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For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.
In his reimagining of the story of Adam and Eve, How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness, Rabbi Harold Kushner observes the Euro-American obsession with a universe in which every action earns divine reward or punishment. This kind of thinking sees personal responsibility as the ordering principle of the universe, to the extent that we’ll assume guilt rather than concede that most things simply lie beyond our control. The book of Job and the laments in the Psalms call out this misperception, not to mention our own observations of how life actually works. Yet many of us still cling to it, even though it casts humans as self-determinative and God as a mechanistic reactor.
