Word Prompt - PUZZLES - Yehuda Pryce

“Puzzles” has the connotation of problems specifically designed to test someone’s abilities to solve them, and the confusion that results from trying to make sense of something. Both connotations can be appropriate for the Jewish lived experience in this world under the hashgacha pratis of Hashem.

I remember being arrested as a teenager and sentenced to prison for longer than I had been alive: a 24-year sentence, though I only had to serve a little over 16 years of it. My poor choices would banish me from society, evaporating the potential inherent to my youth. I wasn’t Jewish at the time. I was a gangster. But my life as a gangster, and, consequently, my tests, were a necessary part of the puzzle.

Eventually, I found Yiddishkeit and slowly underwent a process of teshuva. I began to see how each test shaped my being, leading me to eventually becoming a frum Yid married with three children, baruch Hashem.

During each of Avraham Avinu’s ten tests, during the freedom granted in America that has led to an aggressive challenge of assimilation, during the tumultuous times in which Am Yisrael struggled to survive, the Jewish experience has been shaped by puzzles that only an omniscience and omnipotent being can fully make sense of. Only He can bless us with puzzles that can unlock our potential and draw us closer to Hashem. May we merit that all the puzzle pieces of our history be brought together and all the good be revealed, individually, and collectively (speedily in our days).