37 pages • 1 hour read
Harold S. KushnerWhen Bad Things Happen to Good People
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Sometimes There Is No Reason”
Sometimes things happen randomly to people. A mad gunman may shoot someone who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. A spark may start a fire that the wind happens to blow toward one set of houses and not another. A couple, in making love, conceives a child whose strengths, weaknesses, and even crippling malformations depend on the random genetic variations of the sperm that fertilizes the egg.
The last Russian czar’s son, born with hemophilia, may have so distracted his unlucky parents that they were unable to manage their empire and lost it to the Soviets. Thus, a random genetic fluke may have altered world history. Someone who walks away from a terrible traffic accident may believe that God caused the miracle, but other people die in freak accidents. A random wind change steers a hurricane toward a town instead of out to sea. So many tragedies contain an element of randomness that it’s hard to discern a pattern, much less a reason, in them that might represent God’s will.
If God created the Heavens and the Earth, removing chaos from light and dark, land and sea, and setting things in order, perhaps chaos is a remnant, a yet-unfinished part, of His creation. Within the remaining chaos, random events can cause tragedies, “which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us” (63).
Chapter 4 Summary: “No Exceptions for Nice People”
The laws of nature, in their rigorous orderliness, suggest a rational and fair-minded Creator. These laws act on everyone, good and bad, in the same way. A bullet fired from a gun obeys the laws of physics without regard for the character of the person it strikes, “and God does not cause it and cannot stop it” (67). Otherwise, the righteous would soon learn to ignore physics and jump out of high-rise buildings because the elevator was slow.
Instead of being protected from all damage, humans have pain receptors that warn them of harm. Without pain, life would be unlivable, yet some pains seem more worthwhile than others. The two most intense pains known to science are giving birth and passing kidney stones. The stones mean nothing beyond the pain they cause, while giving birth is dense with meaning and promise. That meaning, and its place in our life and our plans, makes pain bearable.
It’s hard to mistreat our bodies for years—smoking packs of cigarettes a day, eating until we are obese, or working ourselves to the bone—and then blame God for our subsequent health problems. However, Kushner asks, what about random cancers, or mental retardation, or blindness? Does it help the afflicted to know the science behind such misfortunes?
Societies could let the sickly die and forbid those with genetic defects from having children, but who would want to live in such a world? Those who suffer need to know not the biochemistry of their misfortunes but the fact that they are important to their friends and families and that they are still fully human.
In the Odyssey, Ulysses meets the immortal goddess Calypso, who has never met a mortal before. She envies Ulysses his mortality, as it gives meaning to his choices and actions. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver visits a society among whom now and then is born an immortal, someone doomed to grow old and decrepit, lose all friends as they die off, and live on in misery. A society whose members never died would soon become too overcrowded or refrain from having children and thus be deprived of their newness and fresh promise. Instead, humans are mortal, and with that mortality comes the tragic possibility of early death.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Much misfortune is due to random events that just happen to cause pain, and no one is immune, including the virtuous. In Chapters 3 and 4, Kushner explores this idea, gently separating random fate from God’s plans and permitting us to confront our sorrows without implicating the Deity or resenting Him for cruelty when He harbors no such motive.
Kushner argues that God’s universe includes a certain amount of dangerous chaos; many misfortunes can be traced to this randomness, along with the often-evil consequences of the free will that God has conferred on humanity. He doesn’t wish us to hurt for no reason, but pain is an integral part of the human experience, and God won’t intervene to prevent it. He shares our suffering and even our outrage against bad things, but he doesn’t deliberately cause them.
Supporting Kushner’s explanations for God’s unwillingness to intervene are the laws of chaos theory, which include the fact that infinitesimal variations in early conditions generate results almost infinitely variable and unpredictable later on—for example, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China that result, months afterward, in changes to an Atlantic hurricane’s power and direction. Thus, if God intervenes to alter a chaotic, random event so that it doesn’t cause harm, this intervention can lead to even greater chaos and damage down the line.
God might wish to manipulate events so that no virtuous person is ever harmed by accidental natural events, but the calculations that would protect good people from any such harm would soon grow infinite. It’s simply not feasible for the victims of, for example, a fatal plane crash to be sorted out ahead of time; it’s infinitely more difficult to sort out every accident everywhere in the universe so that they harm no one. If God were to try, his universe would quickly become unmanageable.
For Kushner, God in His goodness resolves the unfairness of natural processes with a “Please excuse the mess” explanation and an “I’ll make it up to you later” promise. (God also offers strength and love to those who pray for it, but that argument comes later in the book.)
An alternate, but related, view of God’s non-involvement comes from Deism, the belief that God built the universe, set it in motion, and now sits back and watches, His hands no longer on the levers of Creation. This idea was widely shared by America’s founders and framers. It’s a view, however, not shared by critics of Kushner, who believe the God he portrays is impotent and hardly a deity to fear or respect. Kushner’s response is that God is a being of compassion rather than harsh judgment, one who feels our pain and wants us to grow from the experience.
Kushner contrasts humans with other animals, declaring that people differ in large part because they have free will and can learn and grow in ways that animals cannot. However, many biologists who work with highly intelligent animals—chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, dolphins, and whales—might argue with Kushner on the matter.
