I’m grateful that I finally took the time to study Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice

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very attempt to comprehend the loss of the Beis Hamikdash confronts an inherent difficulty: The Churban took place over 2,000 years ago, and there is no one alive who ever saw the Beis Hamikdash or experienced the powerful emotions that accompanied aliyas haregel. By contrast, there are those still living who went through the Holocaust, and many have recorded their memories for future generations.

Baby boomers like myself can still remember an America in which people did not despise one another; an America in which politics was a subject, not the only subject; an America in which friendships and relationships were not subject to a litmus test of political affiliation. Obviously, I’m citing historical memory totally incommensurate with the loss created by the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash, but the example brings home how far we are from being able to grasp what we are missing in the absence of the Temple.

Rav Reuven Leuchter writes, “[T]he essence of Churban HaBayis is not a private tragedy but a universal one. The Churban caused the Shechinah to be without a fixed makom, dwelling place, in the world, and thereby stripped the entire world of kedushah (holiness) and spiritual elevation.”

We intuitively recognize that the world in which we live is not that which Hashem intended. But what that world might actually look like or how we can possibly get from the present world to that of Mashiach and a third Beis Hamikdash is beyond our imagination.

AS I MENTIONED LAST WEEK, I have tried in recent years to overcome the lack of historical memory of that which was lost with the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash by recourse to Holocaust literature. This year, however, I have chosen an alternative path during the Three Weeks — i.e., delving into a work on aveilus by Rabbi Asher Resnick, Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice: Grappling with Divine Justice (Mosaica Press).

That solution is, admittedly, imperfect on many levels. Individual aveilus and the aveilus of the klal differ in many fundamental respects. The pain of the loss of a loved one lies in large part in the very clarity of the loved one from whom we have been forcibly separated by death. We have no trouble conjuring up the image of the person whom we are mourning or expressing what they meant to us. With respect to the Beis Hamikdash, our difficulty is just the opposite — a lack of clarity about the nature of our loss.

There is another major difference, as Rabbi Resnick points out. When individuals suffer yissurim at any level, there are multiple possible explanations for those yissurim mentioned in our sources. Yes, they can be a punishment. But they can also be a form of kapparah to purify a soul so that it can attain a closer degree of closeness to HaKadosh Baruch Hu in Olam Haba. Other times, the yissurim are designed to bring out a particular strength from potential to actuality. And in other cases, to point to areas in need of improvement.

But when it comes to calamities affecting the entire klal, such as exile, there is only one explanation offered. Those yissurim are a punishment for abandoning our relationship with Hashem and turning from observance of His Torah. The specific failure might remain obscure, as when the Navi asked, “Al mah avdah ha’Aretz — Why was the Land lost...?” (Yirmiyahu 9:11), but the answer lies in the realm of a collective failure.

Yet however imperfect the correlation between individual aveilus and collective aveilus, I’m grateful that I finally took the time to study Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice. And that gratitude has nothing to do with the topic being a new one for me. Over a decade ago, I had the privilege of adapting into print, along with Rabbi Jeremy Kagan, a series of powerful lectures delivered by Rav Yitzchok Kirzner ztz”l, after he learned that he had been stricken with a form of the dreaded disease that ultimately claimed his life, and published by ArtScroll as Making Sense of Suffering.

I first met Rabbi Resnick while working on my biography of Rav Noach Weinberg. I quickly recognized him as a person of rare depth, and asked him, as a close talmid of Reb Noach, to be my reader on all matters connected to Reb Noach’s thought. I did not know at the time that Reb Asher and his wife had lost a daughter, Ruchama Rivka, at the age of 14, after a 12-year battle with leukemia. But neither was I surprised when I learned about his loss. His seriousness and thoughtfulness made clear that he was not a person who has skated through life oblivious to challenges.

Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice can truly be described as a comprehensive treatment of every aspect of the subject of suffering and loss, including such related topics as Olam Haba, bitachon, cheshbon hanefesh, and gilgulim. Rabbi Resnick brings a wealth of material, from the original sources in Tanach and Gemara to the Rishonim, to the great medieval thinkers, such as Maharal and Ramchal, to modern thinkers, including Rav Yerucham Levovitz, Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, and Rav Avigdor Miller among many, and finally personal testimonies of contemporaries who have faced loss and suffering. The relevant passages are quoted at length, in fluent translations, so that the reader can grasp the full flavor of what is being said on his own.

