When Bad Things Happen to Good People

The subject book by Rabbi Harold Kushner is a well recognized book on the subject of trying to understand grief in the context of God and faith and loved by many. His son Aaron was diagnosed with progeria ("rapid aging") at 3 and they knew it was terminal at a young age. He died at age 14. Certainly, a tragic event and one that drove Rabbi Kushner to question God, faith, life, etc as it would any father.

I think the book may well be useful to many people, but I have a lot of theological and philosophical concern with it. I found the key words in the book to be:

I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die for whatever exalted reason.

So why is it God's responsibility to be the kind of God that one can worship more easily? From the perspective of an infinite God, are those really his only options? What is it that limits his options? How we think and feel?

Rabbi Kushner has a lot of thoughts about how God can and can't be -- in my mind, there isn't much reason to believe in a God that is not SOVEREIGN. I may or may not "agree / understand / be able to explain" a whole host of things about an infinite God, but I believe the least that my lowly person can do is recognize that it is he, not me, that is sovereign.

Kushner argues that we ought not be angry at God because his god is "limited"--god really can't prevent bad things from happening, so he ought not be blamed. While I enjoyed some of his discussion of Job, I disagreed with his conclusions and felt all the way through the book that if one was to believe in a god that was as small as Rabbi Kushners, one may as well be an atheist.