Dennis Prager (1948- ) is a wise man. He is one of my favorite writers. He has written brilliantly on many subjects– religion, relationships, politics, ethics, economics, science, culture, history, and the meaning and purpose of life. He has also written extensively on the problem of suffering. He is Jewish, and the suffering of his people has given him much to contemplate. Now, he has his own extreme personal suffering to endure and ponder upon. In a recent magazine article, he describes what happened to him, and why it is so important to have a mature ‘philosophy of suffering.’ Dennis Prager is not a Christian, but his philosophy of suffering is based on his belief in God as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures (our Old Testament). I wish Dennis Prager knew Jesus as his Lord and Savior; but as Christians, we do share with him the same theological and Biblical foundation upon which he bases his understanding of suffering.
(From Jewish Journal, September 11-17, 2026; with some editing for length.)
———————————–
On Tuesday morning, Nov. 12, 2024, I stepped out of the shower in my home, slipped on the finished wooden floor, and fell backward, hitting my head on the side of the bathtub on the way down. The result was a catastrophic injury: I was rendered quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down. Fortunately, I sustained no brain damage.
I’ve been asked how I have been able to handle this devastating injury as well as I have. Why wasn’t I depressed? How am I able to continue to work? (I am completing my latest book, starting on another, producing a weekly podcast, doing frequent interviews, and, soon I will give my first in-person speech.)
To answer these questions, I wrote an article for The Jewish Journal. It became the cover story for their Rosh Hashanah edition. If Rosh Hashanah is about anything, it is about ‘cheshbon hanefesh:’ taking an account of one’s life and grappling with the greatest questions of life.
I hope that how I am dealing with this awful injury will be of help to many others.
Since my early teens I have been preoccupied, perhaps even obsessed, with good and evil, and especially with the problem of unjust suffering. Many of the conclusions I reached helped prepare me intellectually, and perhaps even emotionally, to deal with my accident.
Proof is that I wrote most of these conclusions thirty years ago in my book on happiness, Happiness Is a Serious Problem. The quotations that follow are exactly as written in the book.
We Need a Philosophy of Life and a Philosophy of Suffering
“We can determine how we react to events; we make this determination on the basis of more than disposition. Our reaction is determined by our attitudes and perspective, or more precisely by our philosophy of life.”
“Without a philosophy of life [and suffering] we do not know how to react to what life deals us.”
“Most people wait until tragedy strikes before thinking about how to incorporate tragedy into their life. And then the shock is often too great to absorb into their emotional and psychological system.”
How this attitude has helped me.
In formulating my views on happiness, I have had to deal realistically with the ubiquity of unjust, often seemingly pointless, pain and suffering. I have had to deal with the Holocaust, the Gulag, Mao’s starving of 60 to 80 million Chinese, Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia, the innumerable people enslaved and tortured and the women raped throughout history. And those are only the victims of human evil. What about all the victims of natural evil, such as earthquakes, diseases, plagues, the death of children and all the women who died in childbirth?
This has had two effects on me. First, it has engendered immense and constant gratitude in me. And since gratitude is the mother of happiness, I have been able to be happy. At the same time, I always reminded myself that tragedy is not confined to the “other guy;” I am just as likely to be the “other guy.” And now I am.
I Love Life, But I Have a Largely Tragic View of It
“I do not come to the subject of happiness from a particularly rosy outlook on life. On the contrary, I come to it from a largely tragic view of life. I believe that suffering is real, not as some fine souls in the East would have it, a function of the ego, and not as some fine souls in the West would have it, ‘all for the best.’ Some suffering is a result of egocentrism, and sometimes suffering does indeed lead to positive results, but much suffering that people have had to endure is undeserved, awful, and leads to nothing positive.”
“There are a number of important philosophical and emotional consequences to having such an outlook. For one thing, I am amazed at my good fortune. Given how much unjust suffering and unhappiness there are, I am deeply grateful for, sometimes even perplexed by, how much misery I have been spared.” (continued…)
Related Posts
