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"When Bad Things Happen to Good People," Rabbi Kushner was forced to face the issue of suffering head on when his son was diagnosed with a disease that would cause him to age rapidly and die young. In dealing with his family's struggles and his son's premature death, Kushner was driven to question God's justice and search for some new answers. Kushner's conclusion about God is an untraditional one. He states that God is not responsible for inflicting or even allowing suffering; rather, God cannot stop all the cruelty and evil in the world from hurting the innocent. A young rabbi at the time, Kushner was devastated. As a man of God, paid to console others in their time of misfortune, he faced misfortune himself and discovered that there is no easy consolation; that God lets good people suffer with bad, that the moral order he had assumed existed in the universe was an illusion. Kushner also assumes Job has uttered the same platitudes about piety to others that have suffered. Only when he suffers himself does he realize that the advice, "God punishes the wicked and helps the innocent," (Kushner 456) implies that the sufferer has somehow deserved his suffering. Job knows he is innocent and has no sins sufficient to explain his children being killed, his wealth stolen, and his health wrecked. Kushner also explains in his preface how his child's illness and death pushed him to come to face with the existence of unfairness in life (Kushner 457). .
Kushner's interpretation of God's speech from the whirlwind is that the Joban poet rejects the first proposition, that God is all-powerful. God wants to help, but cannot control chaos and evil in the way we have imagined. God wants good things to happen to good people, but sometimes God cannot keep bad things from happening. God is an all-powerful ruler who cannot be compelled to be just by humans. The "sense of relief" comes from concluding that God is not causing us to suffer but, rather, suffering happens.
