[Avodah] Apikores?

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 10:34:49AM -0500, David Riceman wrote:
: > However, another finding of the last century does make it difficult
: > for hashgachah to be anything but all-or-nothing. This has to do with
: > something called Chaos Theory. Cool topic, worth a Google. But the
: > relevant point is that real-world systems have feedback loops, so that
: > an immeasurably small difference in the start condition could have
: > huge differences in final state.

: Only some systems are chaotic.  Avalanche-prone mountains are, but 
: pitched baseballs aren't.

Closed systems don't exist in a real world. However, we're talking about
life, not avalanches or baseballs. And of all the things that interact
to create the events of your life story, the system is quite large, and
quite chaotic.

...
: Let's consider the case of a person condemned to pick cotton his entire 
: life, brutally beaten by cruel taskmasters, underfed and overworked and 
: ... (I'm sure you remember Uncle Tom's Cabin).  In the passage I cited 
: (Michtav Me'Eliyahu, vol. 4, pp. 98-102) Rabbi Dessler says that this 
: can be, not punishment, but part of the incomprehensible Divine Plan.  
: How then, can it also represent perfect justice?
: 
: The rishonim generally take the pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die approach; 
: God's justice applies not to each individual event, but to the sum total 
: of olam hazeh and olam haba.  Rabbi Dessler takes the soul's 
: perspective.  The soul doesn't care about all the tribulations it 
: encounters, it views them all as opportunities to get closer to God.  So 
: that, for the soul, being a slave in horrendous conditions isn't unjust, 
: it's an opportunity.

I didn't read REED like that.

Say a child was blind, but a surgeon found a way to repair his sight.
The parents take him in for surgery. Would you consider the parents
and surgeon to be unjust for imposing such pain on the child? Or does
eventual reward offset the pain?

IOW, the justice isn't in the fact that the soul doesn't consider it
unjust, but that from an objective position, we would know the balance
rests otherwise.

: I'm (to put it mildly) not thrilled with this attitude (though I find it 
: a plausible reading of Rabbi Dessler) and as a contrast I cited Rabbi 
: Lipkin's opinion that tending to other peoples needs in gashmiyus takes 
: precedence over tending to their needs in ruhniyus.

That's our duty to another. Not Hashem's. I fail to see how one reflects
on the other. IOW, Hashem could decide that the spiritual reward in the
world to come outweighs temporary pain in the here-and-now. But for man
to do so opens the door to the Inquisition.

Despite "mah Ani ... af atah ..." our moral choices differ. Hashem banned
murder even though He takes lives regularly.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A life of reaction is a life of slavery,
micha at aishdas.org        intellectually and spiritually. One must
http://www.aishdas.org   fight for a life of action, not reaction.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                            -Rita Mae Brown