Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? (Parshas Re'ei)

yeah okay all right so no joke listen this is a serious question people are suffering people have hard lives just just the reality there there are a lot of challenges in life and people are are people are going through difficulties and it is causing them a great deal of pain and i get asked about this all the time and what's the answer there is no answer because to somebody else's pain you can't be cavalier you can't be blase about it you have to have compassion i can only speak philosophically about my own pain which always puts me in a peculiar position because if i know i'm speaking about myself to myself but it's like going out on the internet so other people are going to hear it they're going to think i'm talking to them the truth is listen i'm not talking to you i'm not telling you what you should do about your pain what you should do about your pain i i i if i see you in pain my only response is i say to hashem asheville yeah how could a good and just god inflict pain on somebody but i'm saying for me for myself for myself how how do i process it i'm going to tell you right now okay so this week's powershell parses see that today i placed before you broke blessing and a curse blessing and curse okay let's talk about the bracha and the klala the blessing and the curse what's a claw so if you want to know what something means sometimes you need to have it translate it so there are two major translations classic canonical translations of the title i don't mean like english french russian i mean translations that are holy and they are canonized as being part of the homici in many himachal at least one of them is in pretty much every homish which is oncolous and then there's another targum which is targum is uh translation but we we mean aramaic translation because aramaic was the vernacular of the jewish people for so many centuries uh the talmud is written in in aramaic the jewish people spoke aramaic so uh in addition to uncles we have what's what's called the targamyanism jaenus and ben ozil janice minizil was one of the tanoyim he was a talmud of hillel historically you're the one who went into the water new zealand was the one they said when he when he was learning the the birds would fly overhead and get scorched from the holiness yeah so he was earlier he was in the times of hillo second base of mikdush and uncles was actually during the time of the destruction of the second base of immigration in fact his uncle was titus the roman caesar who destroyed the base hamikdash so venezuela's earlier and uh uncle this is a little bit later uncles became for whatever reasons became accepted as more of the primary aramaic translation but at any rate so on this possible see that i give to you i place before you today the blessing and the curse so uncle says you should see today i give before you birch that is aramaic for bracha klola blessing and curse i give to a blessing a curse but you look in the targum yanisin and he says abamesha nivea he's letting us know who's speaking first of all let's just know masha's speaking mesha the prophet you should see i'm placing before or arranging before you today luffa the blessing and its exchange khilof means an exchange yeah so this it's very interesting first of all what does it mean it's exchange not it's opposite but it's exchanged so maybe you're saying you you you trade in one for the other okay possibly because it could be neutral that you have neither so i'm just wondering why it's like well then why isn't the curse and its exchange meaning the baseline is the bracha and then the exchange is apparently the claw also in case you think that that jaenison benzel was being euphemistic and he was afraid to use the word that oncolous uses levatin which means curse i want to tell you something threep suck him later he uses that word see this is the first possible which is uh but possible you're talking about how they're going to arrange you know the the whole thing with tigerism and how evil the two mountains with the blessings and the curses so there when it says he translates he trans jaenis new zeal translates the word claula the way that uncles does he translates with the aramaic word which means curse so he is fully capable of using the word curse he clearly knew the word curse he uses it three verses later but in this verse no he won't use the word curse he says the exchange of the bracha so here's the idea i know i usually tell a story i'm not in the mood for stories if you're talking about either brachas and clawley's are there blessings and curses you've got to be crazy not to think there are of course there are toyota speaks about it and i don't need the there to tell me about it you know you see it in life when i say curse i don't mean like bad mojo like you know i've got bad luck a voodoo hacks a curse meaning pain and we see of course of course there's there's there's pain in this world darkness of course it exists and therefore there's a word for it and there's a translation for it and we can speak about it but that's not what this verse is saying this verse is saying speaking first person saying i am placing before you today this thing called brachan this thing called claw ain there is no evil which descends from on high you want to talk about our human experience yet there's good and there's bad and i don't just mean morally good and morally bad i mean just from a human experience of hardship and suffering and challenge their experiences which everyone would agree i don't want that you pay me a million dollars i don't want to go through that i wouldn't do it for a million dollars i wouldn't do it for a billion dollars i don't want that experience so from from the perspective of of a human experience yes we can we can definitely say there are experiences which we would consider a curse nobody wants it but that's not what we're talking about here what we're talking about here is in its origin if you ask what is it that hashem gave you not how it's experienced and i know it sounds like semantic word games but it's incredibly important here as you experience it yeah nobody's denying it it's a curse but the way hashem is giving it it's not a curse it's a bracha or potentially the luffa it's exchange in other words there's like two perspectives at the same time you want to talk about subjectively human experience the way i go through it there's there's clearly this bracha in this claw there's a pleasant experience and there's a painful experience but if you want to talk about the what what hashem is actually giving me hashem's not giving me a claw i end up experiencing it as a claw and there's no denying that we're not trying to we're not trying to invalidate people's suffering i'll just suck it up what are you talking about god is good no you didn't go through hell god is good no person did go through hell we're not invalidating that experience at the same time what we're saying and again we're not saying this to anyone else we're saying it to