Human beings are remarkably quick to interpret the suffering of others. When misfortune enters another person’s life, there is often someone prepared to explain why it happened. Perhaps the sufferer made poor choices. Perhaps he lacked faith. Perhaps she failed to observe a particular mitzvah. Perhaps G-D is punishing some hidden transgression.
Such explanations may offer comfort to the observer, but they can inflict great cruelty upon the person who is suffering. More importantly, they claim knowledge that we do not possess.
The wisdom of our Sages confronts this tendency directly through one of the most disturbing scenes recorded in the Gemara. A father tells his son to climb a tree and bring down fledglings. Before taking them, the son sends away the mother bird, as the Torah commands.
The boy has now fulfilled two mitzvot to which the Torah explicitly attaches the promise of prolonged days. He has honoured his father, and he has performed shiluach haken, sending away the mother bird.
Yet while descending from the tree, he falls and dies.
The Gemara does not attempt to soften the event. It does not suggest that the boy must secretly have deserved what happened. It does not accuse him of insufficient faith, improper intention or some unknown transgression. Instead, it asks the question that any honest person would ask:
Where is the goodness promised to him?
Where is the prolonged life?
The answer given by Rabbi Yaakov is that the promised “long days” belong to the world that is entirely long, while the promised “good” belongs to the world that is entirely good.
This is not an attempt to pretend that the boy’s death was not tragic. It is a warning against treating this visible life as though it were the entirety of existence.
We see only a fragment.
Much of our confusion arises because we imagine that birth marks the beginning of the whole story and death marks its conclusion. We therefore expect every promise, consequence and act of Divine justice to be completed between those two points. If a righteous person suffers, we imagine that righteousness has failed. If someone who behaves wickedly prospers, we begin to wonder whether wickedness has escaped judgement or even, G-D forbid, question G-D entirely.
But the soul is not confined to the brief period during which it inhabits the body. Our existence does not end when this life ends. What appears to us as the conclusion of a person’s story may be no more than the closing of one chapter within an existence whose full dimensions remain hidden from us.
This is why we must be careful when reading warnings in the Tanakh that a person who commits a particular transgression “shall die.” Such language does not invariably mean that the person will fall dead at the moment of the offence. Nor does it always mean that the consequence must become visible during the person’s earthly life.
In some passages, death means physical death. In others, the Torah speaks of karet—being cut off—a spiritual consequence whose deepest meaning cannot be measured merely by counting the years a person remains alive. A transgressor may continue to enjoy health, wealth and public honour while having inflicted terrible damage upon his soul. Conversely, someone who is righteous may endure immense suffering without that suffering being evidence of Divine rejection.
The warning may concern the person’s portion in the world to come, particularly where there has been wilful transgression without teshuvah. A person may appear very much alive in this world while forfeiting something infinitely more enduring. Another may appear to have been deprived of life while receiving a reward far beyond anything visible to those left behind.
We therefore cannot use worldly comfort as a reliable measure of righteousness, nor worldly suffering as proof of guilt.
This lesson is particularly important when we confront the enormous suffering present in the world. We see illness, bereavement, poverty, persecution, loneliness and lives interrupted before their apparent purpose has been fulfilled. Faced with these things, it is tempting to construct explanations. We want events to fit into a pattern that we can understand. We want to believe that if we behave correctly, nothing similar will happen to us.
That desire can turn theology into accusation. Instead of sitting beside the sufferer, we inspect his life for the offence that supposedly explains his pain. Instead of offering compassion, we offer judgement. We quietly persuade ourselves that the sufferer must have failed in G-D’s estimation, because otherwise we would have to admit that we do not understand what G-D is doing.
Yet the Gemara does not permit such confidence. The boy fell from the tree after performing the very mitzvot associated with long life. If we had witnessed only the fall, we might have invented some explanation for it. The Gemara instead teaches us that what we witnessed would not have been enough to reach a judgement at all.
We saw the fall. We did not see the whole life of the soul.
A child looking at the underside of a tapestry sees loose threads, knots, broken lines and colours that appear to have been arranged without purpose. From beneath, the work may look confused or even ruined. Only when the tapestry is turned over does the pattern become visible.
We live beneath the tapestry.
We see the knots but not the design. We see the moment of loss but not everything that preceded it or everything that follows it. We see suffering enter a life, but we cannot see how that life is held within the complete justice and mercy of G-D.
This does not mean that suffering is unreal, or that grief should be suppressed by abstract assurances about the world to come. The father who loses the boy still loses his son. Those who mourn are entitled to mourn. Those who suffer are entitled to cry out. The Gemara itself asks the painful question rather than condemning the questioner.
Faith does not require us to call suffering pleasant. It requires us to recognise that suffering is not the whole account.
Nor should belief in the world to come become an excuse for indifference in this world. We are still commanded to feed the hungry, visit the sick, comfort mourners, protect the vulnerable and pursue justice. When suffering can be relieved, we must act. What we must not do is claim that another person’s pain reveals his standing before Heaven.
A mitzvah is not a commercial transaction through which we purchase immediate comfort from G-D. Torah observance does not guarantee wealth, perfect health, public recognition or freedom from grief. We observe Torah because it is true and because it is the will of G-D. No act of obedience is lost merely because its reward is not immediately visible.
Likewise, no transgression becomes harmless merely because its consequence has not yet appeared.
The Gemara asks us to abandon the shallow arithmetic by which earthly success equals Divine approval and earthly suffering equals Divine condemnation. It teaches that justice cannot be measured within the narrow boundaries of what our eyes presently see.
Our souls endure. Our deeds endure. The consequences of how we live reach beyond the grave and into a world that is entirely long and entirely good.
Until the tapestry is turned over, we should respond to suffering with compassion rather than explanation, with humility rather than judgement and with faith rather than presumption.
We see only the underside.
G-D sees the completed design.