Why, God, Why?

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December 26, 2022

13 min read

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A frank conversation about suffering with Gershon Schusterman, a rabbi who suddenly became a widower with 11 children at age 38.

At age 38, Rabbi Gershon Schusterman suddenly became a widower with 11 children to raise single-handedly. At the time, Rabbi Schusterman was the director of the 400-student Hebrew Academy of Huntington Beach in Southern California. One Sunday morning, his wife, Rochel Leah, called him while he was away teaching to report she was feeling terrible.

“From her voice I immediately knew that something was very wrong, and I drove home as fast as I could and then got her to the emergency room,” Rabbi Schusterman remembers. While praying for her recovery in the ER waiting room the doctor came out with the grim news. “He put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘We did everything we could, but your wife passed away.’ Life as I knew it had changed forever, for our children and me.”

His wife was only 36 and had been living with an undisclosed congenital heart defect.

Rochel Leah was only 36, and had been living with an undisclosed congenital heart defect. Their children ranged in age from 14 to 16-month-old twins. “I was devastated,” he writes in his new book, Why, God, Why? How to Believe in Heaven When It Hurts Like Hell.

For decades, Rabbi Schusterman had considered writing a book that would provide a framework for coming to terms with inexplicable tragedy and loss. Rabbi Schusterman realized this goal with the recent release of his book, Why God Why?, which is based on Rabbi Schusterman’s personal experiences and also on Jewish learning and wisdom; it provides a roadmap toward acceptance and to embracing a forward-looking outlook on life.

Aish.com had the opportunity to interview Rabbi Schusterman:

Aish: In your book you reference Rabbi Harold Kushner’s bestselling 1981 book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, which has sold millions of copies. You found it troubling as a guide for those suffering from tragedy. What did you find wrong with that book?

Rabbi Schusterman: Rabbi Kushner and his wife suffered terribly after losing their 14-year-old son to a rare genetic disease called progeria, which causes premature aging. My heart certainly went out to them both. But Rabbi Kushner’s answer to the question of “why do bad things happen to good people” was that God was simply incapable of preventing certain tragedies or evils in life. If this were true, much of human suffering is arbitrary.

This is not an authentically Jewish answer, and it is also psychologically unsettling. Like Rabbi Kushner, I also faced a spiritual crisis after my young wife died so suddenly. However, I always understood that God was the Master Planner of what happened to us, and that nothing was random. I spent many years digging deeper into our teachings and into my own heart so that I could appreciate what Judaism really taught about accepting what I could not understand and how to move forward in my life, eventually with optimism.

Aish: What did you learn about yourself and your own faith after your loss?

Rabbi Schusterman: I had served as a community rabbi for many years, and when people in my community or in our school suffered tragic loss, God forbid, I dutifully sat with the families, listened to them, providing them with the time-honored Jewish answers that I had delivered dozens of times to those who were spiraling through grief. As the “consoler-in-chief,” I thought I knew all the answers.

But when my wife died, I was in deep shock and pain. I lacked the emotional language to express my feelings even to myself, and not surprisingly, they began to eat away at me. In fact, I felt betrayed by God and began to distance myself from Him. I didn’t play mental gymnastics and try to convince myself that somehow it was good. It was bad, tragic, and emotionally devastating. But, as Job said to his wife even as he was writhing in the pain of his suffering, Shall we accept the good from God and not accept the bad?

In my mind I still accepted God’s ultimate dominion and goodness as an article of faith, but my heart had gone cold and I had a grudge against God. With the help of wise counsel, I learned that I could release God, as it were, from those grudges. I needed God, and I needed to renew our relationship unfettered. These realizations allowed me to gradually return to my balanced self.

Aish: If this was so hard for you as a rabbi, what chance do “average” people have to not hold that grudge or turn against God, assuming they even believed in God in the first place? How are we to make sense of tragedy and evil?

