When Rabbis Can't Fix It: The Power of Just Listening #shorts

I remember a situation where a woman shared with me an abusive situation with her husband. Um but she didn't she didn't want me to reach out to my husband. It was an absolute uh absolutely uh confidential. Which really left me with very few options. At the time I thought as a young rabbi that if I could just speak to the husband, I could solve the problem. Of course, that's not true either. But um she spent an hour crying and talking to me and she said I couldn't share this with anyone. Um and uh about 6 months later she called me to tell me how she was disappointed she was that I hadn't followed up with her. And I was just thinking as a rabbi who was trying to fix the situation that couldn't be fixed. And when she left my office, I assumed I was done. What she really needed was someone she could talk to and someone she could cry to. And I think that that's something that you really learn as a rabbi and something that sometimes only a rabbi could do. That the role of the rabbi is simply to be there for somebody even if the problem can't be solved, can't be fixed. That uh simply being someone that somebody checks in on you. Someone who knows what's going on checks on you. Everybody says, "How you doing?" But "How you doing?" doesn't mean anything if you don't know what's going on in the person's life.