Knowing God's Plan # 2

Knowing God's Plan: The Ramchal

• What are we trying to understand? Darkei Hashgacha, the purpose of history, by extension the purpose of reality, for reality exists to undergo the cycle of history
• Hence Ramchal begins not with Hashem being the ultimate good/Chok Hatov l’heitiv, but with the situation of man, as that is the center of the structure of world history
• Once we appreciate where man fits in, we can go back and ask ourselves the broader question of why Hashem created man to be the creator of his own perfection.
• We think of good being a self contained concept. Meaning, there isn’t necessarily another person present to enjoy the lemonade and beach, in fact they may just disturb peace :). But upon further reflection, we realize that without someone to share the good with our good is meaningless. Going one step deeper, the good is a shared experience, but the ‘other’ is in fact Hashem. Not to say that we can retire to a mountaintop to experience the ‘other’ in the purest form. The only way to truly connect to Hashem, as we will see, is to be as ‘like Him’ as possible — and that means fully engaging in the giving process, whether as a giver or as an enabler/receiver.
• Being a giver is akin to “paying it forward”
• Hashem being the ultimate good wanted to give of His good, and what better way to do so then to allow Man to work his way back to Hashem
• The contradiction between Derech Hashem and Da’at Tevunot.
• Rabbi N Gottlieb it isn’t a contradiction, embarrassment, as the Yerushalmi says causes the recipient to look away — it’s all about the relationship.
• Still, why did Ramchal only emphasize this point in Derech Hashem, whereas in all the other sefarim he simply says the nahama d’kesufa issue, which seems so much less satisfying?
• In Derech Hashem Ramchal is talking in isolation in a nutshell what is tachlis habriah. The Derech Hashem is about many different topics. He therefore didn’t have the luxury of saying nahama d’kisufa and leaving it at that.
• The same goes for mesilas yesharim, a mussar oriented work, where Ramchal opens by saying, closeness to Hashem is good, and man is tasked with creating that good for himself — Ramchal highlights the relationship between man and G-d, but without asking too many philosophical questions, as that isn’t the purpose of the work.
• Daas Tevunos and all other sefarim are describing the Kabbalistic system, a description of reality where the key element is the relationship between creation and its Creator — whose Perfectly unified Will unifies all of reality. In most of Ramchal’s works, writing that the recipient is embarrassed to look at the giver, or even that the gift is imperfect, is enough for us to understand the lack inherent in the gift as being a fundamental issue, not an ancillary issue.