This Narrow Space by Elisha Waldman

Author:Elisha Waldman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

7

The Forces That Give Us Meaning

MY PERSONAL STRUGGLE WITH THEODICY obviously did not resolve itself upon my arrival in Israel. The heavens did not part, and there was no ray of divine light shining down to provide enlightenment. In fact, my new role at Hadassah only deepened my personal struggle. With greater responsibility for patients, I became more personally connected to them, and each new case seemed to present a new type of misfortune. My initial instinct at being exposed to so much suffering was just to give up on God. Why struggle? Why not simply abandon the idea of God, when so much evidence would seem to point to the impossibility of His existence? But despite all the suffering I was witnessing, perhaps even because of it, I was also aware of an element of the sacred that persisted throughout my patients’ experiences. “I cannot prove its existence,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote of the divine, “but what I can say is that the unanimous contradiction of the entire world will not weaken me in my faith that what I have heard is the voice of God. To me this voice is more real than my own existence.” As a physician caring for children facing serious illness, I am granted access to intense, often tragic, but sometimes beautiful moments in people’s lives. It is in these human interactions that I see that glimmer of the divine. Despite all of the terrible things I see, I also get to witness incredible moments: parents embracing and strengthening each other and then doing the same for their children, families refusing to surrender to despair. I am convinced that I am watching something sacred.

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IN MY STRUGGLES WITH PHILOSOPHY and theology, I’m becoming increasingly interested in a school of thought called process theology. This is a theory that posits, through somewhat dense reasoning, that God does exist and is a force for good, but, for reasons we cannot understand, He is also limited. Although He has a will in this world and wishes only for good, there are certain things He cannot accomplish because they are beyond His control. The best-known proponent of this view might be Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose book When Bad Things Happen to Good People reaches a similar conclusion. It’s a complicated theology, and as I struggle with it I do not find it completely satisfying, but it feels more right to me than either accepting a world with no God or a world where God actually allows (or wills!) children to die of terrible diseases. And, admittedly on a somewhat hubristic level, this is something I can relate to. Doctors are often accused of thinking they are godlike creatures (though at times it feels like this is what families expect of us, godlike feats), but in this respect process theology resonates with how I experience my role as a physician: I want only the best for my patients, I do my best for them, but sometimes it’s just not possible to achieve the miracle they are hoping for.

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