A Book with a Timely Message

I just finished reading the book, “When Bad Things Happen To Good People.”

It was required reading for my son’s college class and he had it laying on his desk. I picked it up and began thumbing through the first several pages. The book drew me in.

It is written by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, after the death of his 14-year old son. At the age of three the boy was diagnosed with progeri, a degenerative disease that rapidly ages you.

The rabbi and his wife were told that their son would not grow beyond 3 ft. tall and would have no hair on his head or anywhere on his body. He would look like an old man and eventually die in his early teen years.

This is difficult news for any parent to hear. The rabbi struggles with the question, “Why?” His faith in God is tested as he lives with this sorrow. The book shows a very human side of a religious man and how he searches for answers to life's difficult questions just as the rest of us do.

He tells a story of a woman who after losing her own son, goes to seek out a wise man and asks for the sorrow to be taken from her. The wise man instructs her to go from house to house and find a home that has never known sorrow. Then take a mustard seed from that house and bring it back. This “magical seed” will rid the woman of her sorrow.

Of course as she travels from house to house, she hears tales of sorrow, one after the other. She becomes so caught up in the other people's troubles and is so busy offering comfort to them, that she forgets her own sorrow. Naturally, she never finds a house that has not had sorrow.

The rabbi concludes that all human beings, whether you are a “nice” person or not will have misfortunes. We all fall down at times but it is how you get back up that really matters.

The rabbi states that we are armed with two weapons to help us in this world: forgiveness and love. Can we forgive those who hurt us and love those who are not perfect beings? If we cannot learn to do this then we will be living a very lonely existence.

He explains that the world is filled with cruelty and unfairness but it is also filled with great beauty and goodness. This would certainly apply to our world today. But it is the only world that we have.

The book offers a good message during these days before Easter and Passover. It holds an inspirational message for all those who experience suffering, in other words, each one of us.

The rabbi ends the book by telling us that instead of asking why bad things happen even though we are living a good life, we should be asking how are we going to respond to the bad thing that has already happened; that will make all the difference in our own life as well as in the world around us.