Ichabod's Kin
A place for politics, pop culture, and social issues

          Rabbi Harold Kushner died this month. His 1981 book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” was a #1 bestseller. He said he had been hurt by life and he wrote what he learned, hopefully to the benefit of readers.

          I felt the title was better than the book. I had a problem with the idea that what we don’t like is “bad,” and the notion that we are “good” people, whatever that is supposed to mean. Suffering, or the threat of it, is always there even in the back of our minds and right now living in a hail of bullets isn’t helping.

          But such is our illusion of security that the thought of being plunged into suffering is greatly suppressed. Add to that the illusion of immortality: why else dye our hair, cosmetize our skin, and jack up our bodies with implants did we not think thereby to cheat the ravages of time?

          Literature has tons of examples of the worst suffering—the Biblical Job being one; he was so downright-upright that God took a bet that he could stand anything and not lose his grip. Sadly, the risk was a lot worse for Job: Satan took everything he valued and everyone he loved, the advice he got from several knuckleheads was good for nothing and—spoiler alert–Job lost his vaunted “patience” and cursed his existence.

          Unlike real life, all ended well and Job got everything back plus a chance to gripe at God, who decreed that Job needed to shut up and take his lumps when need be and for whatever reason. At least Job got to ask, though a fat lot of good it did.

          Today people pray to “understand.” Understand what? We too can ask and complain, but the world is not arranged to suit us, and even if we feel we learn something from our suffering, we never want to go through that again, or wish it on our worst enemies. At best, there is time, maybe therapy, and some healing.

          My real problem is why good things happen to bad people. We know about the jerkwad Nazis who got their comeuppance at Nuremberg for war crimes but there were a hell of a lot who got away with it all and lived out lives of ease in places like Argentina. What about that? And what about the best of people who get the biggest kicks in the head and we know it’s not because they deserve it?

          In Job’s case, what else could be said but to suck it up? God’s big speech to him was no answer. There isn’t any. God is God, if such there be, and we are we. Apples and oranges. Take God out of Job’s story and it’s all the same: good people suffer; sometimes there’s no justice; and worst of all there is no answer. Besides, what answer could we ever accept or possibly be happy with?

          The answers Job got were largely in the form of questions, like, where was he when the world was made? DUH-uh! Job was left with, “What can I say?” Indeed, what could he say? He didn’t make the world, he just showed up, without asking to. Would another world be perfect? Maybe. It might be worse.

          It borders on heresy when someone wonders if the god we have is an underachiever. Or that there is a “God of the Gaps,” meaning that the more we find out in order to help ourselves, the less there is for God to do—and the Gap is shrinking.

          A Hassidic tale is about two people lost in a forest who come upon each other. Together they find their way out. And that‘s it; that’s the story.

And that’s what the sciences are for: live and learn. And that adaptation is the soul of living.