We flew from Cleveland, OH to Portland, OR via Charlotte, SC a total of 5 flights (3 there and 2 back) and thankfully we came back alive and in one piece. That's the nice part; but others have taken equally long flights with as many takeoffs and landings and didn't survive. They were hijacked, their airplane crashed, their luggage lost. Why? "Wrong place at the right time." "It was their time to go; their time was up." "It was God's will." Perhaps it is all three.
Why does a woman get breast cancer in one breast and not in the other? Why does your car get a flat on the freeway and hundreds of others passing by in that exact same spot ride on to their destination in ease? The rain falls on good and bad people with the same impunity; yet somehow your garden gets washed away. Your basement flooded. Lightening hits your house.
"Life is unpredictable." "We are at the mercy of fate." Or worse yet—"God turned his face from us; He let it happen." In a book by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981). Kushner give his reaction to personal tragedy--the death of his son Aaron, from premature aging. This provoked a crisis of faith for Rabbi Kushner.. He wrote this book for people "who have been hurt by life", to help them find a faith that can aid in getting through their troubles, rather than making things worse.
"It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them what they deserve. By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable.".
Kushner outlines the various ways that people try to salvage their view of God and His orderly world. They explain that misfortune occurs because
Someone made a mistake, or failed in the observance of some religious duty.
God has a hidden purpose, or is making use of knowledge we don't have.
Suffering itself will turn out to be good for us.
God's purpose is in the grand design of the Universe (which is good and beautiful), not in the life of the individual.
Suffering teaches something, either to us or to those who see us suffer.
Suffering is a test.
Death leads us and our loved ones to a better place.
Kushner rejects all of these explanations. "All the responses to tragedy which we have considered have at least one thing in common. They all assume that God is the cause of our suffering, and they try to understand why God would want us to suffer. … There may be another approach. Maybe God does not cause our suffering. Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God."
Kushner attributes the orderliness of the universe to God, but holds that the ordering of the universe is not complete: Some things are just circumstantial, and there is no point in looking for a reason for them. Some suffering is caused by the workings of natural law. There is no moral judgment involved--natural law is blind, and God does not interfere with it. God does not intervene to save good people from earthquake or disease, and does not send these misfortunes to punish the wicked. Kushner puts great value on the orderliness of the universe's natural law, and would not want God to routinely intervene for moral reasons.
"Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people? That depends on what we mean by 'answer'. If we mean 'Is there an explanation which will make sense of it all?'… then there probably is no satisfying answer. We can offer learned explanations, but in the end, when we have covered all the squares on the game board and are feeling very proud of our cleverness, the pain and the anguish and the sense of unfairness will still be there. But the word 'answer' can also mean 'response' as well as 'explanation,' and in that sense, there may well be a satisfying answer to the tragedies in our lives. The response would be Job's response—to forgive the world for not being perfect, …to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all."
notes by Doug Muder (1997)
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