Levite
Higher and Higher
is there any skill involed in teaching the texts? If there is, why doesn't God do it himself?
That sounds like alot of power. Why is God comfortable with that power in men who don't know everything and can make mistakes?
If God wanted human beings to be omniscient and without free will, He would have created us so. Clearly, having free will and not being omniscient, God wants us to learn from our own experiences; and wishes us to do so in different ways, for different reasons.
We don't really know why God created us as He did, or what all His motivations are in wanting us to have free will and do things for ourselves and make our own mistakes. But many of our rabbis have taught that He wishes for us to have free will to be more like Him; and he wishes us to make our own mistakes and learn from them, because doing so cultivates compassion and empathy for one another. And the best way for us to learn to love Him better is for us to learn to love one another better.
How does this infringe free will? If God infringes the believers free will by organizing the faith, doesn't the clergy infringe the worshippers free will too?
Because if God did everything for us, and constantly gave us all the right answers through miracles and divine intervention, we would never learn to think for ourselves, to act for ourselves, or to value the work necessary to learn, or the experience that breeds wisdom over time.
Clergy don't infringe people's free will because we are not divinely appointed, not hierarchical, are entitled to disagree with one another, and have no authority over the souls of others. In order to become a rabbi, one does not need miraculous selection, or special powers, or noble bloodlines, or to be rich or powerful, or any other quality except education. And rabbis may be halachic judges, but the most we can do to anyone is to put them in cherem (like excommunication): people absolutely have choices about whether to follow what we say. And, most frequently, if people hate the way their rabbi interprets the law, they find another rabbi who interprets it more to their liking, and goes to that rabbi's synagogue instead. No compulsion to it.