My mother broke her hip on the Day of Atonement. She slipped on a wet spot in her condo lobby coming home from synagogue. It was her first medical emergency since cutting a finger twenty years earlier.
"If I’d been drinking," she said, "it would have been my fault. But it was midday. I was praying. God must have been punishing me."
Mom devoutly believed in "God's punishment." Random illogic called for reasons, and she needed God to witness her pain. A high school friend's father ran off with a neighbor's wife and died of cardiac arrest on a ski slope.
"God punished him," my mother said.
She never met the man or knew that he'd competed his entire life with a favored brother, but the information would not have modified her theory. Each punishment required a crime, each effect a cause.