When Ben was about to begin his first job with a Manhattan law firm, he told me he might not wear his yarmulke to work
“G ood Shabbos!”
“Oh Rabbi what’s good about it?”
My chassan Ben fielded this question while we were in a hospital room visiting a patient with advanced cancer. During our yearlong engagement — we waited until he finished law school before getting married — we would often meet on Shabbos and walk over to Manhattan’s Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital where we were part of a rotation of volunteers who visited the Jewish patients.
At the time Ben sported a full beard and a big black yarmulke. In his Shabbos suit he looked like a rabbi even though he was a fairly recent baal teshuvah. The compassion he showed each patient warmed their hearts as well as mine. How lucky I was to be engaged to such a warm and caring man!
But the pain he confronted on those visits took a toll on him. And when patients mistook him for a rabbi and looked to him for words of solace he was often at a loss. How could he explain to parents why G-d was inflicting so much pain on their little girl? How was he to explain to a dying teenager that Hashem loved him?
To me the existence of pain in the world was no contradiction to the existence of a loving perfect G-d. Unlike Him we humans are imperfect and we therefore can’t comprehend everything about the way He runs the world.
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