Two months after September 11, we continue to ponder the philosophical questions engendered by the events of the day. How can people be so evil as to commit crimes of such gravity? And where was G-d on this day when we so needed Him? My rosh yeshivah said to me, “G-d has given man an unbelievable capacity to do evil.” We have witnessed this capability all too often. Yet I believe we are better served if we focus on the inverse: man’s incredible capacity for good.

In the midst of evil run amok, goodness prevailed. From our own offices at the O.K., a secretary and her husband went one night to the Javits Center, a staging ground for rescue support, and worked until nearly dawn sorting food and clothing. Someone I know had taken the train from his uptown Manhattan apartment to his office near the World Trade Center. The train was halted two miles away. On his four-mile walk back home, he stopped at four hospitals in an effort to donate blood. At each hospital there was a four- or five-hour wait, so long were the donor lines. More remarkable is the fact that this gentleman has always been terrified to give blood.

Goodness arrived from every nook and cranny. The New York Mets helped organize a relief staging area in the Shea Stadium parking lot, and rock stars participated in a mammoth fundraiser at Madison Square Garden. Average citizens of every race, creed, and religion turned out not to be average. They volunteered to help — by digging, or by organizing, or by opening their checkbooks. In some neighborhoods, Jewish women went shopping for their Muslim friends who feared to venture out. Our response to overwhelming evil was nothing less than overwhelming good.

What about G-d? I have a business advisor who is not a religiously observant man. He probably goes to synagogue the proverbial three times a year. He relates that a coworker had asked him how, after witnessing such a disaster, he could continue to believe in G-d. My friend’s response: After hearing of the miraculous escapes, the near misses, how could one not believe in G-d? Between 50,000 and 100,000 people pass through the World Trade Center each day. Horrible as the disaster was, there are so many who could have been lost but weren’t, because G-d was there.

By no means can this knowledge console those mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who lost family members. Or those of us who lost friends. But my friend is correct; G-d was there. Why didn’t G-d intervene to prevent the disaster? I don’t have the answer, but I do believe that He reduced its impact.

G-d was there — not with the perpetrators, but with the victims. The Psalmist says, “I am with him in travail” (Psalms 91:15). Our Sages explain that when the Jewish people are in exile, G-d is also in exile. In a certain sense, when we suffer, He suffers. On a universal level, when innocent human beings suffer, G-d is affected.

The age-old question “Where was G-d?” has been magnified in the past century, especially with the Holocaust. My non-observant friend answered the question so accurately, so beautifully. In the Inquisition, G-d was with us in the torture chambers. In the Holocaust, G-d was with us in the death camps. In Soviet Russia, G-d was with us in the prisons of Siberia.

And so we hold our heads high and respond that G-d was with us in the World Trade Center. G-d was with those who were rescued prior to the collapses: those who missed their train, who arrived late because they took their children to the first day of school, who came late because they took the time to say Selichos (extra prayers before the High Holidays), who were fired a day earlier. Indeed, how can one not believe in G-d, knowing that not a single Hatzolah member was killed?

But G-d was equally with those who did not make it out, because He is everywhere. G-d was with the victims, including our heroes: the firefighters, police, and emergency personnel.

There is a wonderful flip side to G-d’s descent into exile with the Jewish people. Just as we will be redeemed (we pray in the imminent future), so will G-d be redeemed along with us (as explained by Rashi on Deuteronomy 30:3), with the coming of Mashiach.

—Avi Goldstein