[Avodah] Apikores?

[David Riceman]

Micha Berger wrote:
> 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.
>   
Two problems.  First, I don't think that's Rabbi Dessler's opinion, and 
second, the analogy is not a good one.  I'll take the second first.  God 
is not only a player in the game, He invented the game and set up the 
rules.  So the proper analogy would be that the parents deliberately 
blinded their child, and then took him in for surgery.  Retrospectively 
the surgery is the lesser of two evils, but it's not just of them to 
blind him and then impose more pain to restore his vision.

If I recall correctly (and I may be wrong on this since I looked for a 
little while a couple of weeks ago and couldn't find the citation I 
remembered) Rabbi Dessler's claim is that everything that happens to a 
person during his entire existence, both in this world and in the world 
to come, are perfectly just.  So "eventual reward offsetting the pain" 
just doesn't fit his opinion.

David Riceman