The Miami tower disaster and those who find meaning in suffering

This was especially true of the Orthodox Jewish community. Observant Jews left their homes in New Jersey, Los Angeles and especially New York and moved to Surfside, Bal Harbor and Miami Beach. And the horrendous tax burden of the blue states made Florida all the more desirable.

Then last week in Surfside, hundreds of people came crashing down in the horrors of the Champlain Tower disaster that is so horrible it beggars the imagination. As of this writing, more than 150 people remain unaccounted for.

And suddenly people saw that death was everywhere and inescapable. You did not need to be a Jew living in Sderot or Ashkelon with Hamas rockets falling on your head to face mortal danger. You could be in the beautiful sunshine of Miami Beach and terror could strike.

We pray for all those who are still missing and yes, God does and will perform miracles.

But as soon as I heard about the terrible events in my childhood home town, I knew it would lead to a general call on the part of rabbis and other leaders in the Jewish community to do some soul-searching. Such terrible events that have decimated the Jewish community over the last year – from a global pandemic that hit the hassidic community especially hard, to the Mount Meron disaster, to a Jewish family killed in Italy on a cable car, to the terrorists’ rockets fired at Israel, and then the Champlain Tower disaster – would no doubt lead to many telling us that God was sending us a message. We have to repent. We have to unite. We have to be less materialistic, more loving, more spiritual.

All those things are true for their own sake. But I hate when we connect them with disaster. The people who are fighting for their lives at the bottom of the rubble of the Florida condominium deserve better than the rest of us pontificating as to why they were struck with disaster. They deserve our prayers. They deserve our hope. Their families deserve our love and our comfort. But what they don’t deserve are our remonstrations about how we can be better people while they fight for air.

ONCE AND for all, we need to stop sullying religion by making it into a dogma that justifies human suffering. The belief that God punishes us because we’re bad people, when in fact most of us are pretty decent even as we are imperfect, has to finally stop.

I have written several books addressing the question of why a good God allows the innocent to suffer, most notably The Fed-Up Man of Faith, and Wrestling with the Divine.

I am still amazed when people come up to me to argue about the content of the books, which express the Jewish idea that we must challenge God in the face of human suffering and never make peace with it and never accept that Jewish assimilation led to the Holocaust or other such twaddle.

Why do so many religious people enjoy portraying God as executioner-in-chief, and are always finding reasons to justify human suffering?

The Holocaust produced two camps of Jews. Many decided that the Jews had been punished for intermarriage and wanting to be secular. But others had a much more Jewish response: They rejected any theological justification or self-blame and set to work even harder toward the creation of a Jewish state where Jews would find refuge and build an army to prevent another genocide.

The appropriate response to death is always life. And the Jewish response to suffering is to demand that God put an end to it.

People search for a reason to explain why people suffer. They want to redeem tragedy by giving it meaning. Suffering ennobles the spirit, they say. It makes you more mature. It helps you focus on what’s important in life.

I would argue that suffering has no purpose, no redeeming qualities, and any attempts to infuse it with rich significance are deeply misguided.

Of course, suffering can lead ultimately to a positive outcome. The rich man who had contempt for the poor and suddenly loses his money can become more empathetic when he himself struggles. The arrogant executive who treats her subordinates like dirt can soften when she is told that she, God forbid, has breast cancer.

But does it have to come about this way? Is suffering the only way to learn goodness?

Jewish values maintain that there is no good that comes from suffering that could not have come through more blessed means. Some people win the lottery and are so humbled that they dedicate a huge portion to charity. A rock star like Bono becomes rich and famous and consecrates his celebrity to the relief of poverty.

Yes, the Holocaust led directly to the creation of the State of Israel. But there are plenty of nations that came into existence without being preceded by gas chambers and tens of thousands shot in the head in a Ukrainian ravine.

HERE IS another way that Jewish values are so strongly distinguished from other value systems. Many religions believe that suffering is redemptive. In Christianity, the suffering servant, the crucified Christ, brings atonement for the sins of mankind through his own torment. The message: No suffering, no redemption. Someone has to die so that the sins of mankind are erased.

Suffering is therefore extolled in the New Testament. St. Paul even made suffering an obligation, encouraging the fledgling Christians to “share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus.”

But Judaism, in prophesying a perfect messianic future where there is no death or pain, ultimately rejects the suffering-is-redemptive narrative. Suffering isn’t a blessing. It’s a curse.

Save a better and safer building code and more condominium towers checked for possible corrosion, there is no good whatsoever that will come from the Champlain tower collapse. The only good is if, God willing, the missing people are found to be alive. Period.

Jews are obligated to alleviate all human misery. Suffering leaves you bitter rather than blessed, scarred rather than humble. Few endure suffering without serious and lasting trauma. Suffering leads to a tortured spirit and a pessimistic outlook. It scars our psyches and creates a cynical consciousness devoid and bereft of hope.

Suffering causes us to dig out the insincerity in the hearts of our fellows and to be envious of other people’s happiness. If individuals do become better people as a result of their suffering, it is despite the fact that they suffered and not because of it. Ennoblement of character comes through triumph over suffering rather than its endurance.

I used to love listening to the speeches of my mentor Elie Wiesel. What emerged from his haunting words is that the only thing garnered from suffering was loneliness, heartbreak and outrage. To be sure, the Holocaust taught us the infinite value of every human life and the sublime quality of human companionship. But these lessons could easily be learned from life-affirming experiences like family summer vacations rather than relatives gathered outside a collapsed apartment tower with rivers of tears streaming down their cheeks.

I believe that my parents’ divorce drove me to a deeper understanding of life and a greater embrace of my Judaism. Yet I know people who have led completely privileged lives and have far deeper philosophies of life and are even more devoted to their religion than I am. And they have the advantage of not being bitter, cynical or pessimistic the way I sometimes can be because of the pain of my early childhood.

Whatever good we as individuals, or the world in general, receive from suffering can be brought about in a painless, joyful manner. And it behooves people of faith especially to once and for all cease justifying the death of innocents and instead rush to comfort and aid the survivors. I pray for the missing in the Champlain Tower. May God grant them life.