God Is in Our Resiliency
Where was God when … ? We ask this question through the most difficult times in our history. Rabbi Neil Gillman (z”l) of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, would ask this question of us as students on our first day of rabbinical school. Where is God in a cancer ward of a hospital? Where was God during the Holocaust? And in 2001, he added another question: “Where was God on 9/11?”
Each one of us has a unique perspective of that tragic day. I was a sophomore at Columbia University, a pre-med student studying biology, when murmurings spread through the classroom that there had been a plane crash just miles away. Minutes later, the towers came down, and our world changed forever. Just days before Rosh Hashanah, we again asked, “Where was God?”