In the book of Exodus 33:13 Moses asks God: “…if I have found favor in your eyes, please show me your way, so that I may know you…” The question is one of those existential questions: Why do good people sometimes do badly and bad people do well?

In the Talmud’s Berachot 1:7, our sages try to explain it and in the first instance they tell us that depending on how the father of the person was, so will the son do. If the person is good and the father was not, then the person will do badly and vice versa. But the Gemara itself does not accept this answer: How can it be that a person’s fortune depends on the actions of his father? The Gemara tries to offer another explanation: perhaps that person is not completely good or not completely bad and that is why things are bad for the first and good for the second.

And the discussion between our sages continues until finally Rabbi Meir says: “In reality God does not give Moses an answer. In Exodus 33:19 God tells him, “I will favor the one I choose to favor, and I will be gracious to the one I choose to be gracious to,” meaning that even to the one who does not deserve God to be gracious to him, He can be gracious to him. This answer reminds us of what Rabbi Yannai says in Pirkei Avot 4:19: “We do not know how to understand why the wicked enjoy during their existence and why the righteous suffer during their life.”

In his book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, after learning of the diagnosis of the terrible illness of his three-year-old son Aaron, asks himself: “I thought I was following God’s ways and doing His work. How can this be happening to my family?” If God exists, if He were just a little fair, let alone loving and merciful, how could He have done this to me? And Kushner himself answers: “We should not ask, as Job did: “God, why are you doing this to me?” but we should say: God, look at what is happening to me. Can you help me? We should seek God not to judge us or forgive us, not to reward us or punish us, but to give us strength or comfort us.”

I have witnessed how people who call themselves religious, attribute the misfortune of others to their failure to fulfill the mitzvoth. Nothing could be more wrong. In reality, we do not understand why life is not fair, because to understand it we would have to know the ways of God. And not even Moshe Rabeinu knew them.

By: Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Tractate Berachot, The Art Scroll Series, Mesorah Publications, LTD and Harold Kushnier “When bad things happen to good people”.