Pain Is A Reality, Suffering Is A Choice

No one is immune from difficulties and challenges.

In response to the devastating news of his two-year-old daughter’s leukemia, her years of illness, and her subsequent passing at the age of fourteen, Rabbi Asher Resnick has devoted decades of study to comprehend and share the Jewish perspective on suffering and Divine Justice.

Pain Is a Reality, Suffering Is a Choice provides a deeply personal and profoundly human Torah perspective on some of life's most basic and essential questions. Drawing on his own personal experience and a wealth of classical Jewish sources, the author sheds light on the Torah view of many fundamental topics:

Painful emotions and anger at God

Maintaining a connection with the deceased

The World to Come and reincarnation

Grappling with difficult tests in life

Why painful things happen to good people

“A most remarkable work that only a most sensitive talmid chacham who himself lived through that harrowing pain can produce… The reader will gain great insight and knowledge from studying the deep and powerful topics that he presents — so thoroughly, clearly, and poignantly.”

Rav Ahron Lopiansky

Rosh Yeshiva, Yeshiva of Greater Washington

Rabbi Asher Resnick was born and raised in LA, and graduated from UCLA with a BA in Psychology. He received rabbinic ordination from Aish HaTorah and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem. He served as a senior lecturer at the Institute of Jewish Legal and Medical Ethics in San Francisco and at the Aish HaTorah Branch in New York.

He has been teaching the foundations of Judaism for over thirty years at Aish HaTorah in Jerusalem, as well as in numerous other yeshivas, seminaries, and kiruv training programs. As a close student of Rav Noach Weinberg, zt”l, he developed a special expertise in addressing fundamental issues in Judaism, as well as in bringing classical texts to life.

As a bereaved parent, Rabbi Resnick’s extensive writings on loss, difficulties, and trauma provide a sensitive Jewish perspective on coping with these fundamental life issues.

His website, JewishClarity.com, brings his expertise from over thirty-five years of teaching and writing to the wider Jewish world. It contains proofs of God and Torah, core philosophical and theological issues, accessible and meaningful messages for all of the Jewish holidays, teaching materials for the Rambam, as well as classical Jewish sources addressing painful difficulties and challenges in life.