Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life - Softcover

Kushner, Harold S.

 
9780804173452: Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804173451 ISBN 13: 9780804173452
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

From the #1 national bestselling author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People—“a lifetime of wisdom from someone who has studied, suffered, celebrated, and through it all, taught an entire generation" (Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters).

In this compassionate and deeply personal work, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner distills his experiences as a twenty-first-century rabbi into nine essential takeaways. Offering readers a lifetime’s worth of spiritual food for thought, pragmatic advice, and strength for trying times, he gives fresh, vital insight into belief, conscience, mercy, and more. Grounded in Kushner’s brilliant readings of scripture, history, and popular culture, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life is practical, illuminating, and compulsory advice for living a good life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HAROLD S. KUSHNER was rabbi laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, having long served that congregation. The author of more than a dozen books on coping with life’s challenges, he is best known as the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He died in 2023.

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Chapter One

Lessons Learned Along the Way

In the twenty-first century, the religious agenda will be set not by tradition’s answers but by congregants’ questions.

For thirty years, I had the perfect job. I was a congrega­tional rabbi. I studied, I taught, I officiated at life-cycle events—bar mitzvah services, weddings, and funerals—trying to enhance the joy and mitigate the sorrow of those moments with my words and with elements of the Jewish tradition, all things I had been taught to do and felt good about doing. (I confess there was one other aspect of being a congregational rabbi that pleased me. I have read that the most frightening thing a person can contemplate, even more than the fear of death, is the fear of having to speak in public. That’s not me. In a room where two hundred people are sitting and lis­tening and one person is standing and speaking, I will always be most comfortable being the one standing and speaking.)
 
I’m not sure how I ended up being a rabbi. It was never my intention growing up. I don’t think it ever occurred to me, nor to my parents, who suggested regu­larly that they would like me to be a doctor. I entered college with no idea of what I would do professionally, hoping that college would give me a direction. My father was a successful businessman, which ruled that out as a career. I did not want to go into business and fail, dis­appointing my father, nor did I want to go into busi­ness and be more successful than my father (a highly unlikely outcome). I have known families in which that engendered not pride but resentment.
 
I entered Columbia in 1951, listing my major as “lib­eral arts,” which left open all possibilities short of medi­cal school. I also took advantage of Columbia’s proximity to the Jewish Theological Seminary, where my mother had studied to be a Hebrew teacher some twenty-five years earlier and where some of her most revered teach­ers still taught. The Seminary offered evening classes for students who wanted the education without seeking a career in Jewish professional life.
 
In those evening classes, I came to recognize four or five familiar faces from my freshman classes at Colum­bia, and we bonded. We would come back from class and stay up late talking theology, trying to make sense of the Holocaust, details of which had just become widely known, and discussing what the State of Israel, founded just a few years earlier, would mean for Jewish life. Sev­eral of those friends were planning to study for the rab­binate, though none of them did. Only I ended up there. After graduating from Columbia in 1955, I enrolled in the Seminary’s rabbinical school and emerged five years later as a Conservative rabbi.
 
My spiritual life—what I believe, teach, and prac­tice—has been shaped in large measure by two sets of circumstances. The first was the home I grew up in and the synagogue my family and I attended. The rabbi at the Brooklyn Jewish Center was Israel Levinthal, recognized as one of the outstanding preachers of the American Jewish community. Stories circulated of how Orthodox Jews would walk over the Williamsburg Bridge from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn on Friday nights (as they could not take trains on the Sabbath) to hear Levinthal speak. The quip was that every newly ordained Conser­vative rabbi would head out to his first pulpit with two books in his luggage: the pocket guide to Jewish practice and the collected sermons of Israel Levinthal. To this day, I cannot sit down to write a sermon without feeling Rabbi Levinthal’s presence looking over my shoulder to make sure I am being faithful to the text.
 
I would describe the religion practiced in my home as “observant but not compulsive.” When we lit the Sabbath candles on a Friday night or observed the tra­ditional dietary rules about permitted and forbidden foods, I never had the sense that we were obeying a com­mand from a God who would be displeased with us if we had not done those things, nor did we obsess about the consequences of our inadvertently making a mistake. Rather, we felt we were making a statement about who we were as a family and, although I don’t think the word would have occurred to any of us, we were bringing a measure of holiness into an ordinary middle-class home, turning mundane moments into appointments with God. I could not have predicted at the time that the concept of “observant but not compulsive” and the absence of a belief in a God who would punish us for disobedience would go on to become cornerstones of my personal and professional life.
 
The second circumstance that shaped my religious outlook was the illness and death of our son, Aaron, from one of the world’s rarest diseases, progeria, the “rapid-aging” syndrome, as I chronicled in my book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It was in the presence of my sick and dying child that I discovered how inadequate the traditional perspective was that I had grown up with and had been taught, that God has His reasons, which we cannot comprehend or judge. It neither made sense of the suffering nor offered us much in the way of comfort. If I was to continue to serve as a rabbi and to honor my son’s memory, I would have
to find a better explanation.
 
I think of the first circumstance, the religion of my childhood home and synagogue, as “religion done well,” religion fashioning a community and introducing moments of specialness into an ordinary home. And I think of the second as my encounter with “religion done badly,” more concerned with protecting God’s reputation than with helping worshippers in need. The notion that an all-wise, all-powerful God who is totally good must have had His reasons for inflicting incur­able illness on innocent children, reasons beyond the comprehension of a human mind or soul, was worse than unhelpful. It was offensive, saying to us either “You must have done something to deserve this” or “In times to come, you will understand why this was the right thing to happen to you.” I heard this from many people after my book came out: “Now you know why God did this to your child, so that you would write this book that would help millions.” I’m sorry, but I choose to believe that any God worth worshipping would say, “I really don’t need you to be My press agent. I need you to bring solace and comfort to My bleeding children on earth.”
 
More than anything else, my half century of congre­gational service and my dozen or so books have been dedicated to reformulating that traditional theology. I’ve done this not to protect God from bad theologians and people’s righteous anger, but to rescue people who need God from having to choose between a cruel God and no God at all.
 
I heard a story some years ago about a couple cel­ebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary by going out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. Leaving the restau­rant, they got into their car to drive home. The wife turned to the husband and said, “What’s happened to us over the years? Do you remember when we were court­ing, when we were first married, how we would get into the car and snuggle up close to each other, and drive somewhere holding on to each other? Now look how far apart we’re sitting.” And the husband responded by pointing to the steering wheel and saying, “I haven’t moved.”
 
For many of us, there was a time when we were young when we felt close to God. We had been taught that God loved us and was watching over us, and...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804173451
ISBN 13 
9780804173452
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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