When Bad Things Happen to Good People

When bad things happen, people often blame themselves and refuse help from others. Their doing so makes the bad thing doubly destructive. Even worse, many people believe the unfortunate deserve their troubles or God wouldn’t have permitted them to suffer.

Job’s friends, hearing him wail, “Why is God doing this to me?” (98), mistook his cry of misery as a request for an explanation. Their attempt to instruct him in God’s ways, including their conclusion that Job must have done something heinous, was unhelpful. Job needed to hear sympathy, not a lecture; the friends’ efforts amounted to “rubbing salt into an open wound” (99). To their credit, Job’s friends did show up; otherwise, he would have felt even more isolated. They also listened quietly to his sorrows.

When someone dies, surviving family members may wrestle with guilt. Kushner visits, on the same day, families of two recently deceased elderly women. At one home, the son regrets not sending his mother from their cold and snowy region to the warmth of Florida; at the other home, the son regrets sending his mother to Florida, lamenting the stress of the move on her weakened constitution. This kind of guilt about decisions made, or things unsaid, or caring actions not taken, “seems to be universal” (102).

People need to make sense of the world, and sometimes they believe their actions cause things to happen when in fact those things are unrelated. It’s unlikely, for example, that a sports fan’s favorite team wins simply because the fan wears a “lucky sweater.” This way of thinking can lead to people blaming themselves unfairly: “It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault” (103). As infants, we cry and someone fulfills our needs; a remnant of this attitude affects our beliefs during adulthood, so that we might decide that someone became ill merely because we despised them. Also, when a parent in a bad mood scolds a child, the child may conclude the bad mood is her fault, and this type of guilt can distort the child’s sense of self.

Kushner relates the story of Bob, whose family becomes increasingly burdened with the care of Bob’s aging mother. At last they decide to place her in a nursing home. Attending a religious service shortly thereafter, Bob hears a sermon that condemns the young for not caring for their parents; Bob, feeling anger and guilt, has a disastrous visit with his mother at the nursing home. Kushner believes religion should teach responsibility to one’s family members but not manipulate people with guilt, especially about difficult decisions made in good conscience. Children, and sometimes adults, who lose a parent to illness or accident may believe that their parent left them deliberately. It’s appropriate to remind them that the parent wanted to come back, and that their death isn’t the fault of the survivor.

Children can become upset or fearful when another child dies. Grownups can explain to them that such things are rare and aren’t punishments. Also, people who are handicapped or crippled aren’t being punished but have suffered an unfortunate turn of events. Sometimes it’s appropriate to invite a child to chat with a person who is, for example, blind or missing a limb, as this “can ease the barrier of strangeness and dispel the fear the child feels” (111).

Adults also struggle with sudden misfortune. Kushner describes Beverly, whose husband leaves her abruptly, telling her he’s bored of her. Beverly visits her parents, who comfort her, but her mother asks questions about the relationship, searching for some mistake Beverly might have made. Beverly becomes angry and insists that, despite her imperfections, she didn’t deserve what her husband had done.

Fifteen-year-old Barry loses his mother to leukemia. His aunt tells him not to feel sad and says that God took her from him because He needs her more than Barry did. Kushner spends hours counseling Barry, who feels wrong about being sad, angry at God, and guilty about not appreciating his mother enough. Kushner tells Barry that his mother died of leukemia and not from some fault in Barry, and that God didn’t take her for His own purposes or as a punishment.

When we suffer big losses, we can become angry but not know whom to blame, and this anger splashes across many people, including ourselves. One way to resolve this situation is to accept the anger and aim it at the situation rather than at ourselves, other people, or God.

Jealousy, which begins in childhood as siblings vie for their parents’ attention, thrives in adults who resent those who have better luck or fewer problems. Such envy alienates the unlucky from the more fortunate who could help them. Bad things strike everyone, and those who appear unscathed usually have their own losses and jealousies. As a young rabbi, Kushner would visit the bereaved to offer comfort, but they often rejected his attempts because he seemed so fortunate. When they learned about his terminally ill son, their hearts softened to him: “I was their brother in suffering, and they were able to let me help them” (123-24).