Reply To: Pre-Yom Kippur Request from the helige Coffee Room Posters

4. “The reality is as LC writes. There have been problems that were ignored for years until bloggers wrote about it publicly and openly. Rabbi Zweibel (certainly no fan of blogs) admitted this in an interview with AMi (or Mishpacha) a few eyars back”

I was waiting for someone to say something to that effect. It’s like the guy who robs the bank. People may think that he gained extra money since they see that he now has money that he didn’t have before.

The problem is that they have no way of knowing how much money he would have had if he hadn’t robbed the bank. It is possible that Hashem would have given him even more money.

The other problem is that they only see the money he has in his hand right now. They don’t realize that he caused more harm to himself than good since Hashem’s plan is to cause him to be in a car accident and have to pay more than that in hospital bills so he will end up with less money plus he will be paralyzed for life.

Even if it’s true that it SEEMS as though the bloggers writing about these things causes something good to happen, we have no way of knowing if that is in fact the case. The same results could have resulted a different way, and perhaps more harm was caused than good. We do not know yet all of the harm that they may have caused.

Just to give one example of the possible harm they could have caused: Before the holocaust, there was a certain problem taking place in the Jewish world and a certain Jewish woman wanted to publicize it. She was told not to, but she went ahead and did so anyhow. The Nazis ended up using her articles for anti-Semitic propaganda, and it is possible that Jews were killed as a result.

I do not who told her not to publicize the information and I do not know enough details of the case to be able to state a definite opinion on that specific case; I am simply using it as an example to show that sometimes it may seem as though there was a positive result from something and yet it is possible that the damage done was greater.

If something was done in a way that is against Halacha, the damage done is definitely greater. הכל בידי שמים חוץ מיראת שמים Hashem runs the world. Our only job is to keep halacha.