“If you’re going through a brutal, inexplicable loss or any form of tragedy, I wrote this book for you”

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Family archives 

IT was the spring of 1986, and Rabbi Gershon Schusterman’s path to the future was focused and forward. He and his wife Rochel Leah (née Deitsch) had moved to Long Beach, California as a young couple in 1971 as shluchim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, where they were raising their large family of 11 children (ranging in age from 14 to 16-month-old twins) and building a kehillah from the ground up.

Rabbi Schusterman had joined a developing day school and was soon director of the 400-student Hebrew Academy of Orange County. He was also an insightful and sought-after rabbinic advisor for others when they were faced with overwhelming challenges or grief, considering himself — well-trained rabbi that he was — as G-d’s “defense attorney,” dispensing Judaism’s time-honored answers to those struggling with tragedy and loss.

And then, his own world collapsed around him.

On a Sunday morning 10 days before Pesach, while he was teaching an early-morning class to a group of bochurim 30 miles away in Los Angeles, Rabbi Schusterman received a desperate phone call from his wife — she was feeling awful and needed medical attention. He drove home as fast as he could and raced with her to the nearest emergency room. Rabbi Schusterman sat in the lobby of the ER, praying for his wife’s speedy recovery, when just half an hour later, the attending physician approached him looking like he was about to cry.

“I’m so, so sorry,” the doctor said. “We did everything we could….”

Rochel Leah, just 36 years old, had suddenly passed, leaving behind a stunned, devastated family, a shattered community, and a shell-shocked 38-year-old widower with 11 young children to care for.

“When someone else goes through a painful experience, we say it’s a test. But when we ourselves go through it, it’s often such a devastating tragedy that we can’t process it,” says Rabbi Schusterman, who today is in private enterprise and lives in Los Angeles with Chana Rachel, his wife of 35 years and the woman who raised his children. “For the first time in my life, I had to confront all the platitudes and teachings I’d been so confidently giving over to others, and realized how little I really understood of what I’d been preaching.”

For years, Rabbi Schusterman considered writing a book that would help others come to terms with incomprehensible tragedy and misfortune and find the inner wherewithal to move forward. He’s finally sharing the hard-earned insight and wisdom culled from his own long and formidable journey in his raw, honest, and often wrenching account, Why G-d Why? How to Believe in Heaven When It Hurts Like Hell, which he says is “a book for the broken-hearted. If you’re going through a brutal, inexplicable loss or any form of tragedy, I wrote this book for you.”