Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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It was all in the title

I hadn’t heard his name is decades. Rabbi Harold Kushner. Then this week, I read of his passing.

When I was in high school, I read Rabbi Kushner’s best selling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. The book that transformed him into a household name across America.

Rabbi Kushner’s book was his response to having witnessed his little boy’s short life of suffering, and then his premature death. The hardest pain of all, the pain of innocent children suffering.

What did I personally really know back then about suffering in the world? Barely having started life, and having been blessed with health and a good life, I knew nothing of real suffering.

Of course, I had my version of teenage angst, challenges and a teen’s interior attention and struggles.

I also had been blessed with a very dear childhood friend who sadly was born with a degenerative disease and thereby, although by a few degrees of separation, was exposed to some of the emotional terrain of chronic degenerative illness. Tragically, my friend, age 12, had died not long before I read Rabbi Kushner’s book.

Somewhere inside of me lived that question everyone at some point ponders, “Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People?”

Moses pondered this question. Abraham challenged G-d on this question. Habakuk the Prophet did too. As well as other Biblical and Talmudic personas and narratives.

Of course, the book of Job is entirely devoted to this question.

I had known about Job, but had not yet studied that biblical book or personality. Job’s wrestling with injustice in the world, the suffering that befalls him time and again, his friends who try to comfort him but whose statements ultimately ring hollow, was not yet a part of my Weltanschauung or thinking. I had not yet known that G-d responds to Job out of the whirlwind.

The famous Talmudic narrative involving Rabbi Akiva and Moses, in which Moses witnessed Rabbi Akiva’s gruesome death, the death of a saintly scholar, and Moses’ emotional recoil and questioning in his brief yet searing question to G-d: “Zu torah ve-zu schara? This is Torah and this is its reward?”

It would still be 10 years before I would read the life-changing The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, his brilliant treatise on suffering and injustice that reign in this world.

Death Be Not Proud by journalist John Gunther, whose title was inspired by John Donne’s eponymous poem, and other such memoirs centering on grief and bereavement — it would be years before I read them.

Truth be told, while my teen self found Kushner’s book compelling, ultimately I recall feeling unsatisfied with Rabbi Kushner’s explanation of G-d and of why bad things do happen to good people.

Yet, that book unleashed something. Specifically, the title.

On some level, I think the title of Rabbi Kushner’s book was the biggest contribution of all.

Years later I would find myself as a student in a class with the lecturer, a scholarly rabbi, addressing this very topic. He started off by saying, the real question is not why bad things happen to good people, but why good things happen to bad people. Bad happening to good people, he said, OK, one can live with that kind of Divine mystery. But seeing evil people soar and prosper? Now that’s nearly impossible to reconcile with a benevolent G-d!

That remark struck me and has stayed with me.

But it’s true, Rabbi Kushner’s question of why do bad things happen to good people, is, I think, universally pondered and asked by nearly everyone. By Rabbi Kushner titling his book with that very question, it’s as though he were validating everyone’s suffering and everyone for whom that question has, even fleetingly, ricocheted through their mind, as they, meaning all of us, wrestled with their own, all of our own, painful junctures or losses.

As is often the case, this one is a classic example of where the question is stronger than the answer, and more sharply, where the question itself might somehow paradoxically be part of the answer.

What Rabbi Kushner accomplished in the title of his book is to counter what Job’s friends attempted to do when they wanted to bring comfort to their grieving friend Job, yet couldn’t.

Instead of sanitizing or sugarcoating, instead of offering platitudes to people who might be faced with the paralyzing pain and enormity of suffering, with his book title, Rabbi Kushner offered a voice of alignment to millions of sufferers, a validation of their pain and questions in addressing injustice in this world.

By now I’ve read so much on what I first encountered in Rabbi Kushner’s book.

Some thinkers explain that what we perceive as good and bad in our limited world of perception is not as it seems.

Yet, all we can know is the world that we actually exist in, and children’s suffering is more than sad, it’s heartrending. It pulls at our heartstrings like nothing else, as well as at the fabric of our moral codes.

For me personally, I long ago came to subscribe to the philosophical school of “nistarot darkhei Hashem,” G-d’s ways are obscured, mystery, unfathomable, to us, his finite creation. It’s better left unexplained, rather than trivialized or diminished.

There are no answers satisfactory to our understanding.

There are times when there is no solace to the sorrow.

Just the grief of getting through.

Be it in silence, or in tears. Be it in expressing the emotion or silencing it.

One thing is certain, though, that grief and loss alters.

We may not have the answers to why bad things happen to good people, but we know, somehow, it changes us.

Even Aaron the High Priest’s famous two-word restrained non-response response, of “And Aaron was silent” upon being confronted by the calamity of losing his two beloved sons is actually then followed up by a conversation between himself and his elder brother Moses. We hear Aaron negate his younger brother Moses’ charge to Aaron to continue with his priestly mission that day. Aaron declines, essentially saying, how can I continue as planned after what has just occurred? Moses concedes to Aaron.

Aaron accepted the unfathomable, even surrendered to it in his chilling and mysterious silence. Yet Aaron was altered, changed by his loss.

The question Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People will continue to be asked as long as there are human beings around to ask it.

Rabbi Kushner offered his validation and empathy in asking this question together with so many millions of people around the world. He was nose’ b’ol, shared in carrying this burden, by sharing his personal, painful story.

Copyright © 2023 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


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