When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“They sat there angry at God for having exacted His pound of flesh so strictly, but afraid to admit their anger for fear that He would punish them again. Life had hurt them, and religion could not comfort them. Religion was making them feel worse.”

A couple whose young daughter suffers a stroke and dies at college cannot resolve their guilt over the possibility that they lost her because they weren’t observant Jews, yet they also struggle with anger toward a God who would visit death upon an innocent. This tragedy serves not to bring them closer to God but to divide them further from Him. It exemplifies the problems that arise from expecting that God should reward and punish people for their actions. 

“I am offended by those who suggest that God creates retarded children so that those around them will learn compassion and gratitude. Why should God distort someone else’s life to such a degree in order to enhance my spiritual sensitivity?”

If tragedies and suffering are visited on people to teach them a lesson, but the lesson is obscure or makes no sense, how does this justify all that pain? If a parent punishes a child without explanation, the child learns not to obey but to despise the parent. 

“If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.”

The idea that God only gives us what we can bear fails in the face of those who break with grief, lose their enjoyment of life, become cynical, or otherwise cease to function as they once did. 

“To say that everything works out in God’s world may be comforting to the casual bystander, but it is an insult to the bereaved and the unfortunate. ‘Cheer up, Job, nobody ever gets anything he doesn’t have coming to him’ is not a very cheering message to someone in Job’s circumstances.”

Job’s friends, wanting to believe that God is all powerful and just, conclude that Job must be at fault, his punishment deserved. This input is no comfort to Job, who can’t understand why he, a good and pious man, has been so harshly penalized. The only other possible conclusions, however, are that God is unjust or that He is not all-powerful. Job’s situation appears to be an unresolvable conundrum, one that confuses the bystander and frustrates the innocent. 

“Blaming the victim is a way of reassuring ourselves that the world is not as bad a place as it may seem, and that there are good reasons for people’s suffering. It helps fortunate people believe that their good fortune is deserved, rather than being a matter of luck. It makes everyone feel better—except the victim, who now suffers the double abuse of social condemnation on top of his original misfortune.”

When others suffer tragically, we cringe at how fate might do the same to us. To reassure ourselves, we decide that the victim made mistakes we’d never make, and those mistakes were the cause of his misfortune. In short, if we suffer from bad fortune, we blame life; if someone else suffers from bad fortune, we blame them. 

“If anything, we find proof of God precisely in the fact that laws of nature do not change.”

It’s the orderliness of things around us that obey precise and reliable laws and not some sort of mass chaos that suggests an orderly and rational Creator. Gravity always works the same for everyone, both good and bad, a fact that tempts us to erroneously impute a rigorous fairness to nature’s laws as well. 

“I don’t believe that an earthquake that kills thousands of innocent victims without reason is an act of God. It is an act of nature. Nature is morally blind, without values. It churns along, following its own laws, not caring who or what gets in the way. But God is not morally blind. I could not worship Him if I thought He was.”

If God made exceptions to the laws of Nature on behalf of those He favored and wished to protect, soon the good people would be jumping out of skyscraper windows just to avoid waiting for the elevator to the street, or they’d walk across traffic while cars swerved and missed them, striking each other but never them. 

“Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.”

Passing a kidney stone or giving birth are the two most intense physical pains, but passing the stone is an ugly necessity, whereas the birth is a beautiful and meaningful moment. How we interpret pain makes all the difference.

“The ‘image of God’ in us permits us to say No to instinct on moral grounds. We can choose not to eat even though we are hungry. We can refrain from sex even when our instincts are aroused, not because we are afraid of being punished, but because we understand the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a way that no other animal can. The whole story of being human is the story of rising above our animal nature, and learning to control our instincts.”

When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they became distinctly different from the other animals, both ennobled and chastened by their new understanding of life’s moral dilemmas. Armed with that awareness, they could venture out into the world seeking not merely sustenance and survival but goodness and rightness. This is a vastly different quest than that of most animals; it has divinity in it tempered with human frailty, and the results throughout history have been both good and bad. 

“Only humans in their work have to worry about choosing a career, keeping a job, getting along with the boss. Only humans have to weigh the pros and cons of doing something that may be illegal or unethical to keep a job or make a sale.”

The complexities of human life extend to the work people must do to earn their food and shelter. This is a process much more complex than that faced by animals, who don’t carry the burden of ethical decisions when they hunt for sustenance. Only people have the knowledge of good and evil; only they carry that burden into their workday lives. 

“To try to explain the Holocaust, or any suffering, as God’s will is to side with the executioner rather than with his victim, and to claim that God does the same.”

If such disasters are God’s will, why would anyone worship Him? The Jews are supposed to be God’s Chosen; why would He want to annihilate them? Theological excuses for such acts quickly become untenable. For Kushner, the Holocaust and other such disasters aren’t caused by God but by people of free will, and those acts offend God as much as they offend good people. 

“I will insist that every adult, no matter how unfortunate a childhood he had or how habit-ridden he may be, is free to make choices about his life. If we are not free, if we are bound by circumstances and experiences, then we are no different from the animal who is bound by instinct.”

