What do we do when the question remains unanswered?

There are questions for which faith does not give us an explanation we can honestly offer. Pain, loss, an unanswered prayer, a reality that seems impossible to understand. In such moments, quick sentences can feel very small beside the pain.

Moses himself begged to enter the Land and was refused. Yet in Haazinu he says: “The Rock, His work is perfect” (Deuteronomy 32:4). He does not say: I understood everything. He says that reality is larger than my understanding.

Faith is not a duty to call darkness light, and it is not permission to explain another person’s suffering. There are things we do not know. We are allowed to say honestly: I do not know.

But we do not have to let one point we cannot understand erase everything we have known, experienced and built. It is possible to remain in relationship even with a question mark.

Sometimes the deepest return is this: God, I still have questions. I am not waiting for them to disappear before I return to You. I am returning with them.

Can you bring even the unanswered question into your prayer?

Read in depth

They tell of a student who came to his rabbi after going through a very difficult period. He did not come to ask a halachic question or to seek practical advice. He came with one question that had not given him peace for months: “Rabbi, why?”

At first the rabbi tried to understand what he meant, but the student stopped him and said: “I do not want to hear now that everything is for the good. I know that sentence. I also do not want anyone to explain to me that one day I will understand. Maybe I will and maybe I will not. I want to know one simple thing: how do you continue to believe when you do not understand?”

The rabbi was silent for a long time. Then he took a white sheet of paper, drew a small black dot on it, and placed it in front of the student. “What do you see?”

“A black dot.”

“And what else?”

The student looked again. “Nothing.”

The rabbi said: “There is a whole sheet here. Almost all of it is white. But your eye was caught by the one point you cannot understand. I am not asking you to say that the point is not black. I am not asking you to call darkness light. I am asking something else: do not allow one point you do not understand to erase everything you do know.”

There are moments in life when this parable sounds simple, and moments when it is very hard. Because some black points are not small at all. Some questions hurt. Some prayers did not receive the answer we hoped for. There is loss, disappointment, illness, fracture, and there are situations in which every attempt to offer an explanation sounds small beside the size of the pain.

It is precisely into that place that Moses enters in the Song of Haazinu and says: “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, righteous and upright is He” (Deuteronomy 32:4).

We need to notice who says this verse and when.

This is Moses. The man who stood at the burning bush, brought Israel out of Egypt, split the sea for them, ascended Mount Sinai, and heard the word of God. But he is also the man who begged to enter the Land and was not answered as he wished. “I pleaded with the Lord at that time,” and he asks: “Let me please cross over and see the good land” (Deuteronomy 3:23-25). The answer he receives is: “Enough for you; do not continue to speak to Me further about this matter” (Deuteronomy 3:26).

And now, at the end of his life, when he knows that he will see the Land from afar and not enter it, that same Moses says: “The Rock, His work is perfect.”

That changes the entire way we hear the verse.

This is not a sentence spoken by someone for whom everything worked out. It is spoken by someone whose own life still contained something he wanted with all his heart and did not receive.

Perhaps here begins the difference between simple faith and deep faith. Simple faith says: I believe because I can see how everything works out. Deeper faith says: even when I cannot see how something works out, I do not erase, because of what I do not understand, everything I know about the Holy One, blessed be He.

Rashi explains “The Rock, His work is perfect” to mean that even though He is mighty, when He brings punishment upon those who violate His will, He does not do so in a flood of arbitrariness but through judgment, “for His work is perfect.” On “a God of faithfulness,” Rashi explains that the Holy One, blessed be He, is faithful to reward the righteous for their righteousness in the world to come (Deuteronomy 32:4).

But here we must be very careful. The verse does not give us permission to stand before a person in pain and explain why the Holy One, blessed be He, did what He did to him. There is an enormous difference between believing that there is justice and judgment before the Holy One, blessed be He, and claiming that we know the calculation.

We believe there is a calculation.

We do not claim that the calculation is in our hands.

That distinction is fundamental.

When Moses’ brother Aaron the priest loses his two sons, Nadav and Avihu, on the day of the inauguration of the Mishkan, the Torah describes his response in only two words: “And Aaron was silent” (Leviticus 10:3).

The Torah does not say that Aaron understood everything. It does not say it did not hurt. It does not even say he had words.

“And Aaron was silent.”

There is a silence that is emptiness, and there is a silence that comes from realizing that there are moments when our words are too small.

This is especially important for believing people. Sometimes we think that every question of faith requires an immediate answer. Someone tells us of a tragedy, and within thirty seconds there is already someone explaining why it happened. Maybe because of this, maybe to awaken that, maybe because the Holy One, blessed be He, wanted such and such.

But who gave us Heaven’s accounting ledger?

Job underwent terrible suffering, and his friends tried to explain the account to him. They were convinced that if there is suffering, they could construct a theology that explains it. At the end of the book, the Holy One, blessed be He, says to Eliphaz: “My anger is kindled against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken correctly about Me as My servant Job has” (Job 42:7).

