Is God playing Parent with us? Reciprocal Reality or Parental Punishment

The concept of middah knegged middah is an intriguing one. Middah knegged middah means measure for measure. In other words “as you have done to to others so shall be done unto you”, or in conventional terms, “what comes around goes around”. For every action you take there is an equal and/or opposite result. This is the spiritual parallel to Isaac Newton’s third law “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. Judaism definitely agrees with the first part of Newton’s law “equal reaction”, and sometimes agrees with the second part, “opposite reaction”.

The first area of reality that this applies to, is our interpersonal interactions. Any actions, indeed any emotions, we project to others will rebound and come right back at us. Judaism asserts that we can affect reality and people around us in powerful ways. When we feel positively toward another they will reciprocate. When we feel impatient with them, they will reciprocate in turn, and so on. In fact, so strong is the impact of our attitude towards others, that we can make enemies into friends simply by treating them and acting towards them with joy and warmth. Gradually this will affect their heart and transform their negative feelings into positive ones.

This is reflected in the verse "Kamayim hapanim l'panim, ken lev ha'adam l'adam:" "As water reflects a face back to a face, so too, one's heart is reflected back to him by another." A recent TED talk

http://www.ted.com/talks/frans_de_waal_do_animals_have_morals.html

has shown that this principle holds good even in the animal kingdom! In his talk “Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals” shows multiple examples of animals after a fight reconciling due to the winner reaching out to comfort the loser. In fact, chimpanzees will hug and kiss after a serious tussle. But the core idea here is that one animal went out on a limb to reach out to the other. And just that one simple overture affects the other, erasing the hostility that was dominant just moments before.

Not just is this true on a micro-cosmic personal level, it is also true on the grander stage of human history, what we call “poetic justice”. Actors and agents in history set in motion events that sometimes only culminate eons later. But the key concept here is that the actions they took, resulted in similar and identical events generations later. The doctrine of reward and punishment, for example, is given an almost mathematical exactitude with the often reiterated belief in measure for measure. The Talmud states (Sanhedrin 90a): “all the measures [of punishment and reward] taken by the Holy One, blessed be He, are in accordance with the principle of measure for measure”.  The scriptural proof text for this is from Ovadiah 1:15- “as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head.”

For example, Pharaoh commanded his people to drown the Israelite boys in the waters of the Nile. Later, his own army perished by drowning in the Red Sea in pursuit of the Israelites. Another example is when Haman was angry with Mordechai for not bowing down to him and he built a gallows to have him hanged. He ended up being forced to lead Mordechai on a horse to honor him, and being hanged on his own gallows.

Poetic justice is brought to a climax in the case of false witnesses – eidim zomemim. The Torah requires the court to "do to him as he had conspired to do to his brother" (Deuteronomy 19:19). We punish the conspirators with exactly the same punishment through which they had planned to harm their fellow.

“And in the end, the love you take
Is equal to the love that you make.”

Paul McCartney and the Beatles ended their iconic White Album with this couplet of poetry that was part of a song called, appropriately, The End. Think about it. In sixteen words, we are taught that in the final analysis, the wisdom to end all wisdom is this: the quantity of love you, or I, or the world receives is directly related to the quantity that we give. Underlying such a grand idea is the even grander idea that all love and hate, peace and war exist in an almost karmic balance of cause and effect that is the result of free human initiative. You and I are at liberty to put out however much love we choose, and it is a firm universal law that we will get back what we gave in equal measure. The Beatles are perhaps unconsciously echoing here the classic Talmudic concept of middah k’neged middah, measure for measure.

What we need to look at more closely, however, is how exactly this works. Does measure for measure mean that reality is reciprocal, that actions we take reverberate in certain ways automatically? Or is it that God arranged a system of justice and order in this world that things we do will ultimately come back to us, not because they must, but because God wants such a system of rebounding reaction? In other words is it built into the very system of nature or is it a divinely mandated and enforced principle?

For example, a child who eats too much chocolate will get sick. This is a reciprocal reaction to his action. But it is a natural and automatic one. A parent punishing their child for eating too much chocolate is also a reciprocal reaction to their action, but it is not an automatic and natural one.

Which is it? Is “what comes around goes around” an automatic reality, or is God playing parent with us?

Stay tuned.