The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God: A Review

(Disclosure: I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for my honest review.)

The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God was written by retired Rabbi Anson Hugh Laytner as an autobiographical sketch and reflection on his life and theology. The book begins with one of the most fascinating interpretations of Job I have ever read in which Job becomes a text that deconstructs and dispels the theodicies of its day.

This creates the launching point for Anson to tell about a long series of tragedies that profoundly marred his life and devastated him in a Job like way, though the wisdom of his wife and friends that pop up in his stories and foot notes are thankfully far more helpful than Job’s. Nevertheless, these tragedies undid much of what he could believe about God and led to his deconstruction of theodicies and reconstruction of how he perceived God, evil, life, loss and hope. He could no longer justify a world where God is a micromanager that allows, as he says, fatalism to replace faith and acquiescence replace acceptance. I would describe this wrestling and new reframing as something of a semiotic shift in his life.

So, if (like me) you go into this book thinking you are going to get a historically faithful rabbinic interpretation on suffering, think again, because that it is precisely what he is protesting against, though towards the end it does show up in his reworking. I will say, however, that it is faithful to the Jewish tradition that follows the path of wisdom over and against offering tidy answers to what is really this mystery of life that we have a choiceless residence in.   

Subsequent to this, what I found most interesting is without stating it as such Anson moves towards an apophatic view of God in which the affirmations about God must be exchanged for the negations of God because the uncreated Creator ultimately is incomprehensible. Making our affirmations about God the central way of “knowing” God, as he more or less shows, leads to an arrogant synthesis between what is knowable and unknowable and even seems to hinder our spiritual growth.

However, some of my cons about this book, of course, come from my own Christian tradition. While the Christian perspective is given voice both positively and negatively (for good reason), it is not really faithful to the Christian view of suffering pre-reformation and fundamentalism. Look no further than how Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor interpret Christ’s suffering, human suffering and death to see the drastic difference, though present Christianity may be more to blame for this than Anson. Yet, the thin understanding of this theology may also stem from his move toward finding hope in something of a Unitarian ideology, which is not to say that religions and cultures have nothing to learn from each other, but in my experience when we attempt to reconcile the differing views of God from one religion to the next as all holding the rightness of our picking and choosing about God, it invariably ends up with mistakes of a farsighted nature about what each religion is really saying.

With that said, I never felt he was being shallow or flighty in his working through any of this. In fact the level of honesty and humility with which he writes about his pain, skepticisms and frustrations on to the final chapters that give way to his very inclusive hopefulness makes him a refreshing a voice. More to the point, love, for him, is the highest moral truth and the foundation of our interconnectedness that forms out of a chaotic universe; it is the one place Anson says he experiences God’s presence the most.  To conclude, his reflection has a way of making his audience of any faith, or none, struggle right along with him, but the insightfulness that emerges from it, I should think, will not make this book a waste of anyone’s time.