Title: Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People: Finding Light in the Darkness
Author: Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt
Publisher: Adir Press
“Saying ‘Everything God does is for the best’ is simply a form of orienting oneself. Let me be open to the good. And when a person is open to the good, he will always find it. Because the good is not in the circumstances, it is in the choice itself.”
In Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People, Rabbi Rosenblatt documents the realizations he came to about pain and suffering during the illness of his late wife Elana, a”h. There may be pain, there may be suffering but neither of these is bad. The same way that pain experienced by a woman in labor or an athlete in training is perceived as a harbinger of good, all pain has the possibility of being perceived that way. Painkillers dull our perception of pain therefore, in order to transcend pain and suffering, we need to alter our perception and find the good in it. And we have that choice.
Similar in tone to Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People explores the promise in every experience as long as we look for the good and the work on accepting that there is good and meaning there even if it isn’t clear to us at the outset.
“We all go through pain in our lives. No one is exempt. What makes some people different from others is how they rise to the challenge of their pain.”
In its third edition, with letters of approbation from the late Rabbi Noah Weinberg, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, Rabbi Dr. Akiva Tatz, Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits and Rabbi Michel Twerski, the book tackles some existential questions in a very succinct and straightforward way.
Rabbi Rosenblatt is a rabbi in London who is also the founder of Tikun, a chesed organization with many activities and programs.
Of course Rabbi Rosenblatt’s greatest chesed is sharing his experiences that lead to the conclusion that God loves us all and it’s all good. Because “when a person is open to the good, he will always find it.”