Too Easy, Too Hard
The problem of suffering.
In Jewish mysticism, the Ten Plagues that God inflicted upon Egypt are understood as dramatizing ten kinds of spiritual flaws that Egyptian society featured. Rabbi YY Jacobson summarized the mystical discussion in several articles available online, for example here. Of his summaries of the Ten Plagues, the one that has always struck me the most was the discussion of the plague of hail:
Water, in Jewish mysticism, generally represents the attribute of giving, especially the act of nurturing through love. Rain nourishes the ground and brings forth new life. What then to make of hail—frozen water that destroys what it falls on? R’ Jacobson understands hail to represent a sort of egotistical, self-centered giving, where it is more important to the giver that he or she be seen as a giver (or think of himself or herself as a giver) than for the recipient to actually benefit from the gift. As a result, such giving can often end up harming the recipient, because the giver is not truly concerned with whether the gift is helpful or harmful.1
We can see examples of such harmful giving all around us. Many government policies or nonprofit programs are ineffective at alleviating hardship, or create perverse effects that do more harm than the ills that were meant to be alleviated. Other examples can be seen with little effort.
In the 1970s, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi introduced flow theory, the idea that people facing specific kinds of tasks become most absorbed and focus their mental efforts most effectively if the task is at an optimal level of difficulty, relative to their skill level. Too hard, and people become anxious and discouraged, and may even give up. Too easy, and people get bored. But if the task is difficult enough to be a challenge but not insurmountable, people become engaged and enter flow state.
Flow theory was soon applied to learning, and it became understood that people learn and grow most effectively when faced with challenges that are almost too difficult to overcome, and when they can apply themselves to the challenge properly. (See for example The Little Book of Talent, by Daniel Coyne.)
Growth often arises from hardship. Some kinds of growth seem to require hardship. If we make Navy SEAL training easier, then the graduates would no longer be what we think of as Navy SEALs.
On the other hand, Nietzsche was being glib when he said, “What does not kill you makes you stronger.” Not all things do that; some hardships may not kill you, but cripple you and leave you weaker than before. There are limits to human endurance. If the SEAL training pushed too hard, we would end up with more dead sailors instead of better SEALs.
If our goal is to learn and grow, one can surmise, we must embrace pain and struggle right up to the point that it would become too much—and no further. And that point of “too much” may shift forward and backward across time, depending on our changing circumstances. We must be patient with ourselves, but also honest with ourselves.
One implication is that if we try to alleviate suffering in the world, we might actually relieve so much suffering that the “beneficiary” is actually harmed. As Robert Heinlein famously put it, “Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.”
Yet we cannot conclude from this that all suffering is good. Much suffering is simply bad, full stop. No one ever became stronger by being murdered. Few people become stronger by being raped or abused—and many are haunted by the experience all their lives. We celebrate people like Helen Keller who transcended their physical challenges, or single mothers who nevertheless raised their children well, precisely because such cases are so rare. Most people in such circumstances are crushed by them.
The trick is to find the balance.
And that takes sensitive awareness of what the beneficiary needs, and true care for them. People are not simply props for the photo-ops of a charity gala, or a politician seeking reelection.
(As an aside, it seems that much of American society is doing the exact opposite to our young. On the one hand, learning standards have fallen far lower than previous generations would have tolerated. On the other hand, we tolerate a horrifying level of physical and emotional violence toward children—from caregivers, from schools, from fellow students, from criminal groups or the insane. We make their early lives both too easy and too difficult, leaving them both weak and crippled. As a result, many people enter the adult world without skills, without resilience, but also without the ability to face life’s challenges and grow from them instead of being further hurt. And then we blame them when they fail.)2
Traditional Jewish thought teaches that the purpose of the world’s evils is to give us an arena for personal growth. We are supposed to become stronger in response to our suffering, and achieve spiritual heights that would have been impossible without struggle. Indeed, this was the purpose of creation: to enable us to refine ourselves and come closer to God than would have been possible without entering the world. This closeness allows God to bestow more of His goodness upon us. Thus, our suffering is actually a gift from God, and our task is to understand it and benefit from it.
All well and good when considering the “normal” pains and struggles we face, the kinds that indeed can make us stronger. Yet this explanation only fits suffering that is capable of inspiring growth even in theory, no matter how cruel. It fails to address suffering that is simply more than one can stand even when straining to the utmost.
To jump right to the usual example, the Holocaust and its horrors did provide the impetus for certain remarkable people to reach great spiritual heights, among them Victor Frankl, Elie Wiesel, and the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere. But that is cold comfort for the millions of others who died amid the worst sort of dehumanization.
Rabbi Gershon Schusterman, a Chabad rabbi living in Southern California, suddenly lost his beloved wife when he was 38, leaving him alone to raise their eleven children.3 He later wrote a book about his experience and his attempts to understand the suffering he went through, called Why, God, Why? In it, he surveys the several traditional answers to the problem of theodicy (why bad things happen to good people). Rabbi Schusterman’s book is likely the best analysis of Judaism’s responses to suffering available to the English-reading audience.
Each of the traditional answers to suffering that Rabbi Schusterman examines is insufficient to answer the whole question. Each fails in the face of certain kinds of suffering. And some of the answers are logically incompatible with each other. Yet in a sense, the combination of them is still more powerful than each of them standing alone.
In my own view, part of the beauty of the Jewish tradition is that it teaches us to become tolerant of uncertainty (not least about the nature of God and existence). I do not mean “being tolerant of ignorance,” but being able to recognize that you do not have an answer—but perhaps you will later, as long as you leave the question open and do not try to force an answer too early.4 Just as “premature optimization is the root of all evil,” we can also say that much evil comes from premature certainty. It is very different to say that we do not yet know the answer than to say that it is evil to ask the question, either because the answer is beyond us or because the answer is “settled.” (This, too, can be seen in many current areas with little effort, alas.)
What then of suffering? How can a just God allow suffering beyond what is truly good for us? I do not know. Perhaps I will never know. But I do not have the arrogance to suppose that there is therefore no answer.5
This is also why the hail miraculously contained fire within it.
I am more and more convinced that many of the problems we face as a society are because far too many people are profoundly hurt. We are the walking wounded. (And another government program, another well-funded nonprofit, is unlikely to change that.) Is it any surprise that our politics have become so traumatized?
One of his sons was a classmate of mine in our youth.
It is no surprise to me that Jews excel in domains such as art, business, and science that are radically uncertain and demand that one keep an open mind to new information, new possibilities.
“The end of the matter is that all is heard: be in awe of God and guard his commands, for this is all of man.”
Home run, Oren. Thanks. I needed this one.