An Honest Man

I was saddened this last week to hear of the death at age eighty-eight of Harold S. Kushner, Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, and one of the most successful author-rabbis of his day. Or any day. He will be remembered for many things by those who knew him personally, but most others will recall him primarily for his six best-selling books, of which When Bad Things Happen to Good People, published more than forty years ago in 1981, was both the most successful and the most widely acclaimed. It remains in print in more than a dozen languages; more than four million copies were sold in the first twenty years after it was written. Amazingly, given that it was written by a rabbi drawing on the wellsprings of Jewish thought for his material, it was widely successful among non-Jewish readers as well as Jewish ones. And I can speak to that aspect of the book’s appeal personally: I knew a Christian minister back in B.C. who routinely gave copies to congregants trying to find their way through grief to solace.

My personal connection is that Harold Kushner and I both served as editors of the journal Conservative Judaism, as did also my predecessor at Shelter Rock, Myron M. Fenster. But that was more of a coincidence than anything else; what made me admire him the most was the breadth of his learning and, even more than that, his willingness to write and teach honestly always and without exception. For readers unfamiliar with the Jewish bookshelf of the four decades since When Bad Things Happen to Good People came out, this may not sound like such a big deal. And, really, it shouldn’t be. But the truth is that writing about theological ideas without dissembling or intentionally obfuscating, following ideas logically along their natural progression without feeling the need to avoid stress-inducing conclusions, and not mistranslating texts because their simple meaning would be upsetting or unduly challenging to traditional beliefs—these should be the natural tools any author possessed of spiritual and intellectual integrity (and particularly any Jewish author writing about Judaism or the nature of Jewish faith) should bring to his or her craft. But that is certainly not how things are in the real world of Jewish books, a world in which people routinely publish books in which they declaim as simple truths ideas that they find appealing and sustaining, but which they cannot say with any certainty at all are true.

Knowing the back story of When Bad Things Happen to Good People is crucial to appreciating its worth. The story itself is terrible. The Kushners had a son named Aaron who suffered from a disease called progeria and who died in 1977. Progeria is a terrible thing, a condition that leads to premature and rapid aging. This year’s Broadway hit, Kimberly Akimbo, features a bizarrely upbeat take on the disease, depicting the title character afflicted with it almost as fortunate because of the deep insights her misery suggests to her adolescent self. But the reality is nothing like what you see on stage and is truly tragic: when Aaron Kushner was ten years old, he had the body of a sixty-year old. When he died, he was as tall a toddler and weighed as little as you’d expect. And then, after such a strange trajectory through an impossible childhood, he died just a few days following his fourteenth birthday.

This is the kind of thing no one who hasn’t personally experienced can imagine. But most parents forced by circumstance to live through the kind of nightmare that features the death of an innocent lad who has never had a moment of normalcy in his short life would at least have the luxury, if that’s the right word, of being left alone by the world to work through their emotions in peace. Or, if that’s not quite true—the shiva week is, after all, designed specifically to make sure mourners are not left alone at all with or in their grief—then at least it is true that most people would be allowed to work through their loss without having to test that work against the dogmatic lessons of classical Jewish (or Christian or Buddhist or any) theology. Most people would be allowed to grieve in peace.

But Rabbi Kushner was not just anyone, He was the rabbi of a large congregation filled with people eager to condole with him  and with his wife, to help—even if only slightly—to dissipate the cloud of misery that had visited the Kushners’ home and left such terrible sadness in its wake. And—and this is the key part—and eager also to hear their spiritual leader explain how such horrific sadness could have been visited upon a man whose entire life had been devoted to serving others. Wasn’t God a just Judge? Isn’t that notion—that God judges the world fairly and honorably, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked—isn’t that idea at the very core of the High Holiday liturgy? If God visits misery on people arbitrarily, then why be good at all? And if God only visits misery on people who deserve it because of their wicked deeds, then how can people explain the suffering of people—like Rabbi and Mrs. Kushner—who appear to do only good in the world? And even if they did deserve—for some secret reason—to suffer the loss of a child, then what did the child himself do to merit such a severely truncated life? Surely, the boy was not responsible for his own misery!

For Jewish people, none of these questions can be asked without reference to the Shoah. And that was part of things too—Harold Kushner was born in 1935, so was just growing into his teenaged years as the true dimensions of the losses endured by the Jews of Europe were becoming known. He went to high school in Brooklyn, then to Columbia as an undergraduate, then to JTS, my own alma mater, where he was ordained in 1960. This was long before people were prepared even tentatively to try to work out a way to maintain traditional faith in a benevolent and just God against wartime stories of depravity and barbarism so horrific that even now, scores of years later, they seem unimaginable to most. The weak and unsatisfying idea put out by most who even tried to respond theologically—and which I myself heard spoken aloud many times during my years at JTS—was that the Shoah was a mystery that by its very nature will never be explained adequately…and that the best path forward would therefore be not even to try to explain it cogently or rationally lest failed attempts lead away from traditional observance or faith.

But the death of Aaron Kushner sparked something in his father that could not be tamped down with reference to divine inscrutability or ontological mystery. He was a rabbi and an honest man. He found himself paralyzed by grief and unable to explain how his blameless son could have suffered and died if Judge God is all-knowing, just, and fair. Most would just move forward and try to forget. But Harold Kushner didn’t forget. Or maybe he simply couldn’t forget. But neither could he stay where he was mired in melancholy—time was marching on and he needed to move along with it.

And so he began to write his book that became the most famous of all his works. In it, he took on the questions that most prefer—and prefer vastly—to ignore. And he produced an answer that worked for him. He angered many with his book. Among radical traditionalists, he was vilified for daring to write as he did. Some of my own teachers at JTS wrote unflattering reviews in which they breathlessly revealed that the solutions he proposed were inconsonant with traditional theological tropes. But the book was resonant not with thousands, but with millions. Countless readers who hadn’t ever studied theology seriously but who had experienced excruciating loss understood that Rabbi Kushner was writing about them, speaking to them, and baring his soul for them. I was in graduate school when the book came out. I read it almost as soon as it was available. And I was fully engaged by what he wrote: not by the details so much, but by the breathtaking honesty of a man unwilling to find comfort in fantasy…and yet who was also unwilling to abandon his faith and find solace in atheism.

The thesis of the book is that God is infinitely good but not infinitely powerful, and that the notion of divine omnipotence—that is, the idea of an all-powerful God—is so inconsonant with the world as we experience it in the context of our daily lives as to make it a ridiculous foundation upon which to build anything at all, let alone a spiritual life. And so, embracing the idea that God is infinitely good and just—but not that God can step into any situation to fix it and make it right—Kushner moves forward from chapter to chapter. Using anecdotal evidence gleaned from his own career as a preacher and a pastor but also providing textual support from the Psalms and from other biblical passages, Kushner makes a reasonable case for embracing faith as the foundation for life itself but without falling prey to the fantasy that God can right every wrong, that God could have saved all the children murdered by the Nazis but just didn’t for some reason, that God could easily have cured little Aaron of his terrible disease but decided for some inscrutable reason not to.

It's powerfully and intelligently written, that book. I read it when it came out and was astounded by the man’s insistence on not looking away no matter how painful staring directly into the light might be. Here was the honest man Diogenes sought. And that I myself also sought…and found in Harold Kushner.

May his memory be for a blessing. And may he rest in peace.