Our Thoughts Create Our Feelings

There was a "Lifelines" article in a recent Mishpacha magazine about a kalla, aged 30, whose wedding was scheduled for the blizzard-that-never-happened a year ago in New York.  The kalla writes about how miserable she was about the weather forecast, about her grandmother crying nonstop, how people told them to postpone the wedding by two days, and how the rav said no, you get married with a minyan if that's all you've got, and you don't postpone a wedding because of the weather.

The kalla, who was finally getting married after years of shidduchim, even expressed the thought that the situation with the forecasted blizzard was harder, in a way, to deal with than her years of singlehood.  It was at that point that she really lost me.  I can sympathize with someone whose planned-for event is ruined, or looks like it will be ruined, but when she makes that comparison and explains how it was harder (which didn't make much sense to me), I'm not impressed.

Interestingly, she writes that her chasan didn't care one way or the other.  If the wedding would be with a minyan of people, that didn't bother him.

Which goes to show that this, and many other events in life, are not objectively bad or good.  If the kalla and her grandmother would have had the same attitude as the chasan, they wouldn't have suffered.  The suffering was caused by their "awfulizing" the hall's cancellation of the wedding if there would be a blizzard. 

And the end of the story was, the forecasters were wrong (as they often are, no matter how authoritative they sounds) and the amount of snow that fell was nowhere close to what they predicted and the hall was open.

And G-d Has the Last Laugh

 

Yesterday, before the MONSTER STORM hit, with the predictions of it being the WORST STORM EVER, I was skeptical.  We have been subjected to dire prognostications in the past.  The media has a field day with it.  They love ominously announcing: WINTER STORM WATCH and updating us every few minutes.

 

But how many times does it pan out? I haven't done a study on it, but in my life experience, on many occasions the prophecies of doom do not materialize.  I get the feeling that even those hyping the massive storms don't quite believe in their own hype, but they hope that it will come true so they will be proven right.

 

In this case, they claimed that the NYC area would get as much as two feet of snow.  What actually happened? 6.3 inches or 7.8 inches (depending on the news item and the wind) of snow fell in Central Park.

 

When Hashem unleashes a storm, whether rain or snow, He shows His might.  Likewise, when Hashem withholds rain.  The weather is one of the few areas in which man has no control.  It would have been difficult if we would have had the blizzard they were predicting, and I davened that it should be much less than they said it would be. 

 

I thought, true, Hashem shows His might in a blizzard, but if Hashem makes it much less than they predicted, this would also put Man in his place.  Man can't control the weather but he thinks (or pretends) that he can forecast what will take place.  It's not like the meteorologists make it clear that this is an educated assessment of the weather patterns and things can change (because they often do).  They present their forecast as fact, and their forecasts are given names like AccuWeather to make you think that you can rely on them for accuracy.

 

So when I got up this morning and looked out the window, I could see that it was nowhere near what they had said it would be, and I was amused.

 

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