Harold S. Kushner - Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World

ALSO BY HAROLD S. KUSHNER

Faith & Family
Overcoming Lifes Disappointments
The Lord Is My Shepherd
Living a Life That Matters
How Good Do We Have to Be?
To Life!
Who Needs God
When All Youve Ever Wanted Isnt Enough
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
When Children Ask About God
Commanded to Live

For Ariel

What we choose, changes us.
What we love, transforms us.

JAN L. RICHARDSON

Courage is not the absence of fear but the mastery of fear.

MARK TWAIN

The Eleventh Commandment
DONT BE AFRAID

They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree and none shall make them afraid.

MICAH 4:4

B efore I could write a book about what people today are afraid of and how they might deal with their fears, I had to write first about what frightens me. Only then would I be able to understand the fears of others. Fears can range from mild concern (Did I remember to turn off the oven?) to serious worry (She was due home at ten; its midnight and shes not home yet!) to sheer panic (My brakes arent working! The man has a knife!). I find myself worrying more about something happening to people I love than about something happening to me. I worry that they are vulnerable to serious illness, accidents, crime, natural disaster. To love someone is to make yourself a hostage to fortune, aware of all the terrible things that can happen to him or her. Whenever I read of a violent crime against a woman or child, a fatal automobile accident, a young person drowning, the rational side of my brain reassures me that it makes the news only because it is so rare, but my emotional side keeps saying, What if it had been someone close to me? (Even as parents fear for the well-being of their children, childrens primal fear is that something will happen to one of their parents. I was once preparing a thirteen-year-old boy for his bar mitzvah ceremony, and I asked him if there was anything he was scared of. I was thinking of his performance at the synagogue service, but he spoke instead of his fear that one of his parents would die while he still needed him or her.) It startles me to realize that my grandson is only a few years away from being eligible for military service and might have to risk his life in a war. I worry about my grandchildren having to cope with the dangers and challenges of adolescence in a much more complicated world than either I or their mother grew up in. I worry about another attack on an American city, like the one on September 11, 2001, with heavy loss of life. I worry in the knowledge that I and the people around me can do everything right and still experience misfortune. We can be careful about what we eat and how much we exercise and still fall victim to a genetic time bomb hidden in our DNA. We can drive carefully and still be in the path of a careless driver. We can work hard at our jobs and save for our retirement, only to have events beyond our control force our employer to terminate our job or market events erode our savings. On those infrequent occasions when I have a bad dream, it is always the same one. I am trying to get somewhere where people are expecting me, and I cant get there. The dream speaks to my sense of helplessness in the face of forces I cant control and my fear of disappointing people who are counting on me.

I worry about losing those things that give meaning and pleasure to my life, the ability to read and to write, to give birth to another book or craft a meaningful sermon, the ability to follow the news and crack a joke about contemporary politics, the ability to recognize people I care about and remember where I know them from. In my rabbinic experience, I have seen too many people who were so sharp and insightful when I met them, only to have those qualities taken from them.

I worry about our planet becoming less livable, about our running out of places to live, water to drink, and even clean air to breathe. Sometimes I worry that I will live so long that I will come to see terrible things happening and be powerless to do anything about them, a war more fearsome than anything we have ever seen or an economic collapse even greater than the one we have just seen, one that will further erode peoples savings, and sometimes I worry that I wont live long enough to see some things I look forward to. And most of all, I worry that all this worrying makes my life less enjoyable than it ought to be.

Columnist Liat Collins has written in The Jerusalem Post, Perhaps deep down my greatest fear is that if I was to live in fear, I would never get anything done. You dont paint an apartment if you constantly worry about the imminence of earthquakes. You dont stay close to friends if you worry that they are about to be wiped out by war or disease. If you acted on all the fears concerning children, youd have to spend so much energy trying to protect them that you wouldnt have time to raise them.

How do I cope with all of these fears? Sometimes I do it by putting them in perspective as very unlikely to happen. Sometimes I find some small area over which I do have controlwatching my diet, conserving energy, recycling more. Sometimes I simply do what most people do: I just stop thinking about unpleasant outcomes; sometimes I stubbornly believe as an act of faith that God has made a world in which tragedy is real but happy endings heavily outnumber tragic ones. I resolve not to let my fears of what might happen prevent me from anticipating with pleasure what I hope will happen.

Some years ago, a movie was made called Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep. The movie imagines people who die going to heaven, where they are put on trial to evaluate how they lived their lives. Every second of every persons life has been recorded on videotape, and in a heavenly tribunal, a prosecutor and a defense attorney summon up key moments of each persons life from childhood to his or her last days. The novel thesis of the movie is that the purpose of the trial is not to determine if one was virtuous or wicked but whether one had learned to conquer fear. That is seen as the goal of life. If in the course of a persons years, he or she never got over being afraid, then that person is sent back to earth to be reincarnated and given another chance to get it right. If people succeeded in overcoming the tendency to be fearful, they graduate to a more refined, and presumably more challenging, level of existence.