Just a brief correction to your concluding sentence:
If I assume that the speaker (in this case, Rabbi Gershon Edelstein) is not a pathological liar, then he is saying what he believes with all his heart. But whether he is stupid or not is unrelated to the matter. Either way, if he isn’t a liar, then he is probably saying what he believes.

Grisha really does believe this with all his heart; there is no point hoping otherwise. It is simply “false hope.”

A few things.
A. I emphasized a person who believes that everything is literally in the hands of Heaven except fear of Heaven—that is, even a person who jumps from a roof, that too is in the hands of Heaven, even if it appears to be an act caused without intervention.

B u t my question was about the conclusion: why did this unsuccessful idea enter his mind? There is no logical explanation for that, especially if the jumper is a reasonable person. And therefore here there is room to draw the theological conclusion that something is being demanded of him or of his surroundings.

For example, throughout the day there are countless drivers who break the law and talk on the phone while driving. A small number are caught by the police. Statistically, it is necessary that some people be caught, but it is not necessary that specifically those people be caught. A person who believes that there is someone directing things so that specifically he will be chosen concludes from this that something is being demanded of him. Another example: in a lottery, although it is a necessity of reality that one of the participants will win, the question why he happened to enter that particular lottery, and therefore to win it, is a question unrelated to the necessity that there be a winner. Likewise, from his perspective, the very decision to hold the lottery was in order to convey the prize to him, in the sense of “the world was created for me.”

True, one cannot prove from the lottery or from the policeman the hand of God, but the believer who thinks the hand of God exists even when it is not seen sees in this a message. He sees that when suffering comes upon a person, he should examine his deeds, etc.

B. If you accept the above, then one should not conclude that a person who receives a ticket is stupid, just as one should not conclude that a person whose barrels turned sour is stupid, even though it is reasonable to assume there was some failure in storing the wine and that is what caused it to sour. In any case, the reason he did not notice that failure is the thing that leads him to soul-searching.

And therefore I think that to conclude about such a person that he is an idiot is incorrect. You may disagree with his basic premise, but according to his own method, his conclusion is correct (especially if that person has a track record of sensible conclusions and is not a preaching liar).

C. Let us return to coronavirus. From the Haredi perspective, the question is not what actually happened; for that he will ask the epidemiology expert. His question is not what, but why. Why did such a kind of plague come, in which Haredi day-to-day behavior that does not border on life-threatening danger is what will kill him? And here comes the conclusion: he should examine his deeds.

Why is it not logical to infer this?
I did not quite understand what the column you are working on is about—drawing mistaken conclusions, or once again about the Haredim.

The Haredi issue.

The practical difference regarding what this forthcoming column is about is that if the topic is once again the Haredim, in the sense of “when the ox falls, sharpen the knife,” then one has to take the full picture into account. Does the essence of Haredi life lead to danger to life, or is Haredi society in itself a reality that causes no damage to society at large, and a highly unusual event, which happens maybe once in a hundred years, leads them to a conclusion two weeks late, and this costs a few victims—should we not say that necessity is not to be condemned?
One has to take into account the calculation of the Haredi person, who sees in the alternative the loss of the basis for his existence, and it is worth it to him to pay the low price of the deviation. Do we say that the benefit of cars is not worthwhile because there are also traffic accidents?

Sorry for the length…
And thanks in advance.

With God’s help, 19 Iyar 5780

To Tam — greetings,

The principle that the Holy One, blessed be He, is more exacting with the righteous than with others is not an innovation of Rabbi Y. G. Edelstein. The Sages already expounded on the verse, “Declare to My people their transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sins,” that for Torah scholars “unintentional sins are treated as intentional ones,” whereas for the unlearned “intentional sins are treated as unintentional ones.” Torah scholars are judged more strictly for their mistakes, because they should have been more exacting in clarifying the Jewish law or the reality, as they instructed: “Be careful in study, for an error in study counts as deliberate sin.”

One cannot attribute everything solely to failure to observe the Health Ministry’s instructions, for Rabbi Edelstein was among those who strongly called on people to obey them. And nevertheless there are many Jews in all sectors who kept all the Health Ministry rules and got coronavirus, and very many in all sectors who were lax about the instructions and were not harmed.

Rabbi Yeshayahu Heber of blessed memory certainly was not under suspicion of violating the Health Ministry’s instructions; and, may he live long, the residents of Efrat, who are educated and modern Religious Zionists, certainly obeyed all the instructions, and nevertheless the city of Efrat was in first place in percentage of coronavirus infections.

Let the experts analyze and offer this or that explanation, but overall the picture is far from clear, and the effectiveness of all the lockdown and isolation measures is also far from clear. Only yesterday I read an article reporting what the governor of New York said about data indicating that about two-thirds of those infected with coronavirus had been at home and had not gone out to work or into the streets, and yet they were infected.

So besides safeguarding health, one must also pay attention to the spiritual side, and therefore Rabbi Y. G. Edelstein calls on Jews who observe Torah and commandments, each person, to conduct a “spiritual home inspection,” because even if he appears to be “righteous” relative to general society, he should think that precisely because of his high Torah level, a much higher degree of precision in his deeds is demanded of him.

Best regards, Shatz

More power to you, Shatz, for your wonderful words.

I wanted to ask a general question, and coronavirus served as a timely example. My question was whether, when there is a physical explanation for a phenomenon, one should not draw a conclusion about why that physical cause came specifically to me, even if it came in a way where I decided, against reasonable common sense, not to listen to the expert, even though I am generally a reasonable person. And that is why Rabbi Michael Abraham wrote that even he does not believe this. But these arguments seem to fly in the air, and I did not understand why—where is the mistake? The fact that you presented shows that even the forensic proofs are not precise in this case, because there are failures in places where the cause is absent and yet the result arrived with even greater force.

Tam.