When Bad Things Happen To Good People
When Aaron Kushner stopped gaining weight at the age of eight months, his parents became concerned. When his hair started falling out after he turned one year old, they began taking him to specialists. Their son’s condition, they would eventually be told, was called progeria, “rapidly aging.” Aaron, it seemed, would grow to about three feet in height. He would have no hair on his head or body. While still a child, he would begin to look like a little old man. He would die in his early teens.
It was the kind of tragedy for which Harold Kushner, a young rabbi who was already the head of a local congregation in a suburb of Boston, had been trained to handle. A religious man all his life who had never doubted the existence of God, the goodness of God, the wisdom of God, it was his job to explain the inexplicable. To the families of dying children whose lives had been cut short before they had really begun. To the mother of the little girl who had been run over by a bus on the way home from school. To the woman whose body slowly but surely, one function after another, was being crippled by multiple sclerosis. The answers he offered were the answers he had always believed. Whatever happens, happens for a purpose. Although it may look otherwise now, virtue will be rewarded and wickedness will be punished. The righteous will be protected. For those who hold their faith, the goodness of the world will surely one day be revealed.
So it would be for Harold Kushner in his darkest hour. He had been nothing if not a good man. His life was one of service. His faith in God was the center of his being. It was not possible that his God would abandon him. But as the months and years wore on, as the progeria more and more took hold of the son whom he adored, something began to change. The consolations that were his stock and trade, that he had always relied upon, he now began to question. For the first time he found himself seriously rethinking his core beliefs. When his friends and colleagues would offer traditional words of comfort, the grief counseling at which he was so adept, he became increasingly skeptical. How could it be that he could have possibly “deserved” what had happened to his son? That it had somehow been “for his own good”? That he must remember “the redemptive value of suffering.” That human beings, no matter how religious, are simply “not capable of understanding God’s ways.” That “no one has the right to question God’s will” and his own favorite chestnut, that “everything has a purpose.”
When Bad Things Happen To Good People is Harold Kushner’s deeply felt, personal answer to what is traditionally called The Problem of Evil: how is it possible for an all-good, all-wise, all-powerful God to tolerate the existence of evil? His book is remarkable for how frankly it acknowledges his anger at his God for punishing him unfairly. He cannot and will not accept the standard consolations his religion offers. There can be no justification, he finally decides, for a God to willingly give cancer to a child, progeria to his son, a brain tumor to an innocent woman. A God who could do that would have to be evil. But God, of course, cannot be evil. There would be no meaning to the world if that were true. If such a God existed, he would not want to believe in Him.
It is at this crossroads in his faith that Harold Kushner makes a daring choice. Deciding that a God who is all good and all powerful could never willfully punish an innocent child, he arrives at the radical conclusion that God is not omnipotent. God does not want, never wants bad things to happen to good people. God always wants to help, but he cannot always control what happens. God, therefore, Harold Kushner triumphantly asserts, does not cause suffering or withhold cures for cancer or any other horrible disease.
What is the basis for the revolutionary claim that God — in opposition to two thousand years of theological doctrine — is not omnipotent? His main reason, as he is honest enough to admit, is simply that “It can’t be there is no God . . . (there would then) be no purpose to life.” He is fortified in his new belief by a physicist who tells him that at the heart of quantum mechanics is the principle of indeterminacy. To Harold Kushner this means that even God — who undoubtedly created both Heaven and earth, and all that is in it — cannot predict and therefore cannot control certain undesirable events. It follows that God cannot control certain pockets of local events, such as who will contract a particular disease, who will have their life cut short by a tragic accident, who will become the next unlucky victim of a deranged serial killer. God does not want suffering, he does not want disease, but he is unable to control the fate (because of quantum mechanics) of every single atom in the universe which He created. And when bad things happen to good people, God feels as bad about it as we do.
Encouraged and inspired by these ideas, which have taken him years to arrive at, he goes on to construct his own personalized, secular theology. Although he is at pains to acknowledge he is neither philosopher nor theologian, his ideas strike one as being both heartfelt and intriguingly innovative. He believes in prayer, but he does not believe in praying for a divine intervention. God cannot control the details of the future (presumably again because of quantum mechanics). But prayer helps, because it puts us in touch with the presence, the goodness of God. It reminds us that God loves us, thinks constantly about our well-being and is rooting for us. He points out that not all suffering is bad. He asks rhetorically if we would really want to live in a world without pain, without hardship, without struggle? Would it not be boring to live forever? It is wrong to do things — not because we want to — but because we are seeking a reward in the afterlife. Although he personally believes that the soul is eternal, who can really know what lies in store for us after we die? More important is it that we count our blessings on earth and give thanks for the goodness that God has put everywhere around us. Not all parts of the Bible, he warns us, are to be taken literally. When it says in the Book of Genesis that “first there was water, then land, then . . .” — since that has been subsequently confirmed by modern earth science — we are right to take it not only literally but as one more sign of divine wisdom. When it says that the world was created in six days, we are to understand that the statement is merely a metaphor.
