Dianne, a young, attractive, aerobics instructor, told me why she saw she disagreed with views I had written about in my book” When Bad Things Happen to Good People. “I believe nothing happens to you unless you secretly want it to,” she told me. “Last week, for example, I was driving to work. I was stopped at a traffic light when a careless driver hit me from behind, causing major damage to my car. I said to myself, now, why did this happen to me? Then I remembered that, just two days before, my father called to tell me he was buying a new car and treating in his two-year-old Lincoln Continental. My first thought was, why doesn’t he give me the Lincoln instead? But he won’t, because I’ve got a perfectly good car. Then two days later, the car I wished I didn’t have was totaled in an accident. Are you going to tell me that was just a coincidence?”
“Diane,” I said, “Let’s accept the premise that you wanted to be rid of your car. Did the driver who hit you want to be rid of his car too? Is that why he ran into you? Did the insurance company subconsciously want to be rid of several thousand dollars the accident ended up costing them?”
“They must have,” she answered. “Otherwise, why did it happen?”
“What about the 200 passengers on an airline that crashes? What about all the children who are born with birth defects? Are those things that they wanted to have come into the lives?
She looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “Well, maybe they had been cruel or vain in a past life and this was a lesson they needed to learn.”
-Rabbi Harold Kushner
Comments