When Bad Things Happen to Good People

The most persistent and meaningful issue people bring to Rabbi Kushner is “why do bad things happen to good people?” (9). How can evil exist in a world governed by God? Is He still good? Is He kind? Can He even exist in such a world?

Many Bible passages suggest that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous. It’s hard, though, for Kushner to agree with the parents of a daughter who died abruptly from a stroke that their failure to fast during the previous Yom Kippur must have caused God to strike down their innocent child. In the past, when news was hard to obtain, it was easier to believe in God’s justice, but today’s modern media—television, newspapers, history books—make it hard to overlook unfair tragedies. Bad people, who often flourish for a time like grass, eventually tend to suffer and die, while righteous lives develop slowly, like a palm tree that slowly grows straight and tall and survives for many decades. However, “Some good people die unfulfilled; others find length of days to be more of a punishment than a privilege” (18).

Perhaps God has His reasons for visiting problems on good people, reasons people aren’t in a position to understand. However, Kushner wonders, how can a disease like multiple sclerosis that slowly takes away a person’s ability to live usefully serve a good purpose? In Thornton Wilder’s book The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a rope bridge in Peru collapses and five people die. A priest who witnesses the disaster figures out that each of the five had recently resolved an important problem and was ready to move on. This premise might work with five people, but what about an airliner carrying 250 passengers that crashes, cutting off many good human beings from their work and caregiving?

Wilder later wrote a novel, The Eighth Day, that answered this question with the idea that life is God’s tapestry, and that people see it from below in its confusing "hodgepodge” of threads, whereas God sees it from above in all its splendor and perfection. The problem is that we can only guess that there might be such a tapestry. And there is still the question of how such a work of art can justify Hitler, for example.

Perhaps, like a parent who must discipline a wayward child, God inflicts suffering to teach a person important lessons that can “purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons” (24). It's a stretch, though, to argue that a successful young pharmacist who’s shot and crippled by a drug-addicted robber somehow had it coming as a lesson in humility. These arguments defend God more than helping the victim, and “not every painful thing that happens to us is beneficial” (28). Punishments with no explanation don’t teach any lessons beyond resentment toward God.

Maybe suffering is a test of our faith and resolve, and God only gives us what we can handle. For his part, Kushner doesn’t see what inner strength of his was being tested with a crippled and doomed family member, nor does he believe that were Kushner weaker, his son would not have had to die so young. Some people try to convince themselves that bad things don’t really exist: Evil is simply a lack of goodness, cold is simply a lack of heat, and darkness is a lack of light. However, people do die of exposure or trip and fall down the stairs in the dark. Others believe all will be made whole again in Heaven, but there’s no way to know for sure how, or whether, this wholeness will manifest in an afterlife. Such a belief can, meanwhile, lead to lassitude in the face of hardship and evil here on Earth. Perhaps God doesn’t send us troubles but, instead, sends us help in coping with them. 

In the Bible, the book of Job is a poem about why God lets bad things happen. It tells the story of Job, a pious and good man, perhaps the best of them, whose faith God tests by afflicting him with a series of misfortunes—house destroyed, children slain, farm ruined, boils on his body. Job argues that he is being punished more thoroughly than any wicked man. His friends retort that his complaints prove he’s not as pious as everyone thought. Job, insisting on his innocence, demands that proof of his wrongdoing be brought before him or that the punishments be brought to an end.

God appears and scolds Job, saying in effect, “How dare you challenge the way I run my world? What do you know about running a world?” (42). Job realizes the limits of his own knowledge and wisdom; relenting, he defers to God’s judgment. God returns Job to health and wealth and gives him beautiful daughters.

Three assumptions undergird the story: God is all-powerful; God is just; and Job is a good person. Because Job suffers mightily, only two of the three assumptions can be valid at the same time. Job’s friends, wanting to believe that God is almighty and just, conclude that Job must be at fault. They also feel “schadenfreude”—guilty relief that bad things have happened to someone else and not to them—which leads to the rationalization that Job must have deserved his misfortune. This idea resolves his friends’ doubts but not Job’s.

If we could compel God to give us our just rewards, then God wouldn’t be all-powerful. Thus, God may choose to mete out justice, but He doesn’t have to. This power certainly makes God great, but it doesn’t make Him good. If God hands out benefits to those who remain faithful to Him, He is rewarding not goodness but obedience.

God tells Job that running the universe is work enough, and He can’t always be expected to solve every little injustice. God relates His battle against the sea monster Leviathan, which, with all its difficulties, shows that God Himself has trouble vanquishing bad things. In this respect, God is good, but He isn’t all-powerful. Thus, humans who suffer misfortune ought to rail against its unfairness but not at God, who shares our anger at the bad turnings of fate.