HASHEM------emotions?

ponder2 Posted - 26 October 2001 16:08

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How can it be that we say that "anger" isn't one of the middos of Hashem....but then it says many times in Tanach that Hashem got "angry"? I never understood this.

MODERATOR Posted - 29 October 2001 17:34

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"Angry" is not at all meant literally, not more than when it says "the hand of Hashem" etc. It is merely a moshol. Hashem has no emotions. He does not get angry. But just as "Yad Hashem" represents when Hashem acts in a way that we would associate with out hand, so too "af Hashem" does not mean hashem gets angry but rather His actions are similar to what we would normally associate with as coming from anger.

depressedAngel Posted - 10 December 2006 15:31

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I’ve asked this question to a lot of Rabbis and I’ve never really gotten an answer that I understand so here goes.

How can we say that Hashem loves us if love is an emotion that is subject to time which is subject to change and G-d cannot change.

It says that Hashem has an extra special love for tzadikim or orphans or widows or whatever so again this applies change like a deviation from G-d's "normal" love.

This question can apply to anything else.

How can Hashem be angry one second and not the next second yet doesn’t it say that Bilam knew how to calculate the instant that Hashem would get angry in one day?

Also this is really random but somewhere else on the site and elsewhere I remember seeing that a person can kill another person even if that person was not "supposed" to die min hashamayim (we learn from yosef and the other shevatim and chananya mishoel and azarya.) This sounds just completely contradictory to anything I've ever learned. pleeeeeeease clarify

MODERATOR Posted - 10 December 2006 16:00

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This was explained in the "G-d" forum. Hashem has no emotions,.

When we say Hashem gets "angry" or Hashem "loves" it is not meant literally. It means that Hashem acts in such a way that it feels to us like He is angry or emotionally happy.

Kind of like when you say about your compute that "it doesn’t like this software" - you don’t mean the computer has emotion; you mean that the computer acted in a way that makes you feel as if it didn’t like the software.

So too when we say Hashem likes or doesn’t like something, we do not mean it literally - we only mean that Hashem acts in a way that feels to us as if He liked or disliked something.