CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly
Fall 2020/Winter 2021
Book Reviews
Rabbi Daniel S. Alexander
The Tragedy Test: Making Sense of Life-Changing Loss: A Rabbi’s Journey
by Richard Agler
(Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2018), 178 pp.
The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God: Autobiographical and Theological Reflections
by Anson Hugh Laytner
(Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2019), 176 pp.
The Talmud presents several back stories to explain what drives the second-century rabbinic scholar Elisha ben Abuya (aka Aher/the Other) to deny the existence of divine justice and to reject the reality of God as supreme Judge. Each story involves a flash of insight arising from a personal experience. In one, a good, young fellow obeys his father’s instructions to gather eggs and, at the same time, heeds the Torah’s injunction to shoo away the mother bird beforehand, two mitzvot for which the Torah explicitly promises long life.
As the rabbi watches, the obedient youngster falls from a ladder and dies. With a start, he realizes that the divine promise of reward for good deeds and punishment for wickedness does not hold. Other Talmudic rabbis respond to similar awareness but arrive at approaches that permit them to justify God in the light of unjust suffering. For the uncompromising Aher, however, honesty permits only one intellectual path: that of rejection of God and abandonment of the tradition of those committed to a relationship built on a covenant with God.
Down through the generations, many luminaries, philosophers, theologians, and poets struggle to make sense of life and God in a world where evil exists and where the innocent suffer either at the hand of fellow humans or through an apparently random act of nature (or God). Some of these efforts constitute theodicies that justify a prior notion of God in the face of evil or suffering. Following the Holocaust, a genre of literature arose whose contributors reject traditional notions of God along with the biblically based doctrine of reward and punishment, the validity of petitionary prayer, and all ideas of divine providence where God may intervene in daily affairs.
Best known of these anti-theodicies is After Auschwitz published in 1966 by Richard Rubenstein. By way of a pendulum swing back again and published in 1981, Harold Kushner’s popular When Bad Things Happen to Good People seeks to comprehend personal tragedy without abandoning faith in God. Kushner’s God cannot prevent the suffering of innocents but can help the survivors cope in the aftermath.
Along come Richard Agler and Anson Hugh Laytner who each contribute a worthy, readable, and compelling entry to the literature of responding to suffering associated with tragic, personal loss. Like the biblical Job, each of these rabbis begins an artfully offered spiritual journey with a personal experience of profound and deeply disorienting tragedy, the nature of which no one should wish on anyone. Agler and his wife, Mindy, are awakened late one night in January 2012 to hear the unspeakably horrible news that their vibrant, multitalented, idealistic, twenty-six-year-old daughter, Talia, has been hit by a car and has no chance of survival.
In Laytner’s case, multiple events, serious diagnoses, diseases, and several deaths strike beloved individuals over the course of a decade or so. These horrors involve in-laws and relatives, including the death of a brother-in-law, a sister-in-law, a thirty-five-year old stepdaughter, his mother, and, after struggling with cancer, his beloved wife. Some of these blows strike in such rapid succession that Laytner must repeatedly employ a kind of pastoral triage, prioritizing a hospital visit of one loved one over attending a funeral of another.
In responding to their experiences of potentially disabling loss by engaging in processes of contemplation and projects of writing, these rabbis have employed the available skill sets each possesses in abundance: an active acquaintance with the life of the mind, a keen knack at putting thought to paper, and large reservoirs of empathy cultivated throughout long careers and widely ranging pastoral experience. Thus, by employing existing capacities to cope with their own grief, these two rabbis serve as role models in their own catharsis. At the same time, they empower their readers to do the same, not necessarily to write books of their own, but to marshal their own resources in the service of healing and restoration of the capacity to live once again with purpose.
Each author crafts a spiritual framework that permits the possibility of a meaningful life while relentlessly insisting on truth-telling. Neither author claims to have solved the mystery of a God who permits suffering. But neither is willing to let God off the hook, as it were, for that suffering. Like Aher, each author rejects all notions of a God whose nature does not align with the existence of suffering or evil. To employ Agler’s framing, a conception of “a God who does not pass the tragedy test” is a conception that must be rejected. Similarly, each rabbi rejects understandings of religious ritual that depend on notions of God which cannot be truthfully affirmed in the face of tragedy.
However, by contrast with the famous heretic, both Agler and Laytner ultimately arrive at a series of affirmations about God, religious community, and ritual. These affirmations permit the possibility of lives lived with meaning and with faith. Each author has found a way to “stay in the game,” to remain committed to their calling as rabbis, to engage in the study and teaching of Torah, in the practice of lovingkindness, and, in relationship with divinity, albeit differently perceived.
Despite the ways in which the two books resonate with one another, one should not have the impression that they read similarly. A reader of The Tragedy Test will enter into a conversation with the author and his laser-like focus on the impact of one horrible, dramatic, personal tragedy on his newly challenged capacity to make sense of life. This invitation into conversation involves few footnotes and mainly bite-sized thought chunks. Agler avoids overwhelming his readers with references or complex theories as he shares his spiritual journey through a process of challenge, response, and acceptance. Readers who find their way to the end of the volume will be rewarded with the gift of an innovative and delicious interpretation of Psalm 23.
By contrast, Laytner frames his book as a commentary on the Book of Job and does so with mastery of multiple sources and by inclusion of voices other than his own, including contrary voices. Thus, The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God can be read as a personal spiritual sharing and also as a well-footnoted, somewhat academic, but, nonetheless, highly readable, exercise in fresh commentary. Many will appreciate the resources Laytner brings to his project and also the lengthy bibliography appended to the volume.
Although both Agler and Laytner cannot help but write as rabbis, their journeys of mind and spirit will doubtless find resonance among Jews and non-Jews, clergy and lay alike.
RABBI DANIEL S. ALEXANDER became rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia, after twenty-eight years serving as its rabbi. Before that, he was the executive director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation at the University of Virginia for nine years. He has been an occasional lecturer in the Religion Department of the University of Virginia and has had several articles and poems appear in the Reform Jewish Quarterly. He contributed a chapter to the 2019 CCAR publication The Mussar Torah Commentary.