Rabbi's Musings

This Week’s Question: Why Do People in the Bible Suffer So Much?

Someone once said you wouldn’t want your children to grow up to be anyone in the Bible.

It is hard to be Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, et al. People in the Bible are often nasty, cruel and spiteful. And those are the good guys! Why can’t the Bible have happier stories and people? Why do the protagonists get chased out of their home countries, sold into slavery, and of-times do horrible things like commit adultery, lie and cheat family members out of their birthrights?

It is true that good stories need tension. The Bible has that. It is also a fact that – unlike Christianity – Judaism did not envision its heroes as saints. Imperfection is sometimes ugly, but it is hard to emulate a perfect person.

I think the key issue is that the Bible wants to teach us to become resilient. Like biblical characters, we are to learn how to overcome adversity. Poet Dylan Thomas said, “There’s only one thing that’s worse than having an unhappy childhood, and that’s having a too-happy childhood.” I don’t know if this is true, but I do know that too many women and men feel lesser somehow because of the adversities they have grown up with, imagining they would be happier or more successful people if they had enjoyed stress-free upbringings. But this isn’t necessarily the case. It is often those who struggled early who succeed the most later in life.

In the end, we all should work for and hope for resilience. We should all understand that our reaction to life is what makes us strong, not our circumstances.

A great military leader (with a supposedly hot temper) was given a beautiful bowl for an important tea ceremony. Someone dropped the bowl, which broke into five pieces. One of the guests spoke up with an improvised poem cleverly linking the name of the giver of the bowl, the style of the bowl and the five broken pieces, making them all laugh and avoiding the wrath of the hot-headed leader. This specific bowl has since become quite famous and is considered very important.

The bowl has become more beautiful for having been broken. … In other words, the proof of its fragility and its resilience is what makes it beautiful.

The opposite of depression isn’t happiness, writes Peter D. Kramer in his book Against Depression. The opposite of depression is resilience. It’s not the absence of guilt and sadness but is the ability to find a path away from those feelings. The Bible was on to this fact millennia ago.