Rabbi Schusterman: In the Book of Exodus, God tells Moses, “No human can see My face and live, [but] you could see My back, but not My face,” so to speak. This means that only in hindsight can we possibly understand God’s more mysterious, and even difficult choices. We may gain this understanding during our lifetimes, but we also may need to wait for clarity after our physical lives are over and we live in the higher World of Truth.

Allow yourself to challenge Him, let Him know you are upset, feel betrayed, and are angry.

Another way to cope is by leaning into God and allowing yourself to challenge Him, let Him know you are upset, feel betrayed, and are angry. I had been afraid to let God know how upset and betrayed I felt, and I kept those emotions bottled up for a long time. When I felt ready to “let God have it,” so to speak, I began to build a deeper, more trusting, more authentic relationship with Him.

A solid, secure relationship can take the occasional argument, even a very serious one. After I allowed myself that freedom to let God know how I really felt, it actually became easier to see His blessings and endless kindness. Since then, I have a closer relationship with God than before, and a more honest one, too.

I understand that this outcome can sound remote, if not impossible, for people still in the raw stages of grief. Even for me, getting this closeness was the work of many years. But I was determined to find the answers that I knew existed within Judaism, which led me to uncover teachings that have transformed my life and enriched my faith. In particular, I know that even when God’s actions remain beyond our understanding, God is the ultimate Counselor, always caring, and always here to listen to us. From an abyss of pain and bewilderment, I learned to rebuild a meaningful, purposeful, joy-filled life.

Aish: What about your children? How did you manage to raise 11 children by yourself?

Rabbi Schusterman: Thank God I was fortunate to remarry within a few years. Chana Rachel has been a wonderful wife and mother to our children. But certainly, those first long months after Rochel Leah passed away were the hardest months of my life. Our lives were filled with confusion and uncertainty. I had lost my balance and didn’t feel normal, whatever normal means anyway. I was not sure of the way forward.

Rabbi Schusterman and his wife, Chana Rachel

With time and counseling, I came to understand that not feeling normal was normal . . . for that period. I learned that this would pass and a new normal would emerge, but it would be different—for each of us in the family. For some of us, it would take a shorter path, for some longer; for some of us it would be a smoother path, for others it would be bumpier. And so it was.

Aish: In your book you write about the need for acceptance of the painful circumstances that make us suffer. Why is this important?

Rabbi Schusterman: First of all, I think it’s important to distinguish between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I realized that within my pain I had a choice: Would I hold on to the pain as an end in itself? If the answer was yes, then I was choosing to suffer. This would make me a victim to my predicament.

My faith in God eventually showed me that my pain had a purpose, which I would only be able to see once I submitted to and accepted God’s will. In psychology, when you work through the five stages of grief, the final stage is acceptance. Likewise, from a religious viewpoint, faith gets you to that final stage.

Acceptance does not diminish the pain, but acceptance is important because it can give us the fortitude and endurance to keep moving forward.

Acceptance does not diminish the pain, but acceptance is important because it can give us the fortitude and endurance to keep moving forward. Our heart’s chambers are big enough to hold two feelings simultaneously: space to feel pain for the loss, and space to hold onto our faith in God, who orchestrated the events for a purpose that is beyond our understanding.

Aish: How do you understand why the Holocaust happened?

Rabbi Schusterman: My chapter on the Holocaust was the most difficult to write. The vastness of its murderous depravity has turned many people off to God entirely, and writers and theologians have struggled with and written about the Holocaust for two generations. Their opinions range from suggesting that God Himself, as it were, was murdered with the six million (as odious and blasphemous as these words are to the ears of a believer) to that the Holocaust was punishment for any of a thousand sins or wrongdoings. I reject any notion—as I learned from my teacher and guide, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson—that the Holocaust was a punishment of any kind.

Writing about the Holocaust places a writer in a no-win situation. Finding an answer—as if this were even possible—in effect rationalizes and therefore “justifies” the event. This is an impossible suggestion, as well as a desecration of the memory of the six million murdered, and perhaps also a desecration of God Himself.

