When Bad Things Happen To Good People

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the international bestseller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, delivers a stirring keynote address to a packed auditorium in Charlotte, NC, in this excellent exploration of tragedy and religion. Having lost his own young son Aaron to a rare illness, Kushner found himself not comforted by the standard religious reasoning that said his loss was according to God's will. Kushner states that he reread the book of Job, and found something rather interesting: as long as everybody's hale and hearty we can simultaneously hold three beliefs: 1) God is all-powerful, 2) God is just, and 3) Job is a good man. When tragedy strikes Job; however, one of those three postulates must be false. Kushner argues persuasively that the second and third conditions must be retained, but that the first may be safely jettisoned. What if God is not all-powerful? What if the comfort and strength we do produce in times of loss and strain are manifestations of God's love and pain, but God, himself, is powerless to prevent tragedies from occurring. The argument is very well made, and much more attractive than its alternative (it was God's will that six million Jews died during the Holocaust). According to Kushner, the Holocaust is a question of psychology not of theology-it was the result of bad thinking by bad people, not a religious event. Whether one happens to be Christian, Jewish, agnostic, or atheist, Kushner's words are comforting to those who are grieving and stimulating to anyone who wonders about the tragic element in the human condition: namely, that we are mortal. Highly recommended. (Available from most distributors.)