Suffering as divine punishment or a test

Suffering as divine punishment or a test is a religious explanation Devorah learns to apply to catastrophe and private hardship alike: pain is treated as deserved, spiritually meaningful, or a warning to repent. But the people closest to her give that explanation different, often incompatible forms. As she questions whether God’s justice can account for what she sees, the framework that once makes suffering legible begins to look like a demand for passivity.

A moral ledger of suffering

At school, Devorah is taught that God sent Hitler to punish Jews for enlightening themselves and that the victims’ descendants now atone for the sins of assimilated Jews. In this account, collective catastrophe becomes a judgment on religious disobedience. The teaching makes the Holocaust more than a historical atrocity: it turns survival and subsequent suffering into evidence in a moral ledger, with pain assigned a cause in the community’s conduct.

The first Satmar Rebbe’s teaching offers a preventive counterpart. If Jews became exemplary in their observance, Devorah learns, God would be pleased and another Holocaust would not occur. Yet the practical measures presented as pleasing to God are small and visible: thicker stockings and longer skirts. Devorah questions whether such adjustments could really secure divine favor. The gap between the scale of catastrophe and the scale of the demanded changes makes the promise difficult for her to accept, even before she rejects the premise that suffering can be reliably explained.

Bubby’s warning and Zeidy’s faith

Bubby’s view is grimmer than the school’s promise of protection. She says that persecution has recurred across Jewish history, citing pogroms, Crusades, and the Inquisition, and predicts another calamity roughly every fifty years. In her account, Jews cannot control whether disaster comes. She warns Devorah that even apparent kindness from non-Jews is not a reason to trust them, extending her fear from specific historical violence to a general expectation of hostility.

That certainty does not erase the difference between Bubby’s outlook and Zeidy’s. She does not voice her predictions in front of him: he believes the Satmar Rebbe can save the community from anything. The Rebbe’s rescue from the concentration camps is remembered as miraculous, and the date is celebrated annually. The family therefore holds two readings of catastrophe side by side: Bubby sees recurrence as nearly inevitable, while Zeidy places hope in the Rebbe’s power to protect them. Neither account gives Devorah an uncomplicated sense of safety.

The New Square talking-carp story intensifies these fears at a charged moment. Shortly after the World Trade Center Twin Towers are attacked and just before Yom Kippur, a carp is said to have warned Jews to repent or face destruction. Witnesses at the fish market reportedly included Jewish and non-Jewish workers; the story’s timing makes it seem to some like a supernatural confirmation that God is watching and will punish wrongdoing. The episode shows how quickly communal anxiety can turn an alarming event into a call for atonement. It does not resolve Devorah’s doubts about whether the suffering being threatened would be just.

Family hardship and the cost of explanation

The doctrine also shapes how Devorah’s family responds to her father’s condition. Bubby calls a problem child a punishment; Zeidy understands such a child as a test from God. Both interpretations discourage treatment, since to address the problem might be to evade suffering God has ordained. Bubby adds a practical fear: a medical diagnosis would become known and could damage the marriage prospects of the family’s other children. Better, she argues, not to know and to accept God’s plan.

The consequence is not only theological. Devorah is angry that no one tries to secure treatment for her father and feels that his condition marks her, however hard she tries to fit in. In her family’s reasoning, accepting suffering preserves both obedience and reputation; seeking an explanation risks exposing a problem the community might use against them. The doctrine thus protects a social arrangement as well as a belief about divine purpose, while leaving Devorah to experience the costs of that arrangement without meaningful help.

Yom Kippur, suffering, and agency

On Yom Kippur, the lesson of deserved suffering becomes immediate. Devorah has been taught that God measures every ounce of pain and exacts justice if the community fails to atone before the ram’s horn sounds. She recognizes the harsh implication: if suffering proves guilt, then greater pain seems to prove greater evil. Yet Bubby and Zeidy are among the most devout people she knows, and their lives are full of hardship. Their experience leaves Devorah unable to reconcile piety with the idea that suffering is a reliable measure of wrongdoing.

Bubby recalls that, when she was a child, a scrap of food was reason for gratitude because the family had one another. She also tells of her mother, Chana Rachel, who survived diphtheria after her desperate mother forced open her throat to remove the growth obstructing her breathing. Bubby attributes the recovery to prayer. Devorah instead sees a woman who acted to save her child rather than waiting passively for a miracle. That difference becomes a model: she wants to be someone who works her own miracles.

During the fast, Devorah goes through the prayers without seeking mercy. She challenges, in her own thoughts, the idea that a God who permits suffering so indiscriminately can be rational or responsive to appeal. Her mood shifts from anger to a sense that she is not as powerless as others would have her believe. Instead of treating herself as merely the recipient of judgment, she imagines that she may be able to negotiate with God. The moment does not settle the theological question; it changes her position within it.

Meaning and limits of the doctrine

In Devorah’s experience, suffering as divine punishment or a test is not one stable explanation but a conflict among explanations: punishment for assimilation, a trial to endure, a warning requiring repentance, or an affliction that cannot be morally accounted for. The Holocaust, her father’s condition, and the family’s hardship place pressure on the belief that pain is deserved and that stricter observance can guarantee safety. Bubby’s fear of repeated disaster and Zeidy’s confidence in protection deepen rather than resolve that pressure.

Devorah’s response is not a simple declaration that suffering has no spiritual meaning. Instead, she resists the conclusion that acceptance is the only faithful response. Her reading of Chana Rachel’s rescue gives action a moral force that prayer alone cannot claim for her, and her Yom Kippur defiance turns doubt into a first assertion of agency. The doctrine’s significance lies in this struggle: it explains suffering for the community, but its demand that people endure rather than intervene becomes precisely what Devorah begins to question.