Rookie Rabbi's First Call: Marriage Crisis! #shorts

I was staring at the phone. It was obviously not a cell phone cuz we didn't have them yet and I was waiting for it to ring. It was 9:00 in the morning. I was sitting and waiting and approximately, I don't know, 9:08, 9:09, the phone rang and it was uh a member of the shul, who's no longer a member of the shul, who told me that he was miserable in his marriage, that uh he wanted to divorce his wife and he needed some guidance and help from me to figure out how to how to make it happen. And um I hope this doesn't come across as insensitive in any way, but you know, being a rookie, excited to be the first day in my job, wondering if anybody was ever going to call me, I started to almost salivate. I'm like, "Wow, this is it. This is my moment. This is what it's all about. I'm now a rabbi." And I was pretty certain in that moment that I was going to save his marriage within the next, if not week, two weeks tops. We were going to figure this out together. He thought he wanted a divorce. He thought he was miserable, but I was going to show him no. There's another path forward and we're going to figure this all out together. And uh I mention that, first of all, it's a real example, but I it took me personally a long time to realize that uh two things are true at the same time. Rabbis have a very critical role and there are ways that we can be very helpful in crisis situations. There is a unique role that rabbis can fill that perhaps others can't, but perhaps the most difficult realization for me personally was that there are so many problems that we can't fix. There are so many puzzles that even if there is a solution, even if they can be solved, there's a limit as to what we can do and being able to sort of hold both of those truths together every day is uh is a big challenge. And it took me a while. It took me a really long time to realize that so often our role is to just listen and to be there and to help refer, but we can't necessarily fix. And uh to come to a place where we can accept that in a healthy way, for me, that was that took a while for me to learn that lesson. Can I ask you a cynical question?