Harold S. Kushner - Nine Essential Things Ive Learned About Life

In the twenty-first century, the religious agenda will be set not by traditions 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 eventsbar mitzvah services, weddings, and funeralstrying 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. Thats 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.)

Im not sure how I ended up being a rabbi. It was never my intention growing up. I dont 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 Columbias 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 Seminarys rabbinical school and emerged five years later as a Conservative rabbi.

My spiritual lifewhat I believe, teach, and practicehas 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 Levinthals presence looking over my shoulder to make sure I am being faithful to the text.