I appreciated the logic of those words but it did not assuage my pain. It offered me little comfort. I kept thinking of my daughter and the suffering that was about to engulf her.
Sure enough, when my husband and I broke the news to her, she fell apart.
For over a month she refused to walk out of the house. She could not face her friends. She did not accept phone calls. She felt she had been shamed in public – in front of her entire world. How could she ever look at people, knowing they would be whispering about her?
Can you imagine how she must feel? How will she ever make a shidduch again?
When she finally did go out in public, she couldn’t help but hear the whispers she’d feared, the insensitive comments and questions. “What happened?” people would ask her. “Why did he do this?”
My daughter didn’t have the strength to answer them. She would just run home and go to her room.
I have asked all those people who gave the young man such high recommendations why none of them mentioned his psychological and emotional problems. Surely those who knew him well and spoke on his behalf had to have seen (or heard about) the manifestations.
The answer I would always get was something along the lines of, “Well, you never asked if he had problems. We felt he deserved a chance at happiness and didn’t want to destroy it for him.”
Rebbetzin, how can I trust anyone after this? How can my sweet, lovely daughter ever again believe people who recommend a shidduch?
Since that tragic day I have spoken to parents in similar situations and all of them echo my feelings. We all have the same question: How can we trust shidduch recommendations after what we’ve been through?
On behalf of all those parents and their sons and daughters, I ask for some illumination. Please give us guidance. Tell us how we can ever trust again.
(Continued next week)