[Avodah] A Gutte Yahr - A Good Year?

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2015 at 08:57:35AM -0400, Micha Berger via Avodah wrote:
::> On some level yes, everything that God does is for the good.  But
::> if you get hit by a car (chas v'shalom), I guarantee you that you
::> won't experience that as a good thing.
...
: We could ask the same about Yeshaiah's "oseh shalom uvorei es hara" --
: what ra? I thought there is no ra?

Addenda in response to private email:

Well, I didn't mean to get all Izhbitz... I meant the evil we experience,
the tragic, and not the evil that we do, the wrong..

But I did buy into more univeralistic models of hashgachah peratis,
that at least every person's fate is subject to HP (pace the Rambam
or Or haChaim), and thus the tragic has a point. If not itself tovsh,
it is letovah.

Which still leaves us with R/Prof Levine's original question sbout
blessing others with shanah tovah.

...
: Even if "ra" ends up meaning "a vacuum in which the tov cannot be
: experienced". (Vacuums aren't created as much as left empty, and even
: that I am calling experiential rather than objectively real.)

But even the evil that we do is more like a missed opposrtunity for good
than a beryah. Much the way Yeshaiah pairs evil with darkness "yotzeir or
uvorei choshekh ... uvorei es hara." Althouh it's possible that Yeshiah
considered darkness to be a beryah, the way Chazal talk about the thick
darkness of makas choshekh.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             With the "Echad" of the Shema, the Jew crowns
micha at aishdas.org        G-d as King of the entire cosmos and all four
http://www.aishdas.org   corners of the world, but sometimes he forgets
Fax: (270) 514-1507      to include himself.     - Rav Yisrael Salanter