"Deserve"?

"Deserve" is a word that makes me nervous. 

It's a word that is bandied about a lot nowadays. Strangers on social media, for instance, exhort that all of the individuals amongst the faceless masses "deserve" love.

I hear parents say that their kids work so hard in school, they "deserve" a vacation. 

This mentality is one that I find disturbing. As we very well know, life on this earth is not based on merit. Hello, how many children were murdered in the war? How many innocents were slaughtered over the millennia? That's not counting good ol' fashioned disease and famine and whatnot. 

But today's generation likes to say, "You deserve!" 

Judaism is about responsibility, not rights. We have to do our part; there's no guarantee we'll be thusly "rewarded." Kids still have to do their homework even if they won't get rewarded for it. For me, one of the last line of Koheles says it all: "The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man." A Jew gotta do what a Jew gotta do. That's it. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Crispin Sartwell expresses similar misgivings in "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" He lists all the things he's been told he deserves, by people who don't even know him, and observes: 

. . . if I believed that I already deserved all good things, I might stop trying to improve. After all, I couldn't become worthier or more deserving than I am right now. Nor could you or anybody else. . . some quibble that praising everyone in exactly the same terms makes saints and monsters morally equal. It's about time, is all I can say to that. Even the worst person in the world deserves the most reliable 5G network. 

Wait—can that be right? 

Constantly being told what I deserve puts me in a state of anxiety. . . I'm not entirely sure I deserve . . . I reflect on all the things I've done wrong . . . 

Sometimes I worry that I actually deserve to be penalized rather than awarded . . .  

He's being sarcastic for most of this piece, obviously. But you get the point. The world doesn't operate on a merit system. 

I was listening to a shiur about Dina, about all the various commentaries and their takes on it. This one says it was her fault, this one says it was Yaakov's fault, this one says it was Leah's fault. But the Abarbanel says: It was no one's fault.  

Following contemporary tragedy, we don't try to find causes or reasons. The good die, or live. The bad die, or live. There's no cause to be found. Dina was abducted and raped the same way many women have been since the dawn of time. To put it crudely, **** happens, and there isn't always a message to be learned. There isn't always a way to prevent tragedy.

And we definitely do not get what we think we deserve.