NOTES for Pro 3:31

The fallen world often proposes us solutions, which seem seductively simple, but, when you try to use them, they lead to the spiritual impasse (and sometimes not only spiritual). One of the examples of such a seductively easy way, leading to the impasse, is violence. Sometimes it seems that by violence we can solve certain inveterate problem, cut the Gordian knot, which otherwise cannot be undone.

But in fact it always turns out that, having solved certain problem for a short time, we also engender several others, new, and they are even rather often more difficult than the one we believed to have solved. Why is it so? Is the use of force always bad? Obviously, no, because even the Torah in certain cases does not forbid to use force. The only question is to know, if it [force] can be used in the keeping of commandments given by God or for their violation. By the way, we can speak of violence only in the second case.

And the most terrible here is not in the use of force as such (this action in itself can’t be considered neither good, nor bad) and even not in the violation of justice with regard to the neighbor (although even that is horrible), but in the fact that the strength directed against the commandments given by God, make us be His enemies, puts between Him and us a wall, of which to surmount will be very difficult. And the logic of the use of force is such that an act of violence will pull inevitably another one, and the wall will grow higher and higher. This same wall, which, if we do not destroy it, will close the way to the Kingdom. For ever.