Chabad of Anne Arundel County Hosts Author Talk on Faith Through Tragedy

The last few months have been difficult for the Jewish people. And during times of great grief, whether widespread or personal, it can be difficult to understand why a loving God would allow such bad things to happen.

This was the question Rabbi Gershon Schusterman was faced with at 38, when his wife died and left him a widower with 11 children. Though he was used to comforting others in the community when bad things happened, he was still unprepared when such a monumental tragedy happened to him.

His journey through grief and how Jewish studies helped him cope with it led him to write “Why God Why? How to Believe in Heaven When it Hurts Like Hell,” a memoir and reflection on the Jewish mourning process. On Thursday, April 25, Schusterman spoke about his writing and personal beliefs, as well as how they may be able to help Jewish people process the current state of the world, in an author talk held by Chabad of Anne Arundel County.

“We feel that this is an opportunity for us to learn, and the main thing is to grow, to heal and to be happy,” said Rabbi Nochum Light, the Chabad house’s rabbi and executive director. “We’re always going to strive to get closer to Hashem as a community, and [Schusterman] has come to help us do that tonight.”

The event was held as a sort of informal book club. Attendees were given time to purchase and read the book on their own, and were encouraged to come in with questions and their own copies for Schusterman to sign.

Released in 2022, 36 years after his wife’s death, the book took Schusterman two years to write. He was inspired by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s best-selling book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” which addresses similar topics and was written after Kushner’s son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease. Kushner was a Conservative rabbi, though, and the book faced some criticism from the Orthodox community. Schusterman was inspired to write about his own experiences with grief and tragedy from an Orthodox perspective.

“I didn’t write a book about tragedy for the purpose of tragedy, I wrote a book on tragedy for the purpose of faith,” he explained.

Schusterman was the director of a Jewish day school in California when his wife died. In addition to his loss, he still had to look after a student body of over 400 children.

One of the reasons he wrote “Why God Why?” so long after losing his wife was because he wanted to share what he had learned during his period of mourning, and because he felt that he’d had enough time to process what had happened for him to be able to write about it.

“If I had written this book when I was 38, it would have been a very different book. I was a young man with limited life experience,” Schusterman said. “I’d had over 35 years to mull over this matter and research it. Those of you who have read the book now know what the results of my efforts were. And if you read it, I hope it brought you some meaning and comfort.”

During the event, Schusterman discussed not only the personal tragedy that inspired him to write a book for the first time, but many of the greatest tragedies that the Jewish people have faced — in addition to the events of Oct. 7, he also talked about the Holocaust and the mass shootings at Babi Yar in Ukraine. He noted that it can be tempting to reject God when bad things happen, but part of having a relationship with a higher power is struggling with it. “Israel” even means “to struggle with God.”

Schusterman remarried a few years after his first wife’s death, and is now a grandfather as all of his children are now married with kids of their own.

He added that it’s important to be there for others who are facing their own personal tragedies, and sometimes helping them can be as simple as giving them a hug. He recounted an experience he had with his son several years later about a loss of his own.

“When people have great losses, they are in pain. They have a void in their heart and they want that void to be filled,” Schusterman said. “Giving them answers for why these things happen talks to the mind, but not so much to the heart. As simple as it might seem, a hug is how people bond, and that helped him deal with his issues better than anything I could’ve said.”