My Virtual Reading Room

The first, and the most difficult, is accepting your helplessness. That is not an easy feat. Year after year, ever since our childhood, we cultivate in ourselves the responsibility for results, the ability to achieve what we want, to overcome difficulties and obstacles and to accomplish our goals.


And that is why, when we encounter something cruel, evil, painful, unfair, which we nonetheless are powerless to change, our entire being, our entire ego protests against this experience.

Our brain literally explodes with questions. How could such a thing have happened? How is that even possible at all? Who bears the responsibility for it? How can I punish those who did this?
And most importantly: how can I stop what is happening?


There isn't any way to do that.


The underlying source of all these brain-exploding questions is the profound inability to accept the very fact that this kind of experience occurred in your life, the very fact of its existence within your reality.

No matter how difficult it could be, you must find the strength to acknowledge that what has happened did happen, what is occurring is indeed occurring, and you are powerless to stop it. And while you spend time wasting your strength and energy on pointless self-flagellation, that will not help either yourself or those whom you might be able to help. You simply waste your energy on indignation and not accepting what is happening.

And there is a second, equally important, action you should take.

It can be explained as follows: ask yourself, earnestly and honestly, what can you actually do? Whom, how, and in what way exactly do you have the ability to actually help?
Maybe you have friends who need your help and attention? Maybe you have colleagues who now find themselves in the epicenter of evil? Maybe you can help people who are traumatized, people who are left homeless. Maybe you can provide moral support to a person who has lost hope.

What can I realistically do?

This is a very individual, very personal question, the honest answer to which depends on your real abilities, your profession, your position in society.

And most often, these are tasks which seem secondary, obvious, small, insignificant, and unconditionally lacking in romance and heroism.

But that is not the truth.

First, because even small deeds are better than empty self-torment about something which you, here and now, today, are powerless to stop.

And second, because the choice between good and evil is made at an everyday level.

The point of trial by helplessness is to understand this--if you are powerless to stop the evil, you have to do what you can realistically do, to help those you realistically can, in the way you can. To stop the evil is very often not within our power. But not to become a part of the evil is always within our power.

All of us have a difficult ordeal ahead of us. But this is not an ordeal in being able to prove you are right, the ability to insist on something you believe in, and not even in the ability to achieve justice.


This is an ordeal in the ability to remain human in the face of evil and insanity. An ordeal in the ability to follow a simple truth: people are more important than ideas.

There is a limit of human strength and abilities. We are unable to arrange things so that evil and insanity would not arise in this world. We are only empowered to arrange things so that this evil and insanity didn't pass any further than each one of us.

And that is enough.