[Avodah] "OUT OF HAND LEADS TO OUT OF OUR HAND"

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, September 28, 2008 8:19 pm, Cantor Wolberg wrote:
: R' Micha wrote: "If people have pragmatic ideas as to how to gain more
: bitachon,"
:
: All I can say is that looking back at events in life, etc. etc., it
: becomes apparent that there was much good not apparent at the time.
: The more you look back, the more you can gain bitachon.

You are speaking to someone who lost a child, so I have a hard time
embracing that idea. Even if I could accept it intellectually,
emotionally the notion hits a solid wall. I would also think that any
Jew in this post-Holocaust era has a hard time taking comfort in the
idea that everything works out in the end. The price is often so
great, and "the end" so remote...

In the blog entry I mentioned earlier, I listed what I believe to be
three models for bitachon:

1- That if you would just trust in G-d, you would get what you want/need.

2- Trust that G-d is providing what is in your best interest.

3- I believe that while the CI asserts the 2nd is true, he does not
consider that trust to be bitachon. Since you don't know when the
story is over, when you can say "everything worked out in the end",
this statement is vaccuus. This is not necessarily what everyone sees
in the CI, so I refer the chevrah back to my post at
<http://www.aishdas.org/asp/2008/09/bitachon-trust-that.shtml>.

So how do I believe the CI does define bitachon? "[R]ealizing that
there are no coincidences in the world, and that whatever happens
under the sun is a function of Hashem's decree." It being in my
personal best interest is divorced from that definition.

I also proposed a 4th, synthesis position: "Bitachon is awareness that
the Almighty is acting in a covenental partnership with you. It is
from there that Rav Dessler's formula for hishtadlus emerges... It is
the CI's awareness that every event in our lives is part of a plan....
[H]aving bitachon demands that trust in 'my strength and the might of
my hand' is misplaced, and through my activities I can not avoid the
tragic. It is part of the role I play in the Divine Plan, and to not
accept them as from Him and part of the covenant would be disloyalty
to it."

The reason for all this speculation is because I'm trying to avoid
dismissming the problem of evil. Which ties right back to my original
question, which I now have to modify...

Given that plan A failed, I couldn't come to terms, or even with
wanting to come to terms, with things G-d allowed to happen to me in
the past, how can I develop bitachon?

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "Man wants to achieve greatness overnight,
micha at aishdas.org        and he wants to sleep well that night too."
http://www.aishdas.org     - Rav Yosef Yozel Horwitz, Alter of Novarodok
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