No small
question this, and if we put a contemporary spin on it we might rather ask the
following:
Why are so many
young people being taken from us before they are zoche to leave progeny in
their wake?
Why are so many
young married women being stricken the dreaded yenne makla?
And why are so
many Gedolei Torah being called to their justly deserved reward when we so
desperately need their guidance at street level in this world?
The answer, of
course, is that we haven’t a clue as to these or any of the other innumerable imponderables
that besiege us.
But the Chofetz
Chaim does.
Rabbi Yechiel
Perr, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshivas Derech Ayson, tells us in the name of Rav
Pinchos Shalom Briskman that the Chofetz Chaim z”l was once confronted by his daughter
with the very question that we posited above. His son-in-law, who was a big tzaddik and a
great talmud chocham, passed away at a very young age and his young widow
reminded her father that he had promised that her husband was a great tzaddik
and then she asked:
“Tateh, why did
he die so young?”
“There are
people, answered the Chofetz Chaim, who are equivalent to half the people in
the world. There are others who are
equivalent to a third of the world. And
there are still others who are the equivalent to of one quarter of the world’s people.
“What do you
want, he asked her? That the Ribbono
Shel Olam should lay waste to half the world?
“Instead He took
just one person.”
So why do
the righteous suffer anyway?
There are as
many reasons as there are permutations of the sufferings in which they are engulfed
and we aren’t privy to any of them.
But as the
Chofetz Chaim lets us hear, there are times that those sufferings may well beat
the alternative.
