Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

Sometimes this world misleads us, creating the impression that it has neither justice nor order: we see people who do evil prosper and succeed, while decent people who have harmed no one, and even innocent children, face unbearable suffering. Judaism offers a profound explanation of this paradoxical reality.

Imagine what the world would be like if only good things happened to good people, and the opposite to the wicked. If for every good deed a person received an immediate raise, and for every lie or bit of gossip his tooth instantly started to ache; if theft were followed by an instant blow, and breaking the laws of kashrut by a stomachache.

In such a reality, where all sinners suffered illness and poverty while the righteous enjoyed a perfect life free of troubles and accidents, human free will would be completely annulled. In the face of an obvious Divine presence we would have no real option of choosing the path of evil — we would turn into programmed robots, acting solely out of fear of punishment or a craving for immediate reward. Life would become pure determinism.

The Creator governs the world through hidden Providence, which leaves room for choosing between good and evil, between closeness to Him and estrangement. If the system of reward and punishment worked as plainly and predictably as the laws of nature (like getting burned when you touch fire), moral choice would lose all meaning.

The Rambam stressed that free will is "a pillar of the Torah and the mitzvot." Every person is given the power to steer himself onto the good path and become righteous, or to choose the path of evil. Actions performed under compulsion (even "at gunpoint" of Divine obviousness) have no value. The Creator wants us to choose good of our own free will, which is why the true mechanisms of decision-making from Above remain hidden from us.

The Talmud states: "The seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is truth." The Creator governs the world justly and keeps a meticulous accounting, yet we are not always able to grasp the higher considerations behind this or that event. Even Moshe Rabbeinu asked G-d to reveal to him the ways in which He governs the world, and received the answer: "You shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen." This means that the logic of Divine Providence can be understood only "after the fact," or at the end of days, from the vantage point of the higher spiritual world.

When Job demanded an explanation for his suffering, G-d answered him: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" Our understanding is limited to the narrow window of our present life, whereas life is only a bridge between what came before and what will come after. We are like actors who see only their own small part, while the Infinite Director knows how all the storylines weave together perfectly into a single picture of justice and mercy.

It is important to remember that not all the righteous have it bad, and not all sinners have it good. Often the outward prosperity of the wicked is deceptive: loneliness, depression, broken families, and a lack of inner peace may be their lot behind closed doors.

Judaism teaches us to look at life from the perspective of the soul's eternity. The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, arrested by the Communist authorities, answered a threat at gunpoint: "That toy can frighten only someone who has many gods and only one world — not someone who has one G-d and two worlds." When a person grasps the immortality of the soul, he stops seeing death as the final stop and finds the strength to do what is right despite the hardships.

The trajectory of every person's life is carefully calibrated from Above for his eternal good. Sometimes suffering is:

• A cleansing of the soul: "scrubbing out the stains" of negative deeds so that the soul can enjoy closeness to G-d in the World to Come without the limitations of the body.
• An atonement for the many: outstanding righteous people may take upon themselves the suffering of a generation in order to avert harsher decrees against others.
• A rectification of past lives: according to Kabbalah (the hidden teaching), a soul may suffer for deeds committed in previous incarnations.

Thus, for example, prophecy revealed to Job that his suffering was connected to the fact that in a previous life his soul had been incarnated in Terach, the father of Avraham, who was an idolater. Once this guilt was cleansed, Job's suffering ceased and his well-being returned.

In the Torah, the word for the birthing stool is "mashber" (literally "crisis," "breaking point"). A crisis is hard because it tears us out of our comfort zone, but it is precisely out of crisis that something new is born. The Creator sometimes sends us trials to rouse us from "spiritual hibernation," to make us think about the meaning of life and realize the potential planted within us.

From our present, limited point of view, "bad" seems like unconditional evil. Yet Judaism believes that in the World to Come, when our consciousness expands, we will understand that everything that happened was absolute good. As the Talmud says, in the World to Come the blessing "the True Judge" (recited upon hearing bitter news) will disappear, and only "the Good One Who does good" will remain.

An analogy for understanding the hidden governance of the world: imagine a person watching a surgeon at work for the first time. From his point of view, the masked man is committing a terrible evil: he is cutting a living body with a knife, inflicting a wound and causing bleeding. Someone who knows nothing of the patient's illness or the purpose of the operation would call the surgeon a criminal. But someone who sees the whole picture — the life-threatening tumor and the healing that follows — understands that every movement of the scalpel is dictated by mercy and a concern to save a life. So too, seeing only the "incisions" in our lives, we often fail to realize that they are part of a great process of healing and elevating our soul.