It is a long night.
I am waiting for the first light of dawn
To peer a lazy head beneath the cracks in my windows
And smile with rays of warmth.
Layla and I speak
About imperfections,
I told her once something that perhaps I should not have.
She is young.
She is vulnerable.
She is moldable.
I told her that G-d made everyone have different ‘imperfections’.
Some people have bad hearing.
Some people don’t see well.
Look- see?
Mommy wears contact lenses to help her see.
Some people are in wheelchairs
Because their legs don’t work.
Some people have a big nose.
They might not like having a big nose.
But that is just the way
They were made.
I told her about imperfections.
So that she knows that we live in
An imperfect world.
And just like parts of her
Are not visibly perfect.
Each one of us has
our own aspects of
Incompletion.
Yesterday, at bedtime, she told me,
“I don’t like Hashem (G-d).”
“Why?”
“Because. He does bad things.
He makes people sick.
He even made your eyes not work so well.”
I try to reason.
I use logic.
I remind her of her best friend in school.
Who made her? Hashem.
I remind her of her sister and parents and her cousins.
Her grandparents, her aunt and her uncles, her teachers.
Her gymnastic class.
Her favorite doll.
Her magnatiles.
Her play doh.
Her scooter and her bike.
“See- Hashem gave you all those things. He does good things, too.”
She is trying to internalize.
Categorize the opposing feelings of goodness and gladness, amid frustration and confusion.
“But he also does not good things. Why does He do not good things, Mommy?”
From the mouth of babes.
I do not know, my child.
I do not know the answer to your question that echoes within my own soul.
I may be all grown up.
A mother.
An adult.
But the same painful question torments me.
It is eating me.
In a world of disproportionate evil, I cannot fathom His ways.
I cannot answer her;
Because my own trust and belief are at war.
Just like hers.
I wallow in the sadness that her question evokes in me.
I feel I may drown in it.
An all consuming blackness, an endless hole
Of why and how and shock.
When we are hit
Time after time after time.
When bad things
Happen to good people.
When an ever Kind G-d
Does things
That do not seem so kind.
Yet we dare not question.
But inside my heart, I question.
I scream and I pound on His door.
Why?
How are we supposed to accept
Your burdens?
When will we reach
Our breaking point?
When will the true colors
Shine?
When will the morning
Come?
From the mouth of babes.
My faith is shaken.
But from the Hand of G-d
I pray it will be restored.