No challenge is greater to the believer who wants to defend the goodness of God than the history of the genocides that have been perpetuated. Harold Kushner’s explanation for why God allowed Hitler to kill six million Jews rests on the supposed necessity for free will. If there were no free will, it could not be just to punish the wicked and reward the virtuous. If a mother does not allow her child to make a mistake, if the child chooses the right path only because he or she has to, there is no free will. Analogously, if God is to allow all people, even a demented, evil genius like Adolf Hitler to have free will, he cannot intercede. That, of course, does not mean, as Kushner is quick to emphasize, that God wants Hitler to kill six million Jews for some higher purpose (as a punishment, perhaps, for a heinous lapse into heathen secularism). No, God once again is as grief-stricken as we are, but He has no choice but to wait and see what happens.
I must admit at this point I find it incredible that Rabbi Kushner, an obviously good man, can believe this. How can it be possible that a God, powerful enough to create molecular biology, quantum mechanics and general relativity physics, can think of nothing to even slow down a process of genocide? Why is it necessary for God to wait patiently as Hitler systematically kills each and every Jew before he can begin to punish him? Once Hitler has made the decision to exterminate the Jews — penned the order, say, to carry out the infamous “final solution” — isn’t that freedom enough to choose evil? Why can’t God stop him at that point? A moment’s thought shows it is not true that a person needs to complete an act before he or she can be said to choose. Suppose someone in cold blood, deciding to murder an innocent person, has taken a gun and just squeezed the trigger? Hasn’t he chosen? Why can’t God at that moment, or at any of an infinite number of possible intermediate points between the inauguration of the evil act and its completion, intervene — when intervention is what is desperately needed? When people are about to become victims of unconscionably brutal crimes, they do not pray to their God to respect the free will of their would-be predator. They pray for exactly the same thing that a hurt or frightened child wants when they run to their parents — for immediate hands-on help. And if Kushner is right, if it is existentially imperative that we respect the right — of good people and evil people alike — to exercise their free will, shouldn’t truly religious people not only be pacifists, but refuse to intercede in someone’s commission of even the most monstrous act? To stand by and not even dial 911 because that might interfere with the God-given right to choose evil? (Imagine someone who actually lived by such a code. Would there be anyone who did not consider them a monster?)
I do not doubt that Harold Kushner would be the first to abjure such absurd conclusions to be drawn from his ideas. Yet, I believe, they follow quite logically for anyone who takes him at his word, carefully thinks through the consequences and then looks at the outcome. He says that free will is necessary in the world. If he really believed that, he would not be so concerned about the adverse effects of early education. He would recognize that although Western jurisprudence is certainly based on coercive ideas of punishment and reward, of deterrence and containment, when free will is at the stake — as Dostoevsky so famously pointed out in Notes From the Underground — the evil, perverse man will do exactly as he wants, in spite of (or because of, in defiance of) the consequences. He would realize that to allow free will to exist is not the same thing as allowing crimes to be committed; that free will means freedom to choose, not freedom to recklessly carry out shameless acts. Harold Kushner says that sometimes things (meaning inexplicably bad things) happen for no reason at all. They happen randomly. He does not seem to grasp that physicists who talk about the quantum mechanical principle of indeterminacy are not talking about the macroscopic world of people and three-dimensional objects (the only world we care about). They are talking about the subatomic world of electrons and quarks, invisible, curled up, extra dimensions, matter and anti-matter, energy and dark energy, the four fundamental forces of the universe and so on. And that in the people-scaled, three-dimensional world we have always lived in, determinism and predictability hold sway to a breathtaking degree of accuracy (if it were otherwise, there could not be such a thing as, for example, rocket science, and the quest to land a man on the moon would not have been accomplished in a million years).
It therefore hardly makes sense that a God who could create the laws of quantum mechanics and general relativity theory, which in turn created the cosmos, who could single-handedly mastermind the Big Bang, could be as powerless to deter the ravages of disease as Harold Kushner is forced to claim. Even if God can’t predict every single random act of bad luck, how could He not be responsible for creating plagues such as cancer and AIDS? And if He can’t exactly control and predict, why can’t He at least make some kind of contribution to the cure for major illnesses? Harold Kushner says God feels as bad as he does, and is as blameless as he is, that his son was afflicted with progeria. Yet, one wonders, if so, just what did He do to help? Did He somehow communicate to Harold Kushner, deliver a message of some kind, containing invaluable advice? Did He hint at a cure for progeria that was at least somewhat ahead of its time?
