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Handing over the ‘key’ to God Almighty

שו”תCategory: philosophyHanding over the ‘key’ to God Almighty
asked 7 years ago

In the last illumination in the book ‘That Which Lives’, which talks about keeping Shabbat in the face of human life, the Rabbi says something that can help a person who is caught in a moral and halachic conflict of this kind: one should remember that God is the one who creates the situations of soul control and can also save the person in danger. And we need to hand over the key to the Kabah in such cases. I didn’t understand – if the danger in soul control is from another person (say, a murderer), then how can it be said that God can simply save the murdered person – after all, this is the meaning of the murderer’s free choice? (It is natural that the Rabbi would say something like this in the context of the Holocaust). And if the danger is due to some natural law (say someone who fell in a landslide), the Rabbi also said (I don’t remember exactly where, and I could be wrong…) that in general the laws of nature are also a ‘value’ in the world that God created (because if we didn’t know – forget gravity, for example – it works all the time without exception, we wouldn’t be able to rely on airplanes, computers, etc., and this is also an important thing in the world, and without a very, very important reason it is unlikely that a ‘miracle’ would happen.) Therefore, the assumption is that if a person is prone to death, it certainly also depends on our actions, right? Handing over the key to God in this situation won’t help because for various reasons God probably won’t intervene – so it’s not very reassuring from the perspective of the person with the moral conflict, right?

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מיכי Staff answered 7 years ago

Indeed, if the danger is from another person, then even less should one expect divine intervention. But in my view today (which has since changed), even in a natural danger, He usually does not intervene. Indeed, this “calm” does not exist in my view today. But my halakhic view has also changed since then, and in my opinion there is an obligation to save the Gentile on Shabbat even in the work of the Torah. And I already wrote this at the end of my article “Is There ‘Enlightened’ Idol Worship?” (which I understood in a parallel thread that you are reading now).

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