Grappling With Chaos

Another mass shooting Friday night, this time in a small town near Houston. A neighbor complained about a man making too much noise firing his gun in his yard. The man went to his neighbor’s house and shot five people dead.

From the brief first article in the Times, two sentences shook me.

Sheriff Capers: “The bodies of two women were found in a bedroom on top of two children (ages six weeks and three years), both of whom survived.”

A neighbor in a different house, Guadalupe Calderon: “Only God knows why he did it.”

From that article I jumped by chance to the obituary of Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of the bestselling book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Kushner wrote it to reconcile tragedy–––his personal one was a young son lost to a rare fatal disease–––with his belief in an omnipotent and infinitely loving God. Kushner’s main argument was to credit God with limitless powers of spiritual love and healing, yet a mysterious reluctance to intervene in human affairs.

In philosophy, this effort to reconcile faith in a God who, despite having limitless powers, still allows evil and injustice to flourish is called “theodicy.” I see it as an effort to make sense of a chaotic world in which we are all subject to a constant lottery of good and bad fortune. Whatever you call it, this contradiction is at the heart of every religion’s belief system, and you can distinguish different religions in large part by the various ways their belief systems attempt to reconcile the contradiction.

Kushner died on Thursday. The shooting took place very late Friday evening. In between the two events, I attended Friday night services at a Manhattan synagogue to celebrate the imminent marriage of my son to my soon-to-be daughter-in-law. Our two families of the bride and groom were filled with joy, and when the rabbi told the story of how our children had met and then blessed them, we too felt blessed. That night, surrounded by the love of our families and the well wishes and congratulations of the congregation, in the moment I felt I had won the lottery of good fortune.

In the Book of Job, God inflicts every misery, short of death, upon the unfortunate Job who asks “Why me?”  For Job has always been a good man, a ten out of ten in terms of both his piety and his ethical behavior.  Job compares himself to “a driven leaf,” blown this way and that by God’s inexplicable and cruel will. And when Job dares to question God directly, he’s essentially told he has no right to ask (the equivalent of Succession’s Logan Roy’s favorite two word dismissal, “F off.”) But through it all, remarkably, Job keeps his faith, and ultimately, in an epilogue, we learn that Job is rewarded when his good fortune is restored­–––more wealth than he had before and a new set of children, his first set having died (probably a deal that Logan Roy would have gladly made!­­­––yes, I’m obsessed with the show and the character.)

I can’t think of a reverse analogue to the Book of Job in foundational Jewish texts. There’s mercy as when God puts his protective mark on the fratricidal Cain. But no powerful vignette about good things happening to bad people. And that makes sense. All religions, in their own way and influenced by the mores of their own times, were created to promote both good behavior and adherence to ritual and tradition.

I am a Reform Jew, which means that compared to other branches of Judaism, ethical commandments are emphasized and ritual and traditional commandments that have lost their rationale in the modern world are optional. Love thy neighbor, yes. Keep kosher, up to you. Every week, for example, when I fail to observe the many restrictions of the Sabbath (Shabbat from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown) the foundational Jewish texts would call for the community to execute me by stoning.

So for me, as a rationalist, I look at good fortune that comes my way and I disassociate it from religion. I believe that some portion of good fortune comes from our own efforts, but so much of it, most in fact, arrives by chance, out of the chaos of a million contingencies.

But there’s a fragility to this mindset. If the wheel turns, and I’m visited by misfortune, how do I prepare for that? In my current spiritual state, I would not have the “patience of Job.” I’m afraid I might crumble in the face of severe adversity.

At Friday’s service, the rabbi addressed the opt-in, opt-out nature of reform Judaism. She encouraged the congregation to consider following a commandment or two that had no ethical or other rationale except “because God says so.” As an example she cited the mysterious commandment (shatnez) not to mix wool with linen in the same piece of clothing.

I thought that was good advice, an entryway to begin accepting the chaos of life, to accept that God, however one may come to conceive of Him, works in mysterious ways.

There’s a brilliant translation of the very first line of the Bible that haunts me, because I think the world remains in the chaotic condition described.

“At the beginning of God's creating of the heavens and the earth when the earth was wild and waste, darkness over the face of Ocean, rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters.”  (Everett Fox, “The Five Books of Moses”)

Chaos and darkness came to Texas late Friday night. We can say, generally, it happened because we live in a wild and waste country plagued by the darkness of guns and gun culture. But why, specifically, those victims? Perhaps chaos or perhaps God knows or perhaps both.

And what about the two women who sacrificed their own lives to save the two young children who were not theirs? Let us call it an act of heroic holiness, made possible only by faith and belief in God.