Where One Who Loves You Hurts You to Set You Free

Chana, of A Curious Jew, put up a great great post. She uses a movie mashal to bring out a very powerful point that you do not see outside of mussar seforim.

She uses a scene from a movie called V for Vendetta where one person who loves another like a father figure tortures her and puts her through a lot of pain and makes her think that she is sacrificing her own life for something greater than herself, in order to set her free from her fear of death and her desire to think that living a normal life is all that life is about. It really brings the "ain ben chorin ela mi she'oseik b'talmud Torah" point home in a very powerful way. I recommend the post highly.

A Curious Jew: Precious

Central Quote:

We are tortured, cruelly tortured by a God who seems not to care for us. We are tried beyond endurance; there is a pain that racks the soul and kills us. We do not know why we have been tortured so and then we are set free. And we realize it was all a sham. We thought it was someone evil and cruel who was torturing us, whether that was our Evil Inclination or some other tool. In truth, it was God. But God did it in order to set us free, to enable us to learn things about ourselves we could never otherwise have known.

Full post HERE.

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