ourselves i'm saying it to myself that whatever i went through that was painful i have to realize there are two planes on which this is existing simultaneously this is the plane on which i'm experiencing it and it's painful but then there's the plane on which it is given from which it's given meaning it's origin so hashem is giving me different types of experiences and really they're all they're all blessings hashem only only blesses us every kind of experience is only a blessing except because we have the ability to experience it subjectively and interpret it and give it our story our narrative so therefore we could experience the as its exchange but it's not a distinct thing it's not like this bracha and there's claw in its origin there's only bracha and the potential to flip the script so to speak and interpret the bracha as something different than what it is but really in its origin there's no brochure down here as we experience it there's brachan there's clawla there's pleasant experiences and there's painful experiences but up there the way it's being given the way i'm giving it hashem says this and the potential to misinterpret so it's it's a tall order it's tough stuff to talk about because you say this kind of stuff and and it sounds dismissive i i just keep i can't get away from the fact that as much as i'm saying oh it's about me i'm only talking about myself i know there are people who are in pain they're going through a hard time right now in life and they're going to hear this and they're going to say you know how can you tell me that when on the worst day of my life the moment of trauma the moment that you know where where i was broken that in its origin that hashem is giving good and again i can't say that to anybody and i won't say that to anybody but for myself yeah i have to i have to realize maybe look at it like this if there is the potential that a painful experience can ultimately provide me meaning that i can learn from my experiences i can become stronger for my experiences i can become more of a gentle person because because of my own pain i can become more compassionate to others so then is that just all right so you went through hell but you made the best of it that's one way of looking at it you went through hell but you made the best of it so you figured out a way to make it productive or is it much deeper than that no the whole purpose of that painful experience was to deliver this lesson and this growth experience that's what it's saying here i mean and again i'm so hesitant to say this to anyone who's currently going through pain because i understand the argument of look hashem put me through hell and i chose to make to make something positive out of it to reframe it to motivate myself to help others but don't tell me that the experience itself is intrinsically good no i decided to make the best out of it and i hear that what i'm saying is perhaps we can look at it like this the fact that it's even possible to make something good out of it isn't incidental after the fact but that is really what the experience was all along and therefore they're all brokers there's just brachas that i immediately recognize as abraham experiences and then there are brachas that are told to us in a way that our that is so unrelatable that at first we get the story wrong where we switch it we say this is a sad story instead of a happy story but that ultimately if we if we refuse to give up on the meaningfulness of our lives if we insist on the fact that even our darkest moments have meaning for us and maybe especially our darkest moments have meaning for us can we recognize the bracha in it not just but that it's a bracha and the fact that we experienced this anything other than was our interpretation the fact that we interpret it as anything other than bracha is that a lack of a muna maybe but i i i'm very hesitant to call it that and i'll tell you why because when somebody goes through such pain that is so beyond their ability to process it i wouldn't tell them well had you have if you would have had more ammuna then you would have been able to process that experience immediately perhaps technically that's true but in reality we know that sometimes people are given a situation that they can't handle right away people often ask will god ever give you a situation you can't handle people say god won't give you a situation you can't handle my answer is well god won't give you a situation that ultimately given enough time given enough perspective you can't handle now sometimes that time that perspective means multiple lifetimes or going up to gonade and being able to see it from there right but ultimately get enough perspective and experience in context the bigger the context why someone would see it immediately it could be a skull it could be so when we reveal him or see that this is hashem in nature that's like the huss for us that we're getting close to hashem even through the you're saying that if you're able to recognize godliness then that's a merit for you or the fact that you're even able to do it that must be because hashem gave you a merit to be able to see it the first one yeah i would say probably they're both true that if a person can do it it's definitely uh to his credit but sometimes just the ability to do it at all is because hashem gave you hashem wants us to be close to him so if we're able to connect hashem through that that's like whatever you know what sometimes we luck out and we're able to find the meeting in something right away sometimes it takes a year sometimes it takes a lifetime you know we spoke about something that i experienced right we spoke about how seeing the the hashem in it the hardship as that hey i'm seeing that hashem this is you know i'm seeing you through the hardship and that'll be the plus for something you know this to go well oh okay you're saying something different that that yeah okay that that if you're able to roll through the pain so that's to your credit and then it'll roll through it but embrace it even then that's to your credit and it'll be good for you in some other way right or even in this or even this situation could transform and change okay and all this stuff is well and good but here's what i want to tell you i think maybe this i'm not sure what my bottom line is but i think this is my bottom bottom line i think this is my real conclusion it's all true there is no such thing conceptually in practice yes there's such a thing called a claula conceptually there's no claude there's only brachas however we have to realize that that is a very lofty level and that's why although the targum unison does bring out this idea of as opposed to bracha buklala or me ulavatin targemianison does say it that way but uncles doesn't why because just the difference of living in the times the basa mikdash and living at times of the corbin that that itself made it that when uncles looked at this he didn't see luffa he saw ulavatin so how much more so we're now you know unclass is is is right after the corbin and we are almost 