“It says throughout,” the Rabbi said, “that they are blessed who bless us, and cursed who curse us. I believe our history has shown this is true.”
If there were a God, Frank thought, then that which has befallen me could not be random. If it were ordered, then, surely, I could determine a cause-and-effect relationship between my actions and my trouble.
But here, he thought, he committed the error of an egocentric theology. For could not and must not God’s objectives be different from his own? “Must they not differ?” he thought; and, again, “If I assign a reason to my trials, such reason beyond my comprehension, do I not, again, suggest myself, in my very punishment, important to God?
“But then, perhaps, I am important to God, but my happiness is not. Or, perhaps, my happiness is not, but my welfare is; and He, whatever power He is, construes the second more important than the first. Like a good father—or, for all that, like a bad father also.”
“A man,” the Rabbi had said, “a poor man, found a fine horse upon the road. ‘How fortunate you are,’ his friends said. ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘well, you never know.’ His son took the horse out to ride, and was thrown, and was maimed. ‘How misfortunate you are,’ the friend said, and the man said ‘Well, you never know.’ But the next day the recruiting officers came round, to press the Jewish boys. Where they would go to the Czar’s army to serve twenty-five years. But the man’s son was maimed, and so he was spared. ‘How fortunate you are,’ his friend said, and the man …”
“Yes,” Frank thought. “In fact, that is true.”