Harold S. Kushner - Overcoming Lifes Disappointments

CONTENTS

Dedicated to the memory of my teachers,

Rabbi Israel H. Levinthal

Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan

Rabbi Mordecai Waxman

The words of the sages echo even from the grave.

FIRST WORDS

I T IS an intimidating thing to write a book in which Moses is the hero, considering that someone (Someone?) has already done that, and done it better than I could ever hope to. The only thing that gives me the courage to do it is that this is not really a book about Moses. It is a book about you and me, and what we can learn from the life of Moses, from his successes and from his disappointments. It is a tribute to the human quality of imagination, the ability to dream and to envision a better world than the one we live in, and to the human quality of resilience, the ability to go on bravely when those dreams dont come true. It is a book for all of us who have to deal with people who dont appreciate us, whether at home or at work, as Moses had to deal with an ungrateful people for forty years. It is a book for all the men and women who have begun to suspect that life will give them some of the things they yearn for but not everything, maybe not the things that mean the most to them.

I have dedicated this book to the memory of the three teachers who have shaped me to be the person, the writer that I am today:

Rabbi Israel Levinthal, the rabbi of my growing-up years in Brooklyn. He was a formidable preacher, often quoted, often borrowed from by other rabbis. It was from him that I learned to make the connection between biblical texts and peoples concerns. To this day, whenever I sit down to write a sermon, I feel Rabbi Levinthals presence hovering over my shoulder to make sure I take my preaching seriously.

Professor Mordecai Kaplan, Professor of the Philosophies of Religion at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The most original thinker the American Jewish community has produced, he was my mothers teacher in the 1920s and mine in the 1950s. Every line I have written in my ten books is in large measure a commentary on what Dr. Kaplan taught me in rabbinical school.

Rabbi Mordecai Waxman, senior rabbi at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Long Island. When I finished my military service, I served as his assistant for four years. It was there that I learned what it means to be a rabbi, when to meet people on their own terms, and when to challenge them to be more than they are.

I would like to think that their memories live on in my thoughts and that their teachings are given new life in my writings.

In this book, as in previous works, I have been blessed by the guidance and counsel of James H. Silberman and Jonathan Segal. Only they and I know how much better this book is because of their involvement. I am grateful, too, to my agent, Peter Ginsberg, for all he did before the first word of this book was written and for many months afterward. As always, my wife, Suzette, was a constant source of encouragement, especially during the sometimes difficult process of completing this work. If this book speaks to you and to your life, they deserve your thanks as well.

The Man Who Dared to Dream

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Langston Hughes, Harlem

I N THESE lines, the poet Langston Hughes wonders what happens to dreams that dont come true. I wonder what happens to the dreamer. How do people cope with the realization that important dimensions of their lives will not turn out as they hoped they would? A persons marriage isnt all he or she anticipated. Someone doesnt get the promotion or the recognition he had set his heart on. Many of us look at the world and see two groups of people, winners and losers: those who get what they want out of life and those who dont. But in reality life is more complicated than that. Nobody gets everything he or she yearns for. I look at the world and see three sorts of people: those who dream boldly even as they realize that a lot of their dreams will not come true; those who dream more modestly and fear that even their modest dreams may not be realized; and those who are afraid to dream at all, lest they be disappointed. I would wish for more people who dreamed boldly and trusted their powers of resilience to see them through the inevitable disappointments.

History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win. Most biographies, excluding works of pure scholarship, are meant to inspire as much as to inform, so they focus on a persons successes. But in real life, even the most successful people see some of their efforts fail and even the greatest of people learn to deal with failure, rejection, bereavement, and serious illness.

The lessons of this book will come in large part from examining the life of one of the most influential people who ever lived, Moses, the hero of the Bible, the man who brought Gods word down to earth from the mountaintop. When we think of Moses, we think of his triumphs: leading the Israelites out of slavery, splitting the Red Sea, ascending Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the law. But Moses was a man who knew frustration and failure in his public and personal life at least as often and as deeply as he knew fulfillment, and we, whose lives are also a mix of fulfillment and disappointment, can learn from his experiences. If he could overcome his monumental disappointments, we can learn to overcome ours.

What can we learn from Moses story to help my congregant who is overlooked for a promotion or the elderly man or woman whose children and grandchildren ignore him or her? What can I learn from Moses to share with all the wives and husbands who find it hard to feel affectionate toward a mate who takes them for granted? Let us turn to the story of Moses, the man who dared to dream, to see what lessons it reveals.

Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel has written in Messengers of God that Moses was the most solitary and the most powerful hero in biblical history... the man who changed the course of history by himself. After him, nothing was the same again. He goes on: His passion for social justice, his struggle for national liberation, his triumphs and disappointments, his poetic inspiration, his gifts as a strategist and his organizational genius, his complex relationship with God and Gods people... his efforts to reconcile the law with compassion, authority with integrityno individual ever, anywhere accomplished so much for so many people in so many domains. His influence is boundless. The teachings of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament would be unintelligible unless read against the background of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. The revelation to Muhammad at the inception of Islam assumes that the earlier revelation to Moses contained the authentic words of God. Even such secular prophets as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud drew their passion for justice and freedom from the life and teachings of Moses.

We may think that we know about Moses, if not from Sunday school classes, then perhaps from one of the movies about his life. If we do, chances are that we relegate that knowledge to the dusty corner of our consciousness reserved for old Sunday school lessons, entertaining and probably edifying but not that relevant to our daily lives. But let me give you a fuller view of him, not only the man on the mountaintop, the man to whom God spoke with unparalleled intimacy, but Moses the human being, a man whose soaring triumphs were offset by crushing defeats in some of the things that mattered most to him, a man who came to realize the price his family paid for his successes. In the end, I trust we will still see him as a hero to admire and learn from, maybe even more heroic when the all-too-human qualities of longing, frustration, regret, and resiliency have been added to the portrait. Let me review his story, as told in the book of Exodus and the narrative portions of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.