The real question

The last few weeks have been filled with more questions than answers.

Are we headed back to days of intense fighting? Are loved ones going to be called up? Does our government have a long-term plan for Gaza? Will the remaining hostages come home? What is President Trump really thinking? Why does the world feel like it is falling apart?

Mostly, I manage to keep these worries inside and focus on what is in front of me. But sometimes they bubble up and boil over, causing me to share the stress by musing about them aloud with my family.

When I start to perseverate, my husband occasionally asks, “Shayna, do you mean to say,  ‘Oof, it is so frustrating to not have control?’”

I guess so.

Living life on the backdrop of war for the last year and a half is taking its toll. It’s hard to make summer plans when you don’t know what lies in store. It’s hard to plan for next week when we have no idea what tomorrow will bring.

This past Shabbat my children were reminiscing about their childhood and went to their rooms to bring down some memorabilia. One of the items that ended up on the table was “A book of kwestons” that my son had written when he was 5.

Each page had a different question, along with an illustration. Included in the list were: Why does Hashem make scary storms with thunder and lightning? Why doesn’t Hashem talk to people who talk to Him? How do birds fly? Why does Hashem create bad bad bad bad people if He knows the future?

From the time we are little, we are plagued with all kinds of questions — especially those that tug at our understanding of the inner workings of the world, good and evil, justice, and God’s role in it all.

At the time, I remember encouraging my son to call my father: “Saba is a rabbi. Maybe he can help you.” My father gave him a thought-through answer about how Hashem is so big and so great that we can’t ever really understand everything that He does and why He does it.

My son, a sharp kid, got off the phone and immediately told me that “Saba does not have the answers either.” But somehow, nonetheless, he felt better and more at ease after that conversation.

In his writings, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik often discusses the theologically vexing questions of evil and proposes that, as opposed to focusing on “why,” we should turn our attention to “what”:

“Man should not ask: Why evil? He should rather raise the question: What am I supposed to do if confronted with evil; how should I behave vis-a vis evil? The latter is a powerful challenge to man and it is the duty of man to meet this challenge boldly and courageously. Suffering, in the opinion of Judaism, must not be purposeless, wasted. Out of suffering must emerge the ethical norm, the call for repentance, for self elevation. Judaism wants to convert the passional frustrating experience into an integrating, cleansing and redeeming factor.” (Community, Covenant and Commitment, 331-32)

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a very special ceremony.

It was a gathering at Ammunition Hill to celebrate the completion of basic training in the IDF by a group of ultra-orthodox and national religious men (most of whom are between the ages of 30-45) who decided to leave their families and workplaces for a few weeks in order to join the army and voluntarily offer their service at this later stage of life.

I cried from the first second until the last, as the various officers got up to speak about the challenging times we are living through, the hostages, the fallen soldiers, the injured soldiers, the drafted soldiers—and their wives and children who have spent so many months on their own.

I then looked toward the group of thirty men who, instead of dwelling in the “why,” thought about “what” they could do to help and how they could answer the call of duty; and to their dedicated wives, children and parents who were in attendance and whose faces were beaming with pride.

The night provided no answers to my many questions about why Israelis are suffering or about what President Trump is planning. It did, however, leave me inspired and feeling a renewed sense of faith.

In the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks:

“Faith is not certainty. It is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith is never easy. The great heroes of the moral life, like the great artists and scientists and thinkers, like anyone who has undertaken to live a life of high ideals, know failure after failure, disappointment after disappointment. What made them great is that they refused to despair…To find meaning in life, as Viktor Frankl discovered in Auschwitz, is to hear a call. ‘In the last resort, man should not ask, “What is the meaning of my life?” but should realize that he himself is being questioned.’ God is calling each of us to a task – asking each of us as he asked the first humans, ‘Where are you?’ – but to hear the call we have to learn to listen.” (The Great Partnership, 97)

Our questions are not destined to disappear anytime soon and if they do, we are guaranteed to have new ones.

As Professor Yeshayahu Leibowtz is reported to have said “The day I wake up and have no questions of faith, I’ll know that I’m dead.”

The real question, however, is what we will make of our lives and what meaning we will give them in the meantime.

And for now, these men reminded and empowered us to find those answers.