{"id":181228,"date":"2016-08-24T18:11:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T23:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/24\/words-to-live-by\/"},"modified":"2016-08-24T18:11:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T23:11:00","slug":"words-to-live-by","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/24\/words-to-live-by\/","title":{"rendered":"Words to Live By"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailykos.com\/stories\/2016\/8\/24\/1563482\/-An-interesting-view-Judaism-and-Atheism\">came across a Chassidic story related by Martin Buber<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson. <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">One clever student asks \u201cWhat lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Master responds \u201cGod created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all \u2014 the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThis means,\u201d the Master continued \u201cthat when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say \u2018I pray that God will help you.\u2019 Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say \u2018I will help you.\u2019\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Martin Buber.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This has always been my philosophy:&nbsp; If you have to use God to justify your actions, you are doing something wrong, it turns out that I have some esteemed Jewish authorities who agree.<\/p>\n<p>BTW, I also love it how Jewish stories use &#8220;Clever&#8221; as a euphemism for asshole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I came across a Chassidic story related by Martin Buber: There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson. One clever student asks \u201cWhat lesson can &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1002,1011,1003,1021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-good-writing","category-history","category-philosophy","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}