WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

(Rabbi Harold Kushner)

Stimulated by personal loss (his son's death from progeria - "rapid aging") and insights from his experiences with his large congregation and from biblical messages (e.g. the Book of Job), Kushner writes for those who have been hurt by life - by death, illness or injury, rejection or disappointment - and who know in their hearts that if there is justice in the world, or a caring God, that they deserved better.

Using the analogy of the trials of Job, when in our own lives we try to make sense of happenings around us - i.e. organize our worlds so that it is seen as rational and purposeful - we would all like to believe the following:

A. God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.

B. God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve, so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.

C. “Job” (i.e. oneself) is a good person.

As long as Job is healthy and wealthy, we can believe all three of those statements at the same time, with no difficulty. However, when Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, family and health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of the three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third. For instance, if God is both just and powerful, then Job must be a sinner who deserves what is happening to him. If Job is good but God causes his suffering anyway, then God is not just. If Job deserved better and God did not send his suffering, then God is not all-powerful.

It is our natural inclination to blame the victim so that evil does not seem so irrational and threatening (Jews vrs. Holocaust / the provocative dress of a woman leading to rape / if the poor worked harder, they would not be poor). This also comforts fortunate people into believing that their own good fortune is deserved, rather than being a matter of luck. Kushner suggests that God is not a kind of cosmic vending machine, into which we insert so many tokens (good deeds, etc.) whereupon God has to kick out what we feel is a just reward, i.e. God's end of the contract.

Kushner sees that the author of the Book of Job, if one of the three propositions has to give, surrenders (A) and accepts that God, insofar as we are concerned, is not all-powerful. In other words, there do exist pockets of chaos in which good intentions and 'justice' do not prevail, and then bad things happen to good people, that God Himself suffers in His inability to control. And one of these areas of chaos stems from God's own gift to humanity, i.e. the gift of freedom of will, of a person's ability to make decisions to do, or not do, things day-to-day. Along with the 'chaos' resulting from the sometimes unintended or unexpected results of our actions, if there is to be truly freedom of will then there must also be the freedom of natural results, whereby we and others learn from the results of our will.

The conclusion then is that we cannot have both an all-powerful God and real freedom of will. Kushner acknowledges a sense of loss at coming to this conclusion, as it was comforting to believe in an all-wise, all-powerful God who guaranteed fair treatment, happy endings, that everything was for a reason and like our parents did for us, everything in our lives would be make right.

The consolation for us is that if we can accept life's challenges as neither God's punishment nor in his control, then we can turn to our God for strength and comfort, in the belief of God's compassion and desire for our well-being. We can maintain our own self-respect and sense of goodness without having to feel that God has judged us or condemned us. We can be angry at what has happened to us, without feeling that we are angry with God. More than that, we can recognize our anger at life's unfairness, our instinctive compassion at seeing people suffer, as coming from God who teaches us to be angry at injustice and to feel compassion for the afflicted. Instead of feeling that we are opposed to God, we can feel that our indignation is God's anger at unfairness working through us, that when we cry out, we are still on God's side, and He is still on ours.

The metaphor is presented that God fashioned a world whose overriding principal was orderliness, predictability, in place of the chaos with which He started: regular sunrises and sunsets, regular tides; plants and animals that bore seeds inside them so that they could reproduce themselves, each after its own kind. Instead of six days, we now see that creation has taken billions of years so far, and is still proceeding - the creation of intelligent order from chaos.

As long as the process of creation continues, there must be the "stuff" from which it comes, i.e. chaos, and bearing in mind Man's relatively recent arrival on the scene, with his big brain and deterministic free will, then things will happen which fall neither within man's expectations nor the metaphoric divine laws of nature.

Randomness exists - so does intentional evil, as does poorly conceived/executed good intention. The evil of chaos as manifest in intentioned or random tragedies, is that it prevents people from believing in God's goodness. Perhaps God finished the main task of creation, and has left the rest to us. Until we perfect the world and ourselves, we will simply have to live with random effects, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.

Kushner also feels that God helps those who stop hurting themselves. The power of guilt in this regard is well known. Sometimes anger is a good thing, if used in the right way - the textbook definition of depression is anger turned inward instead of being discharged outwardly; and the results of depression in our lives include alienation and anti-social action which can well result in further cycles of self-anger and depression.

We cannot pray for the impossible, nor the unnatural, nor out of a sense of revenge nor irresponsibility, asking God to do our work for us. In dealing with tragedy and loss, the power of prayer and ritual can bring us closer to other people and the power of God's compassion that flows through them as they share fears and grief. Prayer, in this context, redeems people from isolation, and feeling abandoned. And through transcending the powers of self by calling on the compassion of God, we may be given strength and courage to bear the unbearable, and the grace to remember what we have left instead of what has been lost. From God may come strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritual resources and focusing our will.

The poet Archibald MacLeish's recasting of the Job story has Job answering the problem of human suffering, not with theology nor psychology, but by choosing to go on living and creating new life. Job forgives God for not making a more just universe, and decides to take it as it is. He stops looking for justice, for fairness in the world, and looks for love instead. In the moving lines of MacLeish’s play, Job's wife says:

“The candles in the churches are out,

The stars have gone out in the sky,

Blow on the coal of the heart

And we'll see, by and by ....”

Their world is a cold, unfair place in which everything that they had held precious had been destroyed. But instead of giving up on this unfair world and life, instead of looking outward to churches or to nature for answers, the couple look inward - to their own capacities for loving. "Blow on the coals of the heart" for what little light and warmth we will be able to muster to sustain us.

If we can become capable of forgiving and accepting in love an imperfect world which has disappointed us - of forgiving and loving the imperfect people around us - of forgiving God despite His limitations, then we may recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world.

Keith and Marnie Elliott’s “REMEDY” Site

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