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Harold S. Kushner is the author of several bestselling books on coping with life's challenges. He has been honored by the Christophers as one of the fifty people who have made the world a better place. He is Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts.

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Living a Life That Matters

Random House Large Print Publishing

Chapter One

The Two Voices of God Like many people, I live in two worlds. Much of the time,I live in the world of work and commerce, eating, working, and paying my bills.It is a world that honors people for being attractive and productive. It revereswinners and scorns losers, as reflected in its treatment of devoted publicservants who lose an election or in the billboard displayed at the AtlantaOlympic Games a few years ago: "You don't win the silver medal, you losethe gold." As in most contests, there are many more losers than winners, somost of the citizens of that world spend a lot of time worrying that they don'tmeasure up.

But, fortunately, there is another world where, even before I entered itprofessionally, I have spent some of my time. As a religiously committed person,I live in the world of faith, the world of the spirit. Its heroes are models ofcompassion rather than competition. In that world, you win through sacrifice andself-restraint. You win by helping your neighbor and sharing with him ratherthan by finding his weakness and defeating him. And in the world of the spirit,there are many more winners than losers.

When I was young, most of my time and energy were devoted to the world ofgetting and spending. I relished competition. I wanted to be challenged. Howelse could I find out how good I was, where I stood on the ladder of winners andlosers? I was living out the insight of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung that"act one of a young man's life is the story of his setting out to conquerthe world."

Of course, I was not the only person who did that. Most people lived as I did.For several years, our next-door neighbor's son was a nationally renownedprofessional athlete. It wasn't money that kept him playing and risking seriousinjury. It was the challenge, the competition, the opportunity to prove onceagain that he was better than most people at what he did.

When I was young, I saw that second world, the world of faith, as a kind ofvacation home, a place to which I repaired in order to relax from the stress ofthe world of striving, so that I could emerge refreshed to resume the battle. Attimes, it seemed almost a mirror image of my first world, a place wheredifferent people played by different rules. Old people were respected there fortheir wisdom and experience, as were old ideas and old values. People weredescribed as "beautiful" because they exuded compassion and generosityrather than wealth and glamour. "Success" had a very different meaningthere.

As my life increasingly became a story of giving up dreams and coming to termswith my limitations (Jung went on to say, "Act two is the story of a youngman realizing that the world is not about to be conquered by the likes ofhim"), I found myself returning more and more to that second, alternativeworld. I would often recall the words of my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel:"When I was young, I admired clever people. As I grew old, I came to admirekind people."

Looking back at my life, I realize that I was commuting between those two worldsin an effort to meet two basic human needs, the need to feel successful andimportant and the need to think of myself as a good person, someone who deservedthe approval of other good people.

We need to know that we matter to the world, that the world takes us seriously.I read a memoir recently in which a woman recalls staying home from school oneday as a child because she was sick. Hearing the noises of the world outside herwindow, she was dismayed to realize that the world was going on without her, noteven missing her. The woman grew up to be devoutly religious, a pillar of herchurch, active in many organizations, picketing abortion clinics, feeding thehungry. As I read her story, I wondered if she became an activist to overcomethat childhood fear of insignificance, to reassure herself that she did make adifference to the world.

In my forty years as a rabbi, I have tended to many people in the last momentsof their lives. Most of them were not afraid of dying. Some were old and feltthat they had lived long, satisfying lives. Others were so sick and in such painthat only death would release them. The people who had the most trouble withdeath were those who felt that they had never done anything worthwhile in theirlives, and if God would only give them another two or three years, maybe theywould finally get it right. It was not death that frightened them; it wasinsignificance, the fear that they would die and leave no mark on the world.

The need to feel important drives people to place enormous value on such symbolsas titles, corner offices, and first-class travel. It causes us to feelexcessively pleased when someone important recognizes us, and to feel hurt whenour doctor or pastor passes us on the street without saying hello, or when aneighbor calls us by our sister's or brother's name. The need to know that weare making a difference motivates doctors and medical researchers to spend hourslooking through microscopes in the hope of finding cures for diseases. It drivesinventors and entrepreneurs to stay up nights trying to find a better way ofproviding people with something they need. It causes artists, novelists, andcomposers to try to add to the store of beauty in the world by finding just theright color, the right word, the right note. And it leads ordinary people to buysix copies of the local paper because it has their name or picture in it.

Because we find ourselves in so many settings that proclaim ourinsignificance—in stores where salespeople don't know our name and don't careto know it, in crowded buses and airplanes that give us the message that if weweren't there someone else would be available to take our place—some people dodesperate things to reassure themselves that they matter to the world. I canbelieve that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy and that John Hinckley,Jr., tried to kill President Reagan in large measure to prove that the world waswrong in not taking them seriously. They had the power to change history. At aless crucial level, there are people who confuse notoriety with celebrity, andcelebrity with importance. They go to extreme lengths to get their names in theGuinness Book of Records, or to appear on daytime television shows, revealingthings about themselves and their families that most of us would be embarrassedto reveal to our clergyman or our closest friends. They may come across aspitiable; the audience may scorn them. But for one hour their story holds theattention of millions of Americans. They matter.

At the same time, we need to be assured that we are good people. A few yearsago, I wrote a book entitled How Good Do We Have to Be? Its basicmessage was that God does not expect perfection from us, so we should not demandperfection of ourselves or those around us, for God knows what a complicatedstory a human life is and loves us despite our inevitable lapses. As I traveledaround the country talking about my book, something interesting kept happening.Although most people in my audience welcomed the message that God loved themdespite their mistakes and failings, in every audience there would be asignificant number of people who were uncomfortable with it. They wanted tobelieve that God loved them, and other people loved them, because they deservedit, not because God and the other people in their lives were...