Does God Punish?
You better hope he does! We always want and demand justice.
For those that believe Judaism does not have any consequences to our actions well you just need to open the Torah
The torah is a book that is filled with stories of consequences.
We pray for consequences.
Reward and Punishment is one of the 13 principles of faith that judaism believes in.
In order to understand reward and punishment we need to understand why God put us in the world. If he is infinite he certainly does not need us. He created us to give to us. The only good that there is, is of himself. The real place for this reward is in the world to come. we need to go through free will in this world to recieve his goodness because we need to earn it otherwise we are incompatible to Him and we will not enjoy it.
The rewards we do get in this world are just to help us have more convenience to do more good but there is no real reward in this world. That is only in the world to come.
The final point of the class was the nefesh hachaim 1,12 (Rabbi Chaim Vilozhin 1749- 1821) where he mentions how the sin IS the punishment. God does not work in ways of revenge or punishment we are taught he even cries (spiritually) when our arm hurts it hurts him and every day that the temple is not rebuilt he is in pain. Of course God can just forgive us but he doesn’t because that is the way of the world. Ever since creation it was set just like everything else, just like gravity, the planets and any other part of physics, these things are set and have rules. There is also a rule that won’t change and that is that when bad is done there is a consequence and when good is done there is a consequence. Part of this creation also allows us to replace that bad energy we create with good by doing teshuva repentance and good deeds.