So my dilemma is that on the one hand, I cannot quite accept that Harold Kushner, a thoughtful, philosophically minded, sincere man, can believe what he says; while on the other hand I am well aware that he does believe it. Why? Because he wants to believe. Because he believes in belief. Because he cannot accept the alternative, as he freely admits — that a God who had the power to prevent bad things happening to good people, and did not, could not be all good. Rather than accept that, he would cling to the seemingly absurd position that an almost (except for quantum mechanics) omnipotent, all-good God has no more ability to contain or eliminate evil than human beings do.
Harold Kushner, it appears, cannot take the next logical step. Maybe God not only cannot cure cancer and cannot prevent evil, but He can’t create heaven and earth either. Maybe, if He does exist, it is more like a symbol in the collective unconscious and does not really resemble the concrete picture presented in the Bible. But life would not be meaningful for Harold Kushner were he to believe that, as he often says. Fortunately, he is free to conduct his life on earth as he sees fit. If he is mistaken and will one day be held accountable, according to his beliefs, it will not be until the afterlife. Yet, as he has remarked, he is not really sure what the afterlife is anyway. Because he can think of no way to test his assumption, he is free to believe in whatever he feels he has to believe in. There are no real consequences. Tellingly, he has arrived at a philosophical position in which the God that he believes in is indistinguishable (by his own criteria) from a God who does not exist.
The impression remains that nothing could really shake Harold Kushner’s faith. If the Holocaust didn’t, if September 11 didn’t, if all the pogroms carried out against the Jews in the past two thousand years didn’t, what would? A War of the Worlds? The faith, it seems, of Harold Kushner is indispensable — as is true of just about all deeply religious people. They would no more change their religion than they would change their sexual orientation. When Harold Kushner says “It can’t be there is no God . . . (there would then be) no purpose to life,” he seems to be saying “I won’t accept that.” If you take that refusal, add an abstract space where anything is allowed, that can neither be proved nor disproved, where the deepest, most wishful fantasies can quietly collect unmolested by the constraints of mundane reality, you are likely to arrive at some kind of concept of a personal God.
In short, Harold Kushner believes that everything good in life comes from God. Everything beneficial and healing in culture, education, and parental support, everything motivational and inspirational comes from God. God is pure love. God is not cruel, is not judgmental, is not frustratingly difficult to comprehend. Because He is unable despite his majestic powers to prevent bad things from happening to good people, He is to be held totally blameless and innocent. But we are to remember He is always there, always present as a kind of a cosmic, spiritual, super-parental force wanting nothing but the best for us.
Harold Kushner does not seem to care that he is preaching to the converted. The only proof that he offers in support of his remarkable, revisionist, personal theology is his lifelong feeling of contact with God’s love and His presence. He does not seem to consider that few people — who do not already believe in most of what he says — could ever find it convincing.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect, for me, of When Bad Things Happen To Good People, is the implicit conception it conveys of Jehovah as a clearly tribal God (an us-against-them God). Over and over again injustice and unfairness are portrayed as bad things happening to good people. The implication is that it is not unjust for bad things to happen to bad people. But why is it okay for anyone to get progeria, for an infant to get Down syndrome, or AIDS, or cancer? How does that fit with a supposedly infinitely good and merciful God? What is the necessity for there being punishment for bad people? Why not loving, nurturing discipline instead? How could an eternity in hell, if hell exists, ever be rationalized (as it was for nearly two thousand years) as the merciful act of a just God? Why wouldn’t justice be, say, a day in hell? Or at least no more than the equivalent number of evil hours spent during a lifetime? All of which points to the existence of the Talion law — an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth — characteristic of a vengeful, tribal God. As has been often pointed out, the Bible makes it clear that there is a double standard of morality that applies in the first case to the Chosen People and in the second to the converts of the new religion of Christianity. Everyone else, which is most of the rest of the world, are more or less consigned to either eternal damnation or the most savage, earthly retaliation.
What is most valuable about Harold Kushner’s book is that it helps people to release and to find a place for their anger. It is for those who already believe but who have been disappointed and hurt by life, who hate what they consider God’s unfairness, but who are not ready to give up their religion and don’t know what to do with their resentment.
The bitterness that Rabbi Kushner felt and overcame resonates in a strange way with my patients. Although few of them would ever dedicate themselves to religious service, all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, would feel cheated by life. All of them, whatever their religious beliefs, would feel that bad things happen constantly to good people, that life is unfair, that life is hard, that life is unforgiving and that justice, whatever that is, is almost never evenly distributed. If I had only one book in the Bible to represent their unconscious philosophy of life, it would be the Book of Job.
Gerald Alper
Author God & Therapy
What We Believe When No One Is Watching
(The following article is an excerpt from my book, God & Therapy)
