Jeremy Rosen
Reward and Punishment
Summary
Does God reward us for our good deeds and punish us for the bad ones?
Jeremy Rosen
Manchester-born Jeremy Rosen was educated at Cambridge University England and Mir Yeshiva in Jerusalem. He has practiced as an orthodox rabbi, as principal of Carmel College in the UK, and as professor at the Faculty for Comparative Religion in Antwerp, Belgium. He has written and lectured extensively in the UK and the US, where he now resides and was the rabbi of the Persian-Jewish community in Manhattan.
That’s a wonderful question. We’ve discussed before here, whether you think praying is guaranteed to give you a response, and the Hebrew words to pray, lehitpalel, is to express oneself. So when you pray, you are expressing to God or to yourself what you care about, what you want, what matters to you, the pain you’ve been in for 20 years. I’m terribly sorry that you’ve been in pain for 20 years. I don’t believe for one minute it’s because you did something wrong to deserve it. After all, you know, we’ve all done things that deserve some sort of punishment, and we don’t get punished for it. So I just don’t buy that idea you must have done something to deserve it. But why do you pray? Because expressing it is therapeutic. Prayer is therapeutic. Just as giving somebody a blessing says, “I care,” praying to God says, “This is something that matters to me.” I want eventually come and help, but there can never be guarantees. In the same way, we can never guarantee when we walk out in the street, we might not pass somebody who breathes a virus into our face and we get it. So what are we going to do, never go out anywhere? We just carry on living as best we can and take whatever precautions we possibly can to cope.
Well, you are right if that’s the only reason for doing it, if you do the good deed because you hope to be rewarded. My father put it this way, don’t expect to be rewarded for a good deed. Very often, you are not, but do it because it’s the right thing to do.
Yes, I think that’s a very good point. A lot of things are likely to happen and be dangerous, and reward and punishment is very much a user manual. But I would say it’s a user manual to encourage, but not a guarantee.