I didn’t know Rabbi Harold Kushner all that well, but he did impact my life in two particular contexts.
First: I live in Natick, Massachusetts, the town where Rabbi Kushner lived and worked for most of his career. In the Jewish cemetery here his son is buried—Aaron, who died of progeria, the rare premature-aging disease which prompted Rabbi Kushner’s famous book When Bad Things Happen to Good People—and here on Monday he will be laid to rest.
I had never met him in person until I moved to Natick in 2005. The first time I ran into him in the Bakery on the Common, I was giddy—“I just met Harold Kushner!”—and he was very gracious and welcomed me to the neighborhood. More exciting was the second time I encountered him a few months later, when he came over and said, “Hi Neal!” Harold Kushner knew who I was!
After that, our paths crossed periodically: at events for local rabbis, or around town, or in contexts where he was a guest lecturer. He was always cordial and warm towards me.
But the main context in which I knew Harold Kushner is the same way in which countless other people knew him: He reached out through his books.
Just think, for a moment, about what a metaphysically extraordinary thing a book is. Through a book an author reaches across space and time to transmit ideas, provocations, comfort, and hope. Here’s the way Stephen King describes it:
What writing is: Telepathy, of course….
We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We’re close.
We’re having a meeting of the minds.
I sent you a table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You got them all… We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy. (Stephen King, On Writing, 1997)
In this telepathic way, Rabbi Kushner reached me and countless people through his books. He was a publishing phenomenon, and through his writing, the healing wisdom of Judaism spread far beyond his reach in the pulpit or in the classroom - and to Jews and non-Jews alike.
I first read When Bad Things Happen to Good People in high school, as part of Temple Shalom’s Confirmation curriculum. (The assignment was simply: read a Jewishly relevant book and submit a report on it. How many synagogue Hebrew schools would expect their students to do that today? Very few, I bet.) It was probably the first book of theology I ever read, and the first place I learned the very Jewish tradition of wrestling with G-d, rather than offering apologies for G-d.
But every elegy for Rabbi Kushner is going to mention WBTHTGP, which made him famous. Personally, I return more frequently to some of his other great books, especially: Living a Life That Matters (2001), Conquering Fear (2009), and his self-published sermon collection Faith and Family (2007), among the others. Really, he never wrote a book that isn’t worthwhile. All of his books speak gentle but sublime spiritual truths, peppered with insights from classic Jewish literature as well as the lives of people in his community.
(By the way, many people don’t realize that he is the author of the “below the line” Torah commentary in Etz Hayim, which sits in the pews of many American synagogues. This, surely, is another aspect of his immortality.)
My personal favorite is How Good Do We Have to Be?, one of the wisest books I know. It’s typical of his style. The jumping-off point is a well-known Biblical touchstone; in this case, the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden. You may have thought that at this late date there wasn’t much more to say about Adam and Eve and the expulsion from Eden. Yet in Rabbi Kushner’s hands, it’s a stunningly contemporary exploration of universal themes: what it means to be a parent or a sibling, the American dysfunctional pursuit of perfection, healthy guilt versus unhealthy guilt, and the real possibility of being able to forgive others and ourselves. He always seems to have a perfect real-life anecdote at his fingertips (a skill that—as a writer and teacher—I covet desperately).
For instance,
The essence of marital love is not romance, but forgiveness.
….Romantic love overlooks faults (“love is blind”) in an effort to persuade ourselves that we deserve a perfect partner. Mature marital love sees faults clearly and forgives them, understanding that there are no perfect people, that we don’t have to pretend perfection, and that an imperfect spouse is all that an imperfect person like us can aspire to:
“For years I was looking for the perfect man, and when I finally found him, it turned out he was looking for the perfect woman and that wasn’t me.”
And:
How do you define a “good death”?... Let me suggest my own definition: a good death would be one that does not contradict what your life has been about.
…When we learn to think of life as a story, then we can come to think of death not as punishment, but as punctuation. What we want to know about a book or movie is not how long it is, but how good it is, and we can learn to think of life in the same way. (p.161-162)
And lest you still are under the misguided impression that after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit the expulsion from Eden was some sort of punishment—it’s not. Here’s Kushner’s midrash from the book, and it is a beautiful epitaph:
How the Story Might Have Ended
So the woman saw that the tree was good to eat and a delight to the eye, and the serpent said to her, “Eat of it, for when you eat of it, you will be as wise as G-d.” But the woman said, “No, G-d has commanded us not to eat of it, and I will not disobey G-d.”
And G-d called to the man and the woman and said to them, “Because you have hearkened to My word and not disobeyed My command, I shall reward you greatly.”
To the man, G-d said, “You will never have to work again. Spend all your days in idle contentment, with food growing all around you.”
To the woman, G-d said, “You will bear children without pain and you will raise them without pain. They will need nothing from you. Children will not cry when their parents die, and parents will not cry when their children die.”
To both of them, He said, “For the rest of your lives, you will have full bellies and contented smiles. You will never cry and you will never laugh,, You will never long for something you don’t have, and you will never receive something you always wanted.”
And the man and the woman grew old together in the Garden, eating daily from the Tree of Life and having many children. And the grass grew high around the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil until it disappeared from view, for there was no one to tend it. (How Good Do We Have to Be?, pp.32-33)
Amen, and I’m grateful to know that through his writing he’ll continue to teach us for generations to come.