If Hitler had no choice but to issue orders that led to the annihilation of millions, then he can’t be considered morally culpable. Everyone suffers stresses and constraints, but if they have no choice at all in their actions, the horrific things they do will be met with little more than shrugs. 

“One of the worst things that happens to a person who has been hurt by life is that he tends to compound the damage by hurting himself a second time. Not only is he the victim of rejection, bereavement, injury, or bad luck; he often feels the need to see himself as a bad person who had this coming to him, and because of that drives away people who try to come close to him and help him.”

People in pain or grief often struggle with guilt, supposing that their misfortune might somehow be their fault. Regardless of whether this is true or not, a time of loss is a time when people need loving support from family and friends so that they can begin the process of recovery. Feelings of guilt can cause them to turn away from the very support that can help them begin to move on. 

“It is hard to know what to say to a person who has been struck by tragedy, but it is easier to know what not to say. Anything critical of the mourner (‘Don’t take it so hard,’ ‘Try to hold back your tears, you’re upsetting people’) is wrong. Anything which tries to minimize the mourner’s pain (‘It’s probably for the best,’ ‘It could be a lot worse,’ ‘She’s better off now’) is likely to be misguided and unappreciated. Anything which asks the mourner to disguise or reject his feelings (‘We have no right to question God,’ ‘God must love you to have selected you for this burden’) is wrong as well.”

People who are grieving are in no mood to hear a lecture or have their behavior corrected. They need sympathy; they need to know they’re still loved; they don’t need instructions on how to put up with their loss. 

“An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But an excessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem and perhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.”

If a person does something that hurts someone else, it’s appropriate for that person to feel guilt and try to make amends. If, however, the person assumes blame for something he or she had no hand in, the guilt is misplaced and has no real outlet, and the person suffers a loss of self-confidence. 

“Getting angry at ourselves makes us depressed. Being angry at other people scares them away and makes it harder for them to help us. Being angry at God erects a barrier between us and all the sustaining, comforting resources of religion that are there to help us at such times. But being angry at the situation, recognizing it as something rotten, unfair, and totally undeserved, shouting about it, denouncing it, crying over it, permits us to discharge the anger which is a part of being hurt, without making it harder for us to be helped.”

Anger is a hard feeling to manage, especially when it comes from painful losses that involve the actions of multiple people. In effect, a lot of people are to blame or could have done better, and trying to resolve all those responsibilities can become an impossible struggle. Still, the anger is there and needs a target; for Kushner, the best one to aim at is the entire situation, in all its complexity and with all its tangled frustrations. Acknowledging anger in this way avoids harm to worthwhile relationships and reduces the chance that we will neglect or harm ourselves. 

“Anguish and heart-break may not be distributed evenly throughout the world, but they are distributed very widely. Everyone gets his share. If we knew the facts, we would very rarely find someone whose life was to be envied.”

We sometimes feel jealousy toward those who seem lucky or blessed. Each of them, however, has had her or his share of misfortune. Were we to look carefully at their life histories, we might discover that they are no better off than we are. 

“We cannot ask God to go back and rewrite the past. Neither, as we have suggested already, can we ask God to change laws of nature for our benefit, to make fatal conditions less fatal or to change the inexorable course of an illness."

If God granted every request, everyone prayed for would recover from disease and injury and no one would ever die. That this doesn’t happen suggests to some that the supplicant simply worded the request wrongly and that God is a mindless bureaucrat who only cares about proper form, or the request was denied for arbitrary reasons and God is uncaring. Instead, Kushner argues that asking God to rewrite history or alter the laws of nature for our benefit takes prayer too far. 

“The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem."

Prayers for a miracle tend not to be answered, suggests Kushner, while prayers for the fortitude to cope with challenges are often fulfilled. 

“I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron’s life and death than I would ever have been without it. And I would give up all of those gains in a second if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, and be what I was fifteen years ago, an average rabbi, an indifferent counselor, helping some people and unable to help others, and the father of a bright, happy boy. But I cannot choose."

For Kushner, the agony of losing a child outweighs any possible benefit to society from his son’s death. Kushner would give back his bestselling book and his renown if his son could be alive and healthy.

“I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom.”

Kushner believes God’s powers aren’t unlimited—or at least that God created a universe, and gave powers of free will to humans, that he will not micromanage—and therefore blaming God for our misfortunes makes no sense. At the very least, God isn’t punishing us for our mistakes. 

“Love is not the admiration of perfection, but the acceptance of an imperfect person with all his imperfections, because loving and accepting him makes us better and stronger.”

We love God not because He is perfect or awesome but because He has created the marvelous universe for us to enjoy, and He represents our best selves. To love God, and, for that matter, anyone, despite suffering from their actions or neglect, is the highest form of love, something God cannot insist on but can only receive as a gift given freely. 

“Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?”

When we forgive others who have hurt us, we can love them again. Likewise, when we forgive God for not giving us the universe we wanted or the freedom from tragedy that we needed, we can re-establish our connection to Him. This ability is, in many ways, a godlike power that gives us the means to re-engage with life and begin again to live joyfully and meaningfully.