Choosing a Rabbi ...

Perhaps we should not go to those who claim to have answers to all of the questions, but rather to a person who, when asked what the remedy for the entire Jewish people is, will reply: “I do not know!” My sandak, Rabbi Avraham Chen, wrote a very emotional book about his father, Rabbi David Zvi Chen, who was a great man in many ways and the rabbi of Chernigov, in Ukraine. In this book he relates how a young man came to his father to register for marriage.
While formally examining his documents, Rabbi Chen discovered that the young man, who was also a Torah scholar, was actually a mamzer. [Wikipedia: A mamzer "is a person born from certain forbidden relationships, or the descendant of such a person. A mamzer is someone who is either born of adultery by a married Jewish woman and a Jewish man who is not her husband, or born of incest (as defined by the Bible), or someone who has a mamzer as a parent."]

There was not a shadow of a doubt in his mind that this man was indeed a mamzer. It was not even a question.
He held the papers in his hand, and the young man, who realized that something was amiss, asked: “Rabbi, what about my match?” and the rabbi said: “It cannot be.”
The young man said: “I understand that there is a reason why this match cannot work, so what do you suggest I do?” At that point the rabbi had to reveal to him that the match could not be, not because the specific bride was unworthy of him, but because, being a mamzer, he could not marry at all.
At this point, the son discloses that eventually he found the young man sitting in the rabbi’s lap and both were weeping.  This is the kind of rabbi I am looking for. Rabbi Chen did not suggest a solution for that young man’s problem, because there was no solution, nor was he the kind of person who would contrive a solution for a person born of a forbidden union. But he wept together with him.