In my chapter on the Holocaust I carefully explain various theodicies—or religious explanations—that attempt to make sense of this massive and unprecedented evil. My conclusion is that finding any satisfying answer is impossible. The only way to come to terms with it is through the recognition and acceptance that there are aspects of God that are unknowable. In fact, without accepting God and God’s role in tragedy and its resolution, there is no comprehensive resolution to tragedy. It is all about coping, not resolving.

Interestingly, while many survivors lost their faith in the Holocaust, many others actually found faith in the concentration camps in their effort to come to terms with the tragedy of tragedies. This has been well documented, including through a study done by Tel Aviv University on Faith after the Holocaust.

And even if we could understand His reasons for creating suffering, we might not want to know those reasons. Think about this: If we understood 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 that spring from observing evil and injustice to alleviate suffering and do acts of goodness and kindness. This brings healing and justice wherever we can.

Aish: What happens after we die? Is there an afterlife?

Rabbi Schusterman: Judaism believes that we each possess an eternal soul which never dies. After our physical lives end, our souls transition to the Afterlife. This is the time and place when life’s unfinished business gets worked out and when all will be good. This is the World to Come we’ve been waiting for, a world of clarity and ultimate spiritual contentment.

The concept of an eternal soul is not an outrageous, unrealistic, anti-science, or extreme position. It is true and consistent with sound scientific theory. There have been thousands of reports by people who “went over to the other side” briefly and returned, and their reports are remarkably consistent. The Talmud even relates such a story. When our souls are elevated to Heaven, we will be completely liberated from the mixed messages, the temptations of the material, physical, and even intellectual offerings in this life. We will clearly see the one absolute, objective reality and truth of God and Godliness.

As I explain in the chapter about the Afterlife, this world is the ultimate experience in values clarification. Reward and punishment in heaven might mean that we finally, ultimately realize what life was meant to be. Our souls will either take pleasure in having lived a life that validated these values (that would be Heaven) or suffer from realizing how much of life we have squandered pointlessly—or worse (that would be Hell).

In the Afterlife we get to reflect on our worldly, painful struggles in retrospect. We will experience a paradigm shift—the confirmation that all our challenges were opportunities for refinement in preparation for this ultimate stage. The trials and difficulties we complained about, asking, “Why are these bad things happening to us?” are now rephrased as, “I now see that these challenging events happened for us.”

This is what it means to “see the light.” It can only happen once we enter the Godly realm, ready to receive our soul’s Godly revelations directly.

Aish: What if someone just can’t get out from their pain? What should they do?

Rabbi Schusterman: If you are in pain, let it wash over you like a wave. You will survive, you will be stronger, and you will be able to deal with the next wave with added resilience. If you need help, ask for support from a friend, a trained counselor, or member of the clergy, and do so in a safe and supportive environment.

We are not victims to whom a tragedy “happened.” Each of us is the captain of our ship and master of our destiny.

There is no single recipe to cope with and overcome life’s painful challenges and losses. But God has faith in you, and wants you to do more than just survive. God wants you to become better, stronger, and more resilient. It may sound like a cliché, but it’s true just the same: Attitude is everything. We are not victims to whom a tragedy “happened.” Each of us is the captain of our ship and master of our destiny.

Seeing yourself as a victim of circumstances is self-fulfilling. If this is the message you repeat to yourself, you will become a victim. But you can turn this on its head and instead see yourself as a person who has been purposefully challenged to prove your mettle. This internal message will bring out your resilience and strength.

Know that God has sent these trials to us, for us. Whether or not we understand it, appreciate it, and feel ready to meet the challenge, it helps to embrace the mindset that somehow, this is purposeful and even for our benefit.

And so, when a wave of pain surges powerfully, know that you can ride the wave. Dive into its core and recognize that there’s a positive plan in what appears to be destructive. If you commit to learning to do this, you can have an exhilarating, positive, life-expanding growth experience.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, “We have to start new every day, and sometimes, many times a day.” Sometimes we just have to take a deep breath and start again.

Visit Rabbi Schusterman’s site at https://whygodwhythebook.com/

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