When I was younger, life was fairly simple. Everything made perfect sense. For every question, there were prepackaged answers — neat, polished, and tied up with a bow. Even the bigger, existential ones — why the Holocaust happened, why suffering exists, why what we were doing truly mattered — had clear-cut explanations, complete with sources, mashalim, and sometimes even a quiet disbelief that anyone could still be asking.
Mitzvos were a kind of spiritual brownie-point system, with extra credit for pain and suffering. And of course, Torah was worth everything put together.
And then life happened, as it does.
Things became heavier, more complicated, more painful. Suddenly, the explanations that once felt so solid no longer explained much at all. They didn’t resonate. If I’m being honest, they mostly just frustrated me.
So I started asking.
I spoke to talmidei chachamim, rebbeim, mechanchim, and mentors — people I respected deeply. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put me back together again. Not because they weren’t sincere and compassionate, and not because what they were saying was false, but because I already knew the script.
Being very well learned, I knew what they were going to say before they said it. And I knew that their words would do nothing to calm the storm inside my soul.
My mind raced constantly. Davening, which had once been so rich and meaningful, now mainly consisted of one word: “why?” The mitzvos that once seemed so clear-cut and simple now felt as if they belonged to another galaxy.
And maybe the hardest part wasn’t even the questions themselves. It was what I feared they said about me.
Why couldn’t I just accept the simple answers? Why did everything suddenly feel so unsettled? What had changed in me? And more frighteningly — what was wrong with me? Was this a failure of emunah? Wasn’t I supposed to live with simple faith? Were my thoughts heretical? Was I an apikores?
At some point, in the middle of that confusion, I found myself saying words I had never said before, one Shemoneh Esrei after the next:
Hashem, I have no idea what is going on or why You are doing this to me. I know one thing — no one else can help me. I tried. You are the only one I can turn to. So I am begging You: You be my teacher. Show me the answers I need to find.
And somehow, slowly, He did.
Someone recommended a book I had never heard of. I clicked on a shiur I normally would have passed over. I needed to look up a quote in a sefer that had never been in my orbit. Two hours later, I was still there.
I began discovering ideas I could never have understood as a bachur — not because I wasn’t intelligent enough, but because they reached a depth the younger me simply wasn’t ready for.
They resonated with something far more real than the tidy explanations I had once relied on — they were true in a way that could be felt to my core.
My relationship with Hashem began to feel entirely different. Emunah was no longer just an idea I believed in; it became the fabric of how I experienced reality. And mitzvos slowly became less about earning reward and more about yearning for connection.
Over time, I realized something surprising.
The answers I had once thought were shallow were not always shallow at all. In many cases, they were true — deeply true — but they had been handed to me in a form that had never really been unpacked. The people giving them over were often sincere, but they had never needed to dig beneath the surface.
And so, when life demanded more of me, I was left holding answers that were true, but too thinly held to carry the weight I was placing on them.
That was deeply validating.
Even more so was discovering that the Alter of Kelm had observed this very phenomenon over a hundred years ago.
That insight changed something for me. It helped me see that my questions were not necessarily a disease or a sign that something had gone wrong. They were a form of growth — Hashem’s way of pushing me out of a childish understanding toward something more mature, more grounded, and more real.
That idea stayed with me.
It didn’t remove the pain of the questions. It didn’t make them easier. And it certainly didn’t guarantee that others would understand. But it made them far less lonely.
And maybe that is part of what the Seder teaches us every year.
The night most devoted to emunah is also the night most built around asking — the same things, year after year — because the deepest truths in Yiddishkeit are not meant to stay frozen at the level we first learned them. They are meant to deepen with us, to be revisited, re-asked, and re-lived as we grow.
This truth extends far beyond Pesach.
Maybe the questions we fear most are not there to push us away. Maybe they are there to bring us closer — to a deeper understanding, to a deeper connection, to a deeper faith.
Mordechai Penner.
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