2 000 years after the corbin so we have to give ourselves a break and realize that even though conceptually in the abstract we certainly understand that the target meaning is 100 correct there's no curses it's all just blessings and their misinterpretation or maybe call it blessings and their mistranslation but just because that's conceptually true doesn't mean that we're all able to experience it that way uncles couldn't experience it that way i i always feel like when things are going well it's like yeah it's gonna get better it's me greater but it takes from things going down here to things going so great and falling back down to like be able to be in touch with reality so it's like when things aren't going good it's sometimes hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel but when things are good you know like hindsight is 20 20. and it's nice when you're at the other end so then it's easy to see the goodness you know yeah yeah so even though so in theory nobody should ever take any experience negatively but in reality we know that sometimes hashem makes it too hard for us on a practical level to actually do that and it's going to feel like a painful experience it's going to feel like a negative experience it doesn't feel like a painful experience it is a painful experience and we will therefore interpret it negatively and we have to realize you can't oversimplify things i see this a lot with religious people you learn torah toyota is truth and then you want to pretend that your experience of it is as black and white as the ideas that you're learning now if you're a simple jew that's great but i want to tell you a secret if you're a simple jew then you didn't come to this conclusion from a class because simple jews don't have to go to class simple jews just know it in their gut but if you came to it intellectually and then you want to trick yourself to say well because we know there's no such thing as negativity that's it i will never experience it again as negativity come on don't be so immature how about this let me offer a more nuanced approach conceptually i am fully aware that nothing bad ever happened to me however on the subjective level of my experience i fully accept the fact that i have i have pain and that that i don't like it and i and and and conceptually i i know that it's it's good for me but i'm i'm not running to a show i'm asking him for more of it and and and maybe i'm not even at the level to thank him yet for it although i aspire to see the yes that's the level that but see the level isn't i think hashem for all my troubles no maybe maybe that's not the level i mean that's a beautiful level i'm saying maybe the level can be i aspire to come to a place where i will thank hashem for all my troubles maybe that's the level maybe it doesn't have to be that we pretend that in actuality our worldview is as clear as conceptually everything is mapped out for us in the holy books and i think we have to allow ourselves that you know the the the gulf of you know what it says in the books and how we experience it as as human beings with minds and hearts and to be realistic about it i don't think we're doing ourselves a favor by uh you know basically bluffing and pretending that just because we know conceptually something's true that it that it feels that way to us so that's the point that the real truth is the way that targamyanism says it there's no there are no curses there's only blessings and the mistranslation of blessings misinterpretation of blessings but uncles who's a little bit closer to our time than than the tiger munis and says okay but who are we kidding in your experience you're going to you're going to identify certain things as that was a cursed day that was a cursed moment that was a cursed period of my life okay and the point is it doesn't have to be one or the other we can we can embrace the fact that there's a truth and we know the truth and even uh you know some moments sometimes we are emotionally aligned with the truth not just cognitively but you know we can even there are moments you know of profound inspiration uh maybe after you meditate and pray maybe you know maybe it's a gift that hashem just gives you out of nowhere there are moments where we are aligned to it but you know what there are plenty of moments where we're not aligned to it and yet if you would stop me and ask me look i know you're really resentful right now about some of the things that hashem caused in your life but on a conceptual level you admit that it's all good so i would hope that no matter how bad i'm feeling i could stop and say yeah on a conceptual level i fully admit this stuff is all peaches and cream now on a subjective level on an emotional level i'm not gonna lie i'm not experiencing it that way yet yet but if everything i believe to be true is true then i know there will come a time where i will see that it was always blessing only blessing all the time and that's you want to know really what is what is meshiach is like the prophet says the the time when will will say i sure enough to be i will praise you all thank you i will thank you hashem for having chastised me that will actually be able to value to be able to cherish our painful experiences why because when mashir comes and we're given new eyes we're given perspective we're lifted up to a higher level of consciousness then we'll see that everything was blessing all along i think you also have to allow yourself permission that you could be on different rates of growth for different aspects of your life so there could be challenges in your life where you didn't see the blessing but now you now you do and then other aspects of your life where it's just look there are different rates of healing for different types of wounds some wounds heal faster some wounds heal more slowly and you have you can't ask see i think that's another thing we say well you know i thought that i internalized my ammuna that i thought my faith became real because i i had this one thing that always bothered me and now i now i'm able to be thankful to hashem for but then i see there's this other thing whether it still pains me i still hate it yeah because they're different wounds so they heal at different rates well we have to be realistic about this stuff if you really believe in it then you have to then you have to allow it to happen in real time and you have to allow yourself to go through a human process that he embraces the human experience and makes it real yeah yeah he could be because he he's talking from his time and and yet at the same time we still need the target because he's right right something nice to be able to you know this is reality it's okay but and also no one could be at our end goal or else what's the purpose of life you're never grown towards something you know yeah there are different things you know there are there are some challenges that we have fully overcome we did reach the end goal then there's the collective end goal you know of the whole the whole universe new growth experiences yeah