When bad things happen to good people. It’s the title of a book that everyone knows and that no one has ever told me that they read (save a guy who needed to quote it in an article). It is the title, the question, that resonates all over the place.
Admittedly, some of the resonance of when bad things happen is a dressed-up, horn-rimmed-polite kvetch of why me? (A friend of mine wonders if perhaps people aren’t more bothered by the reverse: when good things happen to bad people!)
But the question – when heartfelt and selfless -- is a powerful one and an ancient one. Powerful, because everyone relates to it, personally. Ancient, because it has never been answered, sufficiently.
The answer that I know a little is, in short, that when the good people having bad things happen to them are somebody else, then we have to relieve them of their suffering and scream to G-d How can you! When the good people are us, then we have to do what we can to relieve the suffering, pray to G-d for strength that we act appropriately . . .and then go on.
The broken pot is never tested, says the Midrash, only a good pot is tested to see if it can hold up. That holding up, that becoming greater, is what G-d wants to see. For understandable reasons: people only grow through adversity, a kid only appreciates the value of money if it is earned, not given. Etc.
But. . . well, as Tevye put it: would it ruin a vast and mighty plan if I were a wealthy man? Couldn’t You, Oh G-d, in Your infinite wisdom, Your infinite power and Your infinite compassion have tested us and made us grow without all this suffering?
Well, yes and no. Yes, because he is All Capable. No, because, well, because if He could have, He would have. It gets philosophical, and it’s important to have that philosophical wealth before the horror strikes. Abraham searched for G-d for years and had developed a strength, a reservoir of faith, to withstand tragedy. Like a jogger who is in shape when a heart attack strikes.
This week I had the dubious honor of hearing someone claim that the L-rd had revealed himself to him and blah blah blah. I frankly am not sure that anyone revealed themselves to him; and I am quite sure that if anyone did it was a god he created in his own image.
When G-d revealed himself to Abraham it wasn’t pretty. He revealed the unreasonable: leave everything, see My promises broken, your wife kidnapped. And then came the jaw-dropping ‘slice your son’s neck’.
This then is the comfort that gives us strength: we can take anything if we know that it isn’t random. That its purpose is divine. That in every sorrow and gut wrench that we have, He is sad, His guts are being wrenched: “Son, this whuppin’ is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.”
What parent wouldn’t take all the pain on themselves if they could keep it from their kids? And the unthinkable agony of the parent whose kid, writhing on a hospital bed, cries out to the parent,“Tell them to stop already!”
But kids don’t see the parent’s agony; kids just feel their pain. Not until they grow up do they see the it hurts me more than it hurt you. We don’t see Isaiah’s ‘in all their pain he has pain’; we just feel the pain that He is not stopping. Not until Moshiach picks us up and gives us a view from on high: then we can see how it all made sense, that it was all worth it. That only good things happen, and that there are only good people. May it come soon. Until then, (in preparation?) may we kids thrive in a happy, safe and secure childhood. And (because nothing can make Dad happier) may we play nicely together.
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