On Faith in Bitter Times |
There is a concept so fundamental to Jewish thought that it appears in Mishlei almost as a throwaway line, a truth so obvious it barely needs stating: Lev melachim v’sarim b’yad Hashem — the heart of kings and ministers is in the hand of God. He turns it wherever He wills.
Donald Trump sat across from Iranian envoys. He signed a deal that leaves the centrifuges spinning, floods Tehran with billions of dollars, and tells the world’s most openly genocidal regime that its survival is not only acceptable but worth $300 billion in reconstruction funds. He called the Prime Minister of Israel a difficult man who should be grateful. He left Hezbollah intact in Lebanon. He did all of this while Mossad directors and presidents made their calculations, while generals argued and diplomats maneuvered, while all the great machinery of human geopolitics groaned and churned.
This is not a counsel of passivity. It is not a suggestion that we throw up our hands, say nu, Hashem will handle it, and go back to our Daf Yomi. The Torah does not ask us to be naive. It asks us to be wise about what we know and what we don’t. And what we know, from Yosef’s pit to Haman’s gallows to the ovens of Europe, is that the story is never over when we think it is over, and the salvation rarely arrives from the direction we were watching.
Let us begin with hakarat hatov, with gratitude, even now, even in a bitter hour. Because we are required to see clearly, and seeing clearly means acknowledging what has genuinely been........