900.11f Parallel of God: Israel to Father: Child (pps.123-124)

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have him watched, irrespective of my resources. If I have confidence in him, he may rise to my confidence. If I do not have confidence, he will be less likely to attain his potential level of responsibility.

Conversely, as a young man is not truly free and cannot truly reach his potential while under his father’s roof, so too, in parallel, Israel cannot reach its full potential while under the full conscious gaze of the Divine. Thus we posit that civilization. like a child, has various levels of development, and appropriate relationships with the Divine at each level.⁴⁹⁸

As a father disciplines his child, so God disciplines you.
-Deuteronomy 8:5

This is fact that humanity as a whole can exist in four basic states. In this respect, the history of man is very much like the life of an individual. Like a single person, the entire human race is born and reaches maturity.
-Luzzatto⁴⁹⁹

As far as man is concerned, the state of God at Sinai and the state of God during the Holocaust are but two discrete possibilities of multiple, if not infinite, possibilities of Divine states.

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——————- NOTES ——————-

⁴⁹⁸ See Greenberg, Perspectives: Voluntary Covenant, p. 19.
Cf. Hick, Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, p. 518. ‘I. . . this characteri- zation of God as the heavenly Father is not a merely random illustration but an analogy that lies at the heart of the Christian faith.”
Cf. Moore, Judaism, vol. 2, pp. 201-21 1. “The idea of the Fatherhood by God is very ancient, older even than the idea of God as King.” Millar Burrows, An Outline of Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1946).
Cf. Sigmund Freud, “The Future of An Illusion,” in Frazier, Issues in Religion, p. 106. “Men cannot remain children for ever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life.’ ”

⁴⁹⁹ Luzzatto, The Way of God, p. 17 1.

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