daf bit: Avodah Zarah 18

[cellio]

Under Roman rule the study of torah was forbidden. Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion was arrested for publicly teaching torah. They sentenced him to death by burning, and also sentenced his wife to death and his daughter to be consigned to a brothel. Why was he condemned by Heaven? Because he pronounced the divine name of God. Why was his wife condemned? Because she did not stop him; from this we learn that anyone who has the power to prevent one from doing wrong and does not prevent it is punished for him. (The g'mara seems to take it as given that she had the power to stop him but doesn't say how.) Why was his daughter sentenced? Rabbi Yochanan said that she was once walking in front of some great men of Rome and they ogled her, and she responded to tempt them. (I am summarizing.) But all three, after being sentenced, declared their submission to divine justice and were thus deemed righteous. (18a)

Comments

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

G-d enacts justice upon everyone. If you are bad, your enemies overpower you. If you are good, your enemies fall before you. Some of this is covered at the beginning of Makkot. Because G-d can make everything work out correctly, one who deservesto be exiled will happen to accidentally kill someone so that he is exiled. The person he happens to kill will be one who deserved to die. So instead of G-d handing out bolts of lighting for being naughty, he makes bad things happen to you in other ways.

[cellio]

Isn't Olam Ha-Ba (the world to come) understood to compensate for the fact that it doesn't always work this way, though? This system of reward and punishment isn't always evident in the world; people who deserve death don't always die prematurely. So divine justice must be more complicated.

And how does this interact with the season now upon us? By one form of reckoning we all merit death; who among us has never transgressed Shabbat or some other death-penalty offense? But we aren't all struck down because t'shuva (repentance) is possible, and we particularly focus on it now. So (to go back to the talmudic passage), did R. Chanina get a chance to do t'shuva? Did he have the chance and reject it for some reason? What made that transgression the one that sealed his fate, among the others he must surely have committed?

I find the rabbinic view of reward and punishment challenging because of questions like these. I hope that little by little I can increase my understanding of it.