When Bad Things Are Allowed to Happen

I found myself thinking recently about Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

It’s one of those books that lives in the background of a culture — referenced and reread often. The question it asks is timeless: why do bad things happen to good people?

But lately, that question feels… incomplete.

Because what we’re witnessing now isn’t just suffering. It’s something more unsettling.

What happens when bad things are allowed to happen: not in isolation, but at scale?

Every day we are fed a diet of bad things happening. And it’s a weight we dearly wish we could lose. Instead, day after day, we absorb news of the newest antisemitic attacks including the most recent defacements in Rego Park.

It’s disorienting. It’s exhausting. Emotionally and physically, the mind and body being so intertwined. It’s the reason voices that were once loud and certain sometimes go quiet — not out of indifference, but out of shock. And a need to collect ourselves and restore a sense of equilibrium.

Meanwhile, we are upset and angry about what we’re seeing. We’re just stunned that so many others don’t seem to be.

Or worse — that they are but too many have decided it’s acceptable.

Kushner asked how to live in a world where bad things happen. He didn’t offer neat explanations for suffering. He shifted the question away from why and toward what now?

Not everything can be explained. But how we respond to it is still a choice.

We’re now facing a different test: how to live in a world where too many people are willing to accept the bad things.

That’s not evolution. It’s erosion.