This is the message that I took away from a story published in last week's Mishpacha magazine.
The story went as follows. A teenage girl becomes a baalas teshuva and goes to seminary. She comes away from seminary with the following take away. Before doing anything always ask Daas Torah. She finds a Rebetzin (married to a Rosh Yeshiva) whoom she adopts as her Daas Torah. This rebbitzen recommends a shidduch for her, a Baal Teshuva from another country. The girl is initially skeptical, they are worlds apart. The Rebbitzen says don't worry, he has good middos and is a good learner that's all that counts. With much trepidation she follows Daas Torah and marries the guy. From the start things don't go well. The clash of mentalities from different countries is overwhelming. The husband comes from a very patriarchal society and expects her to stay home in the kitchen and listen to him. She, living in America and can't deal with it. Finally, he decides that they are moving back to his country and she demands a divorce which is granted. Sometime later, the Rebbitzen (who pushed her to marry him) calls up and asks for mechila for pushing her into a disastrous marriage. The woman won't hear of it, this is what Hashem wanted and she came out of the situation closer to Hashem. Therefore the Rebbetzin bears no responsibility.
The message is clear, nothing we do matters, we are not responsible for bad outcomes. Hashem runs the world and everything that happens is his will.
As I have posted previously, I cannot live this way. It makes life into a joke. Why bother doing anything when all is from hashem and it doesn't really matter what you do?
The truth is that no one really believes this because when push comes to shove, in a medical or financial crisis, even the most religious people will move mountains to try to affect the situation when their hashkafa says your efforts are completely meaningless once you do basic hishtadlus. The reason is simple, it is almost impossible for people to deny cause and effect.
It's obvious that the outcome of what we do is not entirely within our control. But even the initiation of an action is conditioned by the circumstances of our birth over which we had no control. The real question here is why God would want to have things be the way they are.
ReplyDeleteThe message is that you should listen to the Rabbonim and their proxies, and even when it seems they were wrong, they're really right because Hashem is working through them and so everything they tell you is the best thing for you.
ReplyDelete