The first time I read When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner I was probably 11 or 12 years old. I was in therapy for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, but let’s just say I wasn’t a very happy child. So anyway, my therapist assigned it to me, I read it, and I forgot about it. It really had little to no impact on me whatsoever.

Please indulge me a not-so-insignificant tangent: Much of this blog will be dedicated to my personal spiritual and religious journey – especially my investment in Judaism. I was born into a non-religious family with an agnostic mother with protestant Christian leanings and a father who lived somewhere between agnosticism and atheism; however, I was baptized Catholic at the behest of my paternal grandparents. After that I don’t think I saw the inside of a church until after my parents divorce when my mother began looking for a church. We (Mom, my middle brother, and I) settled on a mainstream Methodist congregation and I became somewhat active in the youth group and choir. During that same time my father was involved with a women who would eventually become my stepmother – she was Jewish, but only in name. She knew little to no Hebrew, didn’t attend Temple or shul, and did not become a Bat Mitzvah until much later in her adult life. At Dad’s house we celebrated a secular Christmas and Chanukah. When I was almost 13 my youngest brother was born and suddenly (at least how I remember it) the religiosity at my Dad’s house increased 100-fold. We had a bris (sort of) and soon started attending Passover seders and began checking out the local Temple. I found this odd considering I perceived Dad’s reaction my middle brother’s and my involvement in a church and a youth group to be a hostile one.

From ages 14-18 I pretty much checked out of any religious worship or practice. At 18 I dabbled in Catholicism, going so far as to complete the rites of passage started at my baptism to become “fully Catholic.” To this day I’m not sure if it was genuine interest or an attempt to agitate my Dad by embracing the faith he rejected many years ago – I think it was mostly the latter with a smattering of the former. Regardless it didn’t last long and throughout my early twenties I dabbled in Bhuddism, other branches of Protestantism, occasional lapses back into Catholicism, until I settled on a nice general agnosticism. It wasn’t until my youngest brother became a Bar Mitzvah that I felt a pull toward Judaism. I read a few books on it, looked into learning Hebrew (but didn’t act on it), and somewhere in all this my Dad converted to Judaism so he became a useful resource on the subject.

Throughout this spiritual quest/journey I came to only one clear conclusion: I believed in God. I wasn’t sure what he/she/it was but I believed. From there I came to a few more understandings: The God I believed in was in everything, everywhere, and all-powerful – otherwise, to me It wasn’t God – but beyond that there wasn’t much else I could know about God. So I set out to find a religion that fit that paradigm, if there was such a thing. Enter Judaism (more on this subject in a later post).

Many of you who read RDNE know that two-and-a-half years ago my youngest brother was murdered. There’s no need to fully recount the horrific events but for those of you who don’t know he was shot and killed on October 30th, 2005. 11 months earlier his mother (my stepmother) died after an 18 month battle with cancer and almost exactly a year before his murder my paternal grandfather died. May their memories be a blessing. Three significant family deaths in a single year and two of the people were far too young to have died. To put it lightly, I was overwhelmed with grief and as a result I was reading every book on the subject of loss and grief I could get my hands on. In the process I re-read When Bad Things Happen … and it didn’t sit well with me but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.OK, so that tangent was longer than I intended (please forgive me) but it brings us back to WBTHTGP and sets up why I find Kushner’s book so problematic and fundamentally flawed from a Jewish perspective. Kushner’s book was 1st published over 25 years ago, has had multiple editions and printings, sold millions of copies, and undoubtedly helped countless people. For those that haven’t read it, Kushner lost his son Aaron at the age of 14 to a genetic disorder known as Progeria or “rapid aging.” WBTHTGP is Kushner’s attempt to grapple with that loss and how the God he believed in could allow such a thing to happen. Ultimately Kushner concludes that God is in fact NOT omnipotent because if he was, things like his son’s death wouldn’t have happened. Basically, Kushner concedes he would rather believe in a “good” God than an all-powerful God. Kushner states:

They [tragedies] happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God’s creative light has not yet penetrated. And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness. (pg. 53)

This belief is fundamentally un-Jewish. Chaos isn’t evil, people are evil and tragedy is never random for the people to whom it happens. We (people) are the randomness in the world, we are violent, selfish, unpredictable, callous, hateful, vengeful, fearful, etc. etc.

To be continued …