Reply To: Gleaning Emunah from amidst pain and confusion

Amen!

Oddly enough this was about me having gleaned emunah from the situation. It was a friend’s divorce. There was some very horrific behavior on the part of one side but many people I had trusted got involved in some dirty ploys. I can’t write the story because of the responses I know it will generate. But so many people were fed so many lies that it destroyed one man’s reputation and destroyed the children’s trust in authority and family ties. It was so painful.

And this is not about divorce, and sides, and bias, and “how do I know” blah blah blah. This is about having your emunah crushed when what you see in front of you is INDISPUTABLE, and how to move forward.

My pain and confusion came from seeing things with my own eyes, knowing I needed to judge favorably, but not having a teeny tiny opening of favor to judge on. One example, (benign demonstrative example) someone who is a big advocate for abused kids whom I have always trusted to be “straight” made very damaging phone calls to people regarding information I knew FIRST HAND to be a lie. I was so broken. It really shook me up and challenged my trust. I couldn’t shake what I saw and heard with my own self. (I was one of a group who witnessed these types of things and we all suffered. We felt like little kids who were just told their parents were really king pins in a drug ring. Shocked and abandoned)

I had to resolve this issue of not finding favor. I couldn’t just accept, but I couldn’t come up with ANY other scenarios.

What I finally found out was that there was false information being disseminated and that people really, sincerely believed that they were helping the victim and not the aggressor. The people who I thought were acting dishonestly, were doing so because of the information that was given to them. They really were sincere and really didn’t know that they hadn’t been given the whole picture. The advocate was making calls based on information she was fed purely because it was known she would respond sincerely and be trusted. Many, many people are walking around believing information that they don’t even know was false. They still assume it is true, but judge favorably, because they think they got the information from a reliable source. But the fact is, the information itself is false.

So I was able to see a glimpse of knowing that there is always another side. We know there is always another side. But sometimes it is SOOO clear that what you are looking at is THE story. That there is no other way to interpret what you are seeing in front of you. But it could be that you just don’t have a point of reference for what may have happened. It may be something you can’t fathom because of who you are and how you think. But it is there. And when life throws us painful curveballs and we cannot fathom that Hashem has any good reason, we cannot believe that a single shred of goodness can come from our agony, we need to believe with a whole heart that it IS true, but it is not in our line of vision to see how.

Now that I have lived thru and witnessed the painful agonizing process of seeing the unbelievable and thinking there could NEVER be an explanation, but learning that for much of it there was, I have to believe that this is true of everything Hashem does. I remind myself, when I am looking straight at that brick wall and scraping my nose on the rough concrete, I say to myself, “and just last year you thought so-and-so was lying”.

Not everyone has been exonerated. The honest truth is that there are some not-so-nice people in the world who put those good people in motion. But the good people, the people I relied on for support, can eventually be restored to a position of trust. And I will judge those not-so-nice people favorably knowing that even they may have a backstory.

And an extra perk from the whole miserable process is how hard it is to get me to accept ANYTHING someone says about someone else at face value. In many tachlis situations we hear the words and accept them, but judge favorably. Now I try to ask more questions, check out the facts if I need to. Nothing is ever as it seems. And it is ALWAYS for the Good.

Ein Od Milvado