At 38 years old, Rabbi Gershon Schusterman was the director of a day school and a community leader in Southern California. He and his wife, Rochel Leah, had 11 children.
When Rochel Leah died suddenly at 36, Schusterman was faced with the biggest spiritual challenge of his life. He had been the very person to whom others turned in their worst moments of loss and grief. In his own hour of need, he was forced to assess whether the comforting messages he had been offering others would actually hold up.
“The good news,” Schusterman writes in the book’s introduction, “ is that they did.” He attributes this to the fact that “Jews have had thousands of years of practice coping with tragedy and loss.”
His book Why God Why? calls to mind the similarly themed When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Written by Rabbi Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen sold more than four million copies since it was published in 1981. Both books are intended to guide the reader who is coping with grievous loss.
Both books were written by rabbis. But that’s where the similarity ends. In When Bad Things Happen, Kushner, a Conservative American rabbi, argues that there is a part of the world God does not control, and that’s the place where evil resides and from which good people are harmed.
About Kushner’s thesis, Schusterman, an Orthodox rabbi, writes, “This is an intriguing idea, and while the book provided comfort to many, to be frank, it is not a Jewish idea. In fact, I’m challenged to even call it a religious idea. We Jews believe that God is firmly in control of every corner of the universe, and, as hard as that may be to understand, bad things can happen to decent people.”
IN 10 CHAPTERS, Schusterman explores several traditional Jewish answers to the question of how we are meant to understand and cope with tragedy while retaining a belief that God is always both good and merciful. He concludes each chapter with a brief summary which helps fix the core ideas of the chapter in the reader’s mind.
Understanding the existence of God
Given that the existence of God is the central pillar on which this book’s advice is based, Schusterman devotes an entire chapter to a theological question, titled “Is There Really a God?” This chapter is worthy of standing alone, although it puzzles me why he waited to address the topic until the fourth chapter.
Another chapter addresses the question “Is It Okay to Be Angry with God?”
Spoiler alert: It is. As Schusterman writes later in the book, “Loving God and struggling with God are not mutually exclusive.”
While acknowledging his trepidation in doing so, Schusterman takes a chapter to explore God’s role in the Holocaust. After examining the perspective of many other thinkers on the knotty problem of the Holocaust, Schusterman’s contribution is disarmingly simple.
“God is unknowable,” he writes. “Even if we could understand His reasons for creating suffering, we might not want to know, because once we see the bigger picture and the ultimate reasons for pain and suffering, we would become desensitized to the suffering of others. What God wants instead, is for us to channel our outrage and sympathy and do acts of goodness and kindness, and to bring healing and justice wherever we can.”
“Even if we could understand His reasons for creating suffering, we might not want to know, because once we see the bigger picture and the ultimate reasons for pain and suffering, we would become desensitized to the suffering of others. What God wants instead, is for us to channel our outrage and sympathy and do acts of goodness and kindness, and to bring healing and justice wherever we can.”
Gershon Schusterman
One final chapter worth highlighting is the one in which Schusterman takes on the nature of the soul itself and its relationship to the afterlife. This chapter is arguably the most removed from the book’s central theme of coping with loss and tragedy, yet it adds depth to the contention that ancient Jewish insights have the ability to soothe the hurting soul.
Rabbi Schusterman is now in his 70s. The wisdom he shares in Why God Why? comes not from dealing with the shock of sudden loss but from decades of exploring the issues of loss and faith through a traditional Jewish lens.
Why God Why? is sprinkled with personal anecdotes, analogies and quotes from hassidic masters. Schusterman’s use of biblical and Talmudic quotes is done with a light touch. This is not an academic tome intended for scholars. It is an approachable exploration of authentic Jewish thought, suitable for the general reader.
Why God Why? will be widely available in Israel in late May and can be ordered from the publisher at order@gefenpublishing.com.
Why God Why?By Gershon SchustermanGefen Publishing House272 pages; $24.99