Translation by Yehoshua Siskin
Approximately 4,000 women participated last night in a Mitchadshot (Women's Renewal) presentation on Zoom in which they heard Ephraim Rimel speak. Ephraim lost his wife Tzipi and his daughter Noam in a traffic accident from which he became disabled. He said the following:
"When this happened, I was reminded of something I heard as a young man from Rabbi Yehuda Amital: 'A good question is preferable to an answer that's not so good.' At the time, I thought this concerned a question in a Torah class. In other words, if the rabbi asks a question and you cannot come up with a good enough answer, it's preferable to just live with the question. But the rabbi was referring to life itself.
And now, for the first time in my life, I have to contend with a question that is more powerful than any answer I can find. I do not know why this accident happened. We are accustomed to ask Google any question we might have, receive a multitude of responses, and then scroll down until we find the appropriate answer, but in this case -- I can't find one. I do not understand what the Holy One blessed be He is doing here, and I definitely think that I could have written a different script.
But that was precisely when my journey towards rehabilitation began. From the moment I understood that I could never understand, only that I knew that I did not know -- I decided to do the very best that I could."
Ephraim recently married Ayelet Coleman, who lost her husband Adiel in a terrorist attack. "Whoever wants a second chapter, to begin again, I say you have to want to want. To exert every effort to try. Neither of us arrived at chapter two because chapter one was not good. We loved chapter one very much. Still, we do not run the world and, nevertheless, cannot allow the big questions to thwart us. Both of us lost so much light, it would be unfortunate if the world would also lose the light that can shine from us alone.”
