Why bad things happen to good people
Ki Tetze

by Rabbi Richard Hirsh

At some point in each person’s life, some event transpires that calls into question one’s faith, assumptions, and certainty. Rare is the person who sails from childhood through old age without experiencing tragedy, loss, illness, or something else that makes one question what once seemed certain. Such events can be global (for example, the Holocaust or 9/11) or can be personal (for example, a diagnosis of cancer or the loss of a child — God forbid in either case).

In this week’s Torah portion, which is largely composed of a variety of individual laws, there is one commandment that played a determinative role in one of the classic stories of Jewish apostasy. In Deuteronomy 22:6, we are told “If, along the road, you chance upon a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs and the mother sitting over the fledglings of the eggs, do not take the mother together with her young. Let the mother go, and take only the young, in order that it may fare well and have a long life.” There is one other commandment of the Torah that promises long life: “honor your father and mother” (Deuteronomy 5:16).

As the rabbinic legends of the Talmud tell the story, one of the leading rabbis of the early centuries of the common era, Elisha ben Abuyah, observed a father instructing his son to climb a tree to gather eggs from a nest, and specifically noting that he observe the commandment not to take the mother along with the eggs. As the story tells it, the boy slipped from the tree, and as a result of his fall, he died. Seeing this, Elisha reportedly said “Truly there is no judgment and no judge.” Elisha’s faith had been shaken by seeing the death of a boy in the act of carrying out the two commandments for which long life is promised.

There are other midrashim about Elisha and the source of his apostasy, and a fine literary treatment of his life is narrated in Milton Steinberg’s novel As A Driven Leaf. But regardless of the historical accuracy of the Elisha legends, the core of the story represents a challenge for which there needs to be a response.

What were Elisha’s options? One would have been to deny his experience and force it through the filter of his prior faith. In other words, if the Torah is really divine truth, and the boy still died, then he must in some way unknown to us have sinned in order to warrant his death. Elisha might have saved his faith by redefining what he saw in such a way as to make it fit with what he had been taught.

Regrettably, many well-meaning people, when confronted with tragedy that tests their beliefs, seem to think they have to save God’s reputation, even at the cost of being cruel to people. For example, following the recent devastation of the hurricane in Florida, the governor said “This is God’s way of telling us he’s almighty and we’re mortal.” Somehow I doubt that many returning to their destroyed homes would find consolation in such presumption. What sort of a God would choose natural disasters (or those constructed out of human evil, from the Holocaust to 9/11 to the Sudan) to “teach people a lesson”?

Other Jews of Elisha’s time no doubt had plenty of opportunities to have their faith tested, if not in accordance with the law of the nest, in accordance with some other precept or teaching. Presumably many of them, including Elisha’s rabbinic peers, found some way to accommodate the dissonance of faith and experience. A popular alternative was to project the promises of the Torah, such as long life, into the world to come or the afterlife, concepts that may well have developed in part to help solve such problems as those with which Elisha was confronted.

Contemporary Jews have options our ancestors did not have. For one, many of us now view the Torah as sacred literature embodying many Israelite insights, rather than as the divine literal word of God. The law of the nest becomes, in this reading, a teaching about compassion, a reminder that all life partakes of the sacred, and an imperative to be alert to the potential to cause hurt. But it is not a theological or philosophical doctrine or explanation of “why bad things happen to good people.”

Ancient Jewish authorities debated the degree to which the world was divinely governed: by hashgaha k’lalit (the big picture) or by hashgaha pratit (with attention to every detail). Those who advocated for the big picture seemed to leave individual acts more to chance, randomness, or as the consequence of natural or human circumstances. Those who advocated for attention to every detail presumably saw a slippery slope if one admitted that anything in the world was not, in some way, under the direction of God. Advocates of either position presumably believed that against randomness, one could affirm meaning.

In a few weeks, the High Holy Day liturgy will present us with the heavy message: “On Rosh Hashana it is decreed and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: who will live and who will die.…” Those of us who remember Elisha ben Abuyah will find such authoritative assertions to be poetic, but not pragmatic; we know that good people will suffer and bad people will prosper. Our job becomes to affirm meaning, to build new foundations where old ones no longer sustain, and to do what Jews have done so often before — to renew and rethink our faith so that the generations to come will be able to carry on the Jewish story, and sustain the Jewish people.

Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.