s eminent single-volume edition, The Mishnah, published by Oxford University Press.