That is a verse that should frighten us before we explain to another person why he is suffering.

Sometimes faith is not the ability to answer every question.

Sometimes faith is the ability to say honestly: I do not know.

But if I do not know, what do I lean on?

Here lies the depth of “the Rock.”

Moses does not begin by saying only “His work is perfect.” He calls the Holy One, blessed be He, “the Rock.” A rock is something stable, something to lean on when everything around us is shaking.

There are things in life I know, and things I do not know.

I do not know why a certain prayer was not answered the way I asked. I do not know why a certain person went through what he went through. I do not know why something that seemed so right to me did not happen.

But there are things upon which I have built an entire life. I know there is a Creator of the world. I know the Torah is true. I know how much kindness I have received in my life. I know how many times I have been in places where I saw providence. I know that my mind is limited. And I know that the fact that I do not understand a certain thing is not proof that it has no meaning.

The problem begins when one question mark erases a hundred exclamation marks.

That was the depth of the white-sheet parable. Do not ignore the black dot. It is there. You are allowed to ask about it. You are allowed to hurt over it. Sometimes you even need to cry it out.

But do not let it erase the entire page.

King David teaches us that faith and questioning are not opposites. The Book of Psalms is full of questions: “How long, Lord, will You forget me forever?” (Psalms 13:2); “Why, Lord, do You stand far away?” (Psalms 10:1). These are not the words of a person without faith. These are words that entered the prayer book of the Jewish people.

What an enormous idea. One can be a believer and ask “why.” One can be close to the Holy One, blessed be He, and cry. One can say “I do not understand” without saying “I do not believe.”

Sometimes the question itself is part of the relationship. A person does not cry out to someone who is not there. King David asks the Holy One, blessed be He, because he is speaking with Him, not because he has left Him.

This may be one of the great messages of Shabbat Shuvah. We stand between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We make an accounting of our actions, but some people enter Yom Kippur with another account in their heart as well: questions about the year that passed.

Master of the universe, I asked. I prayed. I hoped. Why did it not happen?

I have no answer to give to that question.

But perhaps Shabbat Shuvah asks us not only to repent for what we did, but also to return to the Holy One, blessed be He, with the things we do not understand.

Do not wait until all the questions are solved in order to draw close to Him.

Bring the question to the synagogue too.

Bring the pain into the prayer too.

Bring the “why” into Yom Kippur too.

Moses did not enter the Land. The question was not resolved by his eventually receiving what he asked for. And nevertheless, just before he parts from the world, he is able to say: “The Rock, His work is perfect.”

Perhaps because faith is not a contract in which we tell the Holy One, blessed be He: I will believe in You on condition that I understand every clause.

Faith is a relationship deep enough to carry things I do not understand.

A small child can sit in the back seat of a car and not understand why his father chose a certain route. The fact that he does not understand the map does not mean there is no map. We too must guard against the mistake in which the human mind says: if I cannot see the logic, there must be no logic.

Maimonides teaches that our grasp of the Creator is limited precisely because we are human beings. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

This does not mean we are forbidden to ask. On the contrary, Torah is full of questions. But there is a difference between a question that says, “I want to understand,” and a demand that says, “If I do not understand, there is nothing to believe in.”

Perhaps this is our work on this Shabbat.

Every person carries a point he does not understand. For one person it is small; for another it may be the center of life. We must not compare pain, and we must not explain Heaven’s accounts to other people.

But a person can ask himself: has the thing I do not understand taken from me all the things I do know?

Did one question cause me to forget years of kindness? Did one disappointment erase a relationship of a lifetime? Because I cannot see the whole picture, did I decide that there is no picture?

“The Rock, His work is perfect” does not demand that you say: I understood.

It allows you to say something deeper:

I did not understand, but I did not leave.

I did not understand, but I kept speaking to You.

I did not understand, but I brought the question to You and did not use it as a reason to run away from You.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest forms of repentance a person can bring to Yom Kippur.

Not an answer to the question, “Why did this happen?”

An answer to a different question: what did I do with myself after it happened?

Did the pain close me, or did I manage to continue praying from within it? Did the question become a wall, or did I bring it into my relationship with the Holy One, blessed be He?

Then we can return to the man with whom we began. He asked the rabbi: “How do you continue to believe when you do not understand?”

Perhaps the answer is that there is not always a sentence that removes the darkness.

But there is a Rock to hold on to inside the darkness.

There are things we do not understand today, and perhaps things we will never understand in this world. The Torah does not promise that every question will receive, here and now, an answer that satisfies us.

But Moses, the man who himself stood before a closed gate, leaves us four words before he parts from us:

“The Rock, His work is perfect.”

Not because I understood everything.

But because I know that reality is greater than what I understand.

And Shabbat Shuvah may invite us to say to the Holy One, blessed be He:

Master of the universe, I have questions.

There are things that hurt me.

There are things I do not understand.

But I am not waiting for all the question marks to disappear before I return to You.

I return to You with them.