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Finding Light in the Darkness:
The founder of Aish HaTorah UK uplifts & inspires as he speaks of his personal experiences, his wife's faith during her terminal illness, and shows us how to use painful challenges to grow.
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Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
The question is one that Elana and I struggled with over the difficult years of her illness. Eventually, we found an answer that satisfied us both. And its simplicity always amazed me. It needs no drum rolls or introduction. The answer is simply this:
Bad things do not happen to good people.
And bad things don’t happen to bad people either. Bad things simply don’t “happen.” I’m not playing with words. I’m merely using, as I’ll explain, the most meaningful definitions available.
The question of why bad things happen is not a new one - it’s as old as Judaism itself and is raised in many, many places.
“It is not in our hands - neither the suffering of the righteous nor the comfort of the wicked,” says Rabbi Yannai in Pirkei Avos 4:15.
How can we possibly understand, in the context of a loving Father in Heaven, people dying young, parents losing children, disease, starvation, wars, gas chambers, and crematoria? It just doesn’t seem to work.
But as difficult as it is emotionally, as I have said, I believe it to be quite simple intellectually. And I believe this is exactly what Rabbi Yannai meant when he said, “It is not in our hands.” It’s like a hot coal. You can see a hot coal from afar; you can understand what it is and why it is; but that does not mean you can pick it up. You can never hope to hold it in your bare hands and feel comfortable with it, only to observe it from a distance.
The same is true when it comes to suffering. If we are able to distance our emotions from the issue, we will be able to deal with it and understand it relatively easily. Like the hot coal, from afar, it can be observed and understood.
But we can never touch.
We feel suffering deeply - be it our own or that of others.We cannot merely stand back and give answers. As much as we might understand it intellectually, we will nevertheless never feel happy with any answer that we give ourselves. Answers will always seem callous in the face of human pain.We cannot merely “explain” to someone why their child died. The pain is tangible and the explanation is theoretical. The person is suffering, experiencing real pain, and we are merely parroting words. Answers don’t solve the problem. They don’t take away the horror. They don’t soothe; they irritate. We can understand them, but never find complete comfort in them.
However, just because we might not feel comfortable with answers does not mean that they are wrong. When Elana found the lump, it was cancer.We did not like the fact that it was cancer, but that did not change the reality.
The answer to suffering is the same. It is not a pleasant answer, but a person who wants truth above pleasantries will see that it is correct.
I ask you, the reader, to put aside emotion as best you can and to try to listen with your head and not your heart. To the extent to which you are able to do so is the extent to which you will find meaningful answers in the following chapters.
Why?
As a start to this - and most questions in life - we need first to define our terms. And, most significantly, in dealing with why bad happens in this world,we need to begin with a definition of “bad.”
I believe that much of our difficulty in dealing with bad things happening comes from a definition of bad that is entirely inconsistent with Judaism.
I would imagine that for most people, the working definition of “bad” is “pain.” Bad and pain are basically synonymous. Be it the pain someone goes through while dying from a horrible disease, the pain of someone like Elana, knowing she will never dance at her children’s weddings, or the pain of children starving in Africa or the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s the pain involved in these situations that makes them “bad.” If no one in the Holocaust went through any pain - if they were gently put to sleep without any knowledge of what was happening - it would still be a horrible thing, but it would not bother us in the way that it does.
Take a few moments to consider this, because it’s important to understand exactly what it is that bothers us before moving on.
If pain is to be in any way linked with our definition of bad - be it emotional, physical, or spiritual pain - then the question of why bad things happen to people is fairly well unanswerable. Because pain happens to every human being, righteous or evil, throughout most of their lives. And if pain in and of itself is bad, then God has clearly made a world that is just filled with “bad.”
Let’s re-examine our assumptions for a moment. Is all pain necessarily bad? Defining pain as “bad” is actually a modern phenomenon.
Let me give just a few very obvious illustrations as to why we cannot view all pain as automatically being bad.
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