Q:
I have a question and I’ll ask it by quoting a famous philosopher who said, “All the wisdom of the philosophers cannot explain the death of one innocent child”.
A:
On this we say, that’s because they’re philosophers. It’s like someone who knows nothing about electricity, he cannot explain why if the wires are arranged in a certain way it conducts electricity properly, and if they are arranged in another way it will cause an electric shock or make a fire. If he didn’t study the premises he can’t explain it. The philosophers are lacking the premises.
One of the chief premises upon which we base our understanding of the phenomena is the knowledge that there is a World-to-Come. If you don’t know about a World-to-Come then nothing can be solved; everything is a mystery. This has been explained a number of times here.
It’s like the lobby of a wedding hall. A child who was never present at a wedding comes into the lobby and he sees people giving away their valuable clothing to a man behind a window and they get in return nothing but a little piece of cardboard. To him it’s so silly! And he goes home thinking how foolish adults are. He doesn’t know that there’s a banquet and afterwards everyone gets back their coats. If people don’t understand Olam Haba and techias hameisim, so when you have to surrender this poor jacket of flesh and put it down into the fulcrum of the earth, of the cemetery, it’s a mystery; he doesn’t understand.
When a little child passes away it’s not a misfortune. It’s a misfortune for the parents – the parents suffer – but he doesn’t lose. Because he passes on into the World-to-Come.
The Gemara says in the beginning of Mesichta Avoda Zara that Hakadosh Baruch Hu is מלמד תינוקות של בית רבן. You know what that means? He goes immediately to the best yeshiva in the world, where he has the best Rebbe. Hakadosh Baruch Hu Himself teaches that child. She goes to Beis Yaakov if it’s a girl and Hakadosh Baruch Hu is the teacher. You can’t get such a teacher in this world! Rabbi Akiva or Moshe Rabbeinu couldn’t equal such a teacher.
And in a short time they are given such shleimus, such perfection, that they never could have achieved in this world.
Which means for a little child before bar mitzvah who dies because of the accounts of his parents or some other accounts, it’s the very best kind of agreement that he could make. Because Hakadosh Baruch Hu rewards him for doing this service in the highest kind of way.
So therefore for us, who understand what’s doing on both sides of the wall – we know that this world is only a waiting room, and here everything is nothing but a preparation, and the true existence, the real happiness is only in the World-to-Come – so this is not a problem.
May 1974
