Sunday 13th June: Quote from Harold S. Kushner

In 'When Bad Things Happen to Good People' by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner (my edition is the 1982 from Pan Books), Kushner writes as both a Rabbi of many years experience, and also as the father of a son who was born with a degenerative disease, lived his life in pain, and died aged 14 years. In the first chapter Kushner goes through the most common explanations people of faith give to the question of how God can be just and loving, as well as omnipotent, and still permit suffering to exist. I really like this quote below where he refutes the assertion often made to people who are suffering that God only gives us an amount or portion of suffering that God already knows we can bear:

The Talmud, the compilation of the teachings of the rabbis between the years 200 BC and AD 500, explains Abraham's test this way: if you go to the marketplace, you will see the potter hitting his clay pots with a stick to show how strong and solid they are. But the wise potter hits only the strongest pots, never the flawed ones. So to, God sends such tests and afflictions only to people He knows are capable of handling them, so they and others can learn the extent of their spiritual strength... Does God "temper the wind to the shorn lamb"? Does He never ask more of us than we can endure? My experience, alas, has been otherwise. I have seen people crack under the strain of unbearable tragedy. I have seen marriages break up after the death of a child, because parents blame each other for not taking proper care or for carrying the defective gene, or simply because the memories they carry are unendurably painful. I have seen people made noble and sensitive through suffering, but I have seen many more people made cynical and bitter. I have seen people become jealous of those around them, unable to take part in the routines of normal living. I have seen cancers and automobile accidents take the life of one member of the family, and functionally end the lives of five others, who could never again be normal cheerful people they were before disaster struck. If
God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen him miscalculate far too often."