335 - When Bad Things Happen To Good People

When Bad Things Happen To Good People
By Harold S. Kushner
New York, Schocken Books, 1981. 149 pp. $10.95.

Rabbi Kushner wants to preserve faith in a good God, a faith threatened by evil. If God is good, why do bad things happen, especially to those who don't deserve them? Kushner doesn't really answer that question, but he offers a lot of wisdom about it. Above all, he refuses to blame God. God would deserve to be hated if responsible for the Holocaust and millions of other terrible acts of injustice and suffering.

But it is not only a matter of blaming God. A surprising number of people in this scientific age still blame themselves, feet guilty, think God is punishing them, when suffering comes. Kushner is persuasive in insisting on natural causation and the innocence of God. One of the strengths of this book is its rejection of the usual arguments "to justify the ways of God to man": free will, the educative value of suffering, trust in some larger purpose we do not see, etc. Such arguments contain grains of truth but are quite inadequate to explain and justify all the evils of our world.

But then what? Kushner is honest enough to acknowledge that his thinking leaves him with a limited God. Some chaos in the universe never yielded to God's creative order, and when earthquake or murder happens, God is as upset and angry as we are.

But how can we get along with a limited God, with a God who loves us, but who we don't know can protect us when the world burns up or freezes over? Indeed, if God can't prevent the terrible things that happen every day, what about our individual mortality?

We may go farther and say that in removing God from the causation of bad things, this book becomes part of the "acids of modernity" which have eaten away the bonds between a theistic God and the world. While not the cause of bad things, God can be in the results of bad things, Kushner affirms, by teaching us to respond with courage and hope and compassion. Or at least, if we respond in this way to such things, he calls it God's "inspiration." But other people might call it the result of loving friends and the stories of compassionate fellow-sufferers. If so, the process seems again a deistic removal of the divine, a contribution to God's increasing absence.

This conclusion is not Kushner's intention. He writes very well about how bereavement and tragedy may be used to strengthen faith and character and to find God in the experience of loss. He believes that religion may become stronger not weaker if we remove God from the causation of evil. He has responded bravely and positively to his son's death and without boasting he gives the reader a desire to respond likewise to one's own grief.

Also valuable are excellent practical suggestions for helping people to help others.
336 - When Bad Things Happen To Good People
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. To try to make a child feel better by telling him how beautiful it is in heaven and how happy his father is to be with God is another way of depriving him of the chance to grieve.

The book contains many nuggets of positive as well as negative advice. In this respect the book, which has been on best-seller lists for a long time, is deservedly popular.

But it also leaves us with the quandary already mentioned. Kushner is surely right about the will of God. I, too, am horrified when someone says it must have been the will of God that my own son was killed by a drunken driver. I want no part of such a God. But neither do I want a limited God. Western theology is going to have to do a better job in solving the problem of evil than Kushner has done. Perhaps the good Rabbi is telling us that we are faced with a growing need to revise the inherited models of Jewish and Christian theism.

Norman R. Adams
Norton Hill
New York