As befits one who has himself experienced the loss of a child, Rabbi Resnick writes with great sensitivity about the welter of emotions that confront the believer in Divine justice and Hashem’s love in the face of overwhelming loss. Rav Yosef Leib Bloch writes in Shiurei Daas of man’s advantage over the malachim. Two opposing feelings are able to exist within a human heart at the same time. A person has the ability to feel pain to the point of crying and wailing, and, even so, to be filled with simchah. Avraham Avinu on the way to the Akeidah is a classic example. As the Midrash relates, he was simultaneously crying over the imminent loss of his son Yitzchak and rejoicing over fulfilling the horrible test imposed upon him.

The Torah does not deny the feelings of pain experienced upon the loss of a loved one, and even condemns one who fails to mourn properly as cruel and lacking in fundamental humanity. Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik distinguishes between two stages in the mourning process. Prior to burial, aninus, one gives vent to a howl of despair. In that state of fright and confusion upon the confrontation with death, a person lacks the intellectual clarity to perform positive mitzvos with the requisite intent. After interment, however, begins the next stage of mourning, aveilus, in which a person gains sufficient control over his emotions to carry on and to proclaim, with the recitation of Kaddish, his belief in the ultimate establishment of Hashem’s kingdom.

The sermons of the Piaseczna Rebbe, Rav Kalonymous Kalman Shapiro, in the Warsaw Ghetto, published posthumously as Aish Kodesh, carry on a tradition of “arguing” with Hashem, going back to Avraham Avinu’s pleas for the people of Sedom. The key, Rabbi Resnick explains, quoting Rav Yitzchok Kirzner, is that questions be asked to Hashem and not against Him. When facing a challenge, the latter counsels, don’t ask, “Would I have chosen this for myself?” but rather, “Now that I need to deal with his, how will it help me to grow, and thus prepare me for Olam Haba?”

By sharing out pain, and even confusion in the face of suffering, Rav Kirzner suggests, a person builds bonds of trust with Hashem and brings Him into his life more deeply than he could by intellectual means alone.

The Gemara in Berachos (5a) instructs one faced with yissurim to be mefashfeish b’maasav — examine his deeds. In Rabbi Resnick’s chapter on how to conduct that examination, I found at least a hint to one means of rediscovering the awareness of kedushah lost with the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash. That kedushah is found in the Divine soul that Hashem breathed into each and every one of us.

Paying attention to yissurim as messages from Hashem may be one of the most important determinants of one’s status in Olam Haba. Yet the baalei mussar go to great lengths to emphasize that the examination of one’s deeds should not cause one to feel lowly and worthless, for if a person does so, he will despair and become, in the words of Rav Aharon Kotler, “lower and lower.”

Rather, Rav Wolbe writes in Alei Shur, “the beginning of all personal work is to feel the elevation of man.” He then quotes the great Mirrer Mashgiach, Rav Yerucham Levovitz, who used to say, “Woe to the person who doesn’t recognize his spiritual faults, because he doesn’t know what to repair. But even more pitiable is the one who doesn’t recognize his spiritual strengths, because he is ignorant of the tools that will allow him to work on himself in any way.”

Nesivos Shalom quotes Yesod Ha’Avodah to the effect that no two people have ever been the same since the beginning of Creation until now, and similarly no two people have ever had the same task to repair the world. We each have a unique mission, and Hashem seeks something unique from each of us. Accepting yissurim and acting upon them to examine oneself is first and foremost a recognition of Hashem’s Hashgachah Pratis over every aspect of existence. And that recognition of Hashem’s direct involvement in every aspect of our lives, in turn, goes hand in hand with understanding that each of us has a unique mission in life.

In the end, no approbation I can give to Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice, can carry more weight than Rav Aaron Lopiansky’s haskamah. He writes of Rabbi Resnick’s immersion in the Torah of suffering as a consequence of the loss of his daughter, and describes the result of that immersion as “a most remarkable work, that only a most sensitive talmid chacham — who has himself lived through that harrowing pain — could produce.”

Will the sefer serve to deepen my appreciation of the loss of the Beis Hamikdash? We’ll see. But of one thing I am sure. The issues raised and delved into in such depth are ones that each of us will have to confront at some point in our lives.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)