Question

I read something interesting this Sabbath and wanted to share it with you.
The Talmud in Ketubot says that everything is in the hands of Heaven except for cold and heat. It follows from there that illnesses (like dehydration from the sun, catching a chill, etc.) are under human control and are a matter of one’s own irresponsibility, so in that area there is no direct divine involvement.
You have to remember that in the period of the Sages they barely knew about dangers from food (cholesterol, what causes cancer), and certainly not about smoking and so on. And of course they didn’t know how to diagnose internal processes and find treatment for them.
If we take the “midrashic interpretation” of cold and heat, we understand that today almost everything is handled through medicine, whether preventive medicine or medical intervention after the illness begins, so it follows that the vast majority of medicine is in our hands and not in the hands of Heaven.
And that also explains why today, more generally, we see fewer signs of revelation and more of the direction of “God has forsaken the earth,” because the modern, scientific world provides us with discoveries and tremendous information that we didn’t know in the past. And we see that the Creator’s mode of governance is that the more human knowledge there is, the more distance He takes. And that isn’t in a bad sense—He built this platform, and maybe He even sees that as a success; that’s what He was aiming for.
(The success of a brilliant CRM program is measured, among other things, by the fact that people don’t have to call the technician who built it every moment to help them understand or operate it.)
It feels something like: “The world was a baby in the past and needed more babysitting, and now it’s grown up and needs less of an adult parent’s presence.”
Just as a point—I’d be glad to hear your opinion.