A Moment with the Rebbe: As a child, Mark watched a cat kill birds with cruelty, and it made him question Hashem’s kindness. Disturbed, he posed his question to the Rebbe.
Mark, a French Jew, shared his experience with the Rebbe:
When I entered the Rebbe’s room, the Rebbe said that he wanted to talk to me and offered me a seat. I was ecstatic that the Rebbe was giving me, a twenty-five-year-old, his precious time.
I posed a question that had been bothering me. As a child I once saw cat climb a tree and kill birds with cruelty, although he didn’t even look hungry. He did this since it was his nature, without choice. It reminded me of the Germans. I couldn’t see how this was good, and how to reconcile it with the posuk that states, “And Hashem saw all that He had made, and it was very good!”
I expected a deeply intellectual answer from this Torah genius. But as I spoke, the Rebbe looked at me deeply, and I felt that the Rebbe was asking my painful question together with me. When I finished, the Rebbe said, “You have touched on the deepest question of all.”
And the Rebbe immediately shifted to talk practically, how we need to improve the world, through leading a Yiddisher life: “And here quantity doesn’t matter. There are billions of people in the world, the Yidden are only a few million, and the frum are even fewer. But it’s important to remember that there are many more times the number of grains of sand in the world than grains of gold.”
(Teshurah Vichnin, Adar 5759)