Have a Little Faith - Mitch Albom [44]
In the silent hallway, Albert and Sarah prayed for their child to live.
Hours later, she was dead.
It was a severe asthma attack, the first and last of Rinah’s life. Today, most likely, she would have survived. With an inhaler, with instructions, it might not even have been a major incident.
But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words—We couldn’t save her—told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn’t save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?
The next few days were a blur. There was a funeral, a small coffin. At the grave site, the Reb said Kaddish, a prayer he had led for so many others, a prayer which never mentions death, yet is recited on the anniversary of a death every year thereafter.
“May God’s great name be glorified and sanctified
throughout the world which He has created…”
A small shovel of dirt was tossed on the grave.
Rinah was buried.
The Reb was thirty-six years old.
“I cursed God,” he’d admitted when we’d spoken about it. “I asked Him over and over, ‘Why her? What did this little girl do? She was four years old. She didn’t hurt a soul.’”
Did you get an answer?
“I still have no answer.”
Did that make you angry?
“For a while, furious.”
Did you feel guilty cursing God—you, of all people?
“No,” he said. “Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.”
He paused.
“And that is how I began to heal.”
The night the Reb returned to the pulpit, the temple was packed. Some came out of condolence. Some, no doubt, out of curiosity. But privately, most wondered the same thing: “Now that it’s happened to you, what do you have to say?”
The Reb knew this. It was partly why he came back so quickly, the first Friday after the mandatory thirty days of mourning.
And when he rose to his lectern, and when the congregation quieted, he spoke the only way he knew how—from the heart. He admitted that, yes, he had been angry at the Lord. That he’d howled in anguish, that he’d screamed for an answer. That there was nothing in being a Man of God that insulated him from the tears and misery of never being able to hold his little girl again.
And yet, he noted, the very rituals of mourning that he cursed having to do—the prayers, the torn clothing, not shaving, covering the mirrors—had helped him keep a grip on who he was, when he might have otherwise washed away.
“That which I have had to say to others, I must say now to myself,” he admitted, and in so doing, his faith was being tested with the truest test there is: to drink his own elixir, to heal his own broken heart.
He told them how the words of the Kaddish made him think, “I am part of something here; one day my children will say this very prayer for me just as I am saying it for my daughter.”
His faith soothed him, and while it could not save little Rinah from death, it could make her death more bearable, by reminding him that we are all frail parts of something powerful. His family, he said, had been blessed to have the child on earth, even for a few short years. He would see her again one day. He believed that. And it gave him comfort.
When he finished, nearly everyone was crying.
“Years later,” he told me, “whenever I would go to someone’s home who had lost a family member—a young one, particularly—I would try to be of comfort by remembering what comforted me. Sometimes we would sit quietly. Just sit and maybe hold a hand. Let them talk. Let them cry. And after a while, I could see they felt better.
“And when I’d get outside, I would go like this—”
He touched a finger to his tongue and pointed skyward.
“Chalk one up for you, Rinah,” he said, smiling. Now, in the back of his house, I was holding the Reb’s hand, as he had done for others. I tried to smile. He blinked