Wednesday, February 6, 2008
4b-5a Death Story Redux
Another thought on this Angel of Death Story. Why is it here? What the genre of this story? What is the goal? Is this elaborate story only here to teach the somewhat banal moral at the end (folks should be willing to let go of their anger and pride)? If so, it's an awfully long and convoluted way to teach that lesson. In addition, the final line seems like a throw-away to me. It doesn't seem like an integral part of the narrative. So, I ask again: what does the editor of this section want to accomplish by putting the narrative in? What did the original teller of the story want? Is this one of those popular-type fables, not necessarily Jewish in origin, that get slightly recast with a Jewish trope and stuck into rabbinic literature? What's going on here?
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The trigger for this story is Rav Yosef's crying at Proverbs 13:23 - "There is one who succumbs without justification" - a verse he agrees with -- it is true, sometimes young people die without reason. It is here our story begins. I think the story does two things by way of trying to explain unexplainable tragedy. First, it lets God off the hook. The person died not because God wanted it to happened, but because of a bureaucratic error. Though this raises other questions such as why can't God get control of His staff and why can't God fix it -- the fact is that God is left out of this story. This gives God plausible deniability in the charge that He was complicit in this unfair death. Secondly, the story zooms out to the bigger picture. Though we may lament the loss of the individual in this world, the story presents an evening out in the end. The lost years on earth are not gone; rather they go to a young Torah scholar, whose learning will bring merit to both that scholar and the deceased in the next world. Therefore, if you look at the big picture, where it matters (the olam haba), everything works out in the end.
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