[Avodah] Apikores?

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, December 24, 2007 10:26 am, David Riceman wrote:
:> 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....


: 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.

Except that it's not so much that the child was blinded, but that the
child never had sight -- and has no innate right to such "sight".
There is a difference between being harmed and never having had a
benefit. The child has a right to sight, and it's unjust to deprive
him of it, and even unjust to refrain from getting all available help
to help one's blind child. But that presumes a child has a right to
sight and is therefore being deprived of the fair thing.

If sight is considered a priviledge, the whole line of reasoning
doesn't get started. Then the question of justice becomes
understanding how sight was earned for those who get it.

To stop torturing the metaphor...

HQBH made man incomplete so that people can have the opportunity to
make ourselves. This is a greater good than being given everything
(the nimshal for sight), and thus being born without it isn't a lack
of justice.

: 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.

The difference is that I'm reading it as "everything", and you are
reading it as "each thing". IOW, I saw REED as saying the complete
picture is a just one, every positive balanced with a negative to
exactly match the person's bechiros in positives and negatives. You
understood him to mean that each event in itself is just.

As neither of us could find the source text, this kind of diyuq
halashon would have to wait.

That said, as for my own beliefs (as opposed to how I understood
REED), FWIW... I believe in a very broad definition of sechar mitzvos
behai alma leiqa. We're in the prozdor, and the merciful thing for
HQBH to do is help us prepare for the banquet. Only people incapable
of getting to the banquet are aided by getting more short-term hanaah
for its own sake. Thus, what you get be'olam hazeh is what best points
you to your maximum potential based on where you place yourself. This
is a position of universal HP, at least WRT people.

And it isn't quite the same as sechar va'onesh in olam hazah - leiqa!
It not only implies more "growth experiences", HQBH saying "I'm doing
this for your own good", for those who make more mistakes, but it also
means that they are more likely for those capable of taking their
lesson (who tend to be the holier among us).

And without knowing every possible outcome given differences in our
life stories, we really can never know how this event or that was a
tool we did/could have used.

SheTir'u baTov!
-micha

-- 
Micha Berger             One who kills his inclination is as though he
micha at aishdas.org        brought an offering. But to bring an offering,
http://www.aishdas.org   you must know where to slaughter and what
Fax: (270) 514-1507      parts to offer.        - R' Simcha Zissel Ziv