When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner

Author:Harold S. Kushner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307430205
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 2009-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Six

God Helps Those Who Stop Hurting Themselves

One of the worst things that happens to a person who has been hurt by life is that he tends to compound the damage by hurting himself a second time. Not only is he the victim of rejection, bereavement, injury, or bad luck; he often feels the need to see himself as a bad person who had this coming to him, and because of that drives away people who try to come close to him and help him. Too often, in our pain and confusion, we instinctively do the wrong thing. We don’t feel we deserve to be helped, so we let guilt, anger, jealousy, and self-imposed loneliness make a bad situation even worse.

I once read of an Iranian folk proverb, “If you see a blind man, kick him; why should you be kinder than God?” In other words, if you see someone who is suffering, you must believe that he deserves his fate and that God wants him to suffer. Therefore, put yourself on God’s side by shunning him or humiliating him further. If you try to help him, you will be going against God’s justice.

Most of us probably respond to this point of view with the feeling, “That’s terrible.” We usually think that we know better than to do that. But too often we inadvertently find ourselves saying to people who have been hurt that they, in some way, deserved it. And when we do that, we feed into their latent sense of guilt, the suspicion that maybe this happened to them because they did somehow have it coming.

Do you remember Job’s comforters from the biblical story? When the three friends came to visit Job, they genuinely wanted to comfort him for his losses and his illness. But they did almost everything wrong, and ended up by making him feel worse. Can we learn from their mistakes what a person needs when he has been hurt by life, and how we as friends and neighbors can be helpful to him?

Their first mistake was to think that when Job said, “Why is God doing this to me?” he was asking a question, and that they would be helping him by answering his question, by explaining why God was doing it. In reality, Job’s words were not a theological question at all, but a cry of pain. There should have been an exclamation point after those words, not a question mark. What Job needed from his friends—what he was really asking for when he said “Why is God doing this to me?”—was not theology, but sympathy. He did not really want them to explain God to him, and he certainly did not want them to show him where his theology was faulty. He wanted them to tell him that he was in fact a good person, and that the things that were happening to him were terribly tragic and unfair. But the friends got so bogged down talking about God that they almost forgot

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