Question

In the final note in the book That Which Is Present, which discusses Sabbath observance versus saving a human life, the Rabbi says something to the effect that a person who finds himself in this kind of moral-halakhic conflict should remember that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, is the one who creates situations of life-threatening danger, and He can also save the person who is in danger. And in such cases, we need to hand over the key to the Holy One, Blessed Be He. What I didn’t understand is this: if the danger in a life-saving situation comes from another person (a murderer, say), then how can one say that the Holy One, Blessed Be He, can simply save the victim? Isn’t that the whole meaning of the murderer’s free choice? (I think the Rabbi said something like this in the context of the Holocaust.) And if the danger is because of some law of nature (say, someone has had a landslide collapse on him), the Rabbi also said somewhere (I don’t remember exactly where, and I may be mistaken…) that in general the laws of nature are also a kind of “value” in the world created by the Holy One, Blessed Be He (because if we didn’t know that gravity, for example, works all the time without exception, we wouldn’t be able to rely on airplanes, computers, etc., and that too is something important in the world, and without a very, very important reason it is not likely that a miracle would happen). So the assumption is that if a person is about to die, that really depends on our action too, doesn’t it? Handing over the key to the Holy One, Blessed Be He, in that situation won’t help, because for various reasons He probably will not intervene—so that’s not very reassuring for the person facing the moral conflict, is it?