God is endowed with infinite love and justice, but because he wields only limited power to prevent evil, he is a practical public figure whose best-selling books have assured readers that bad things happen to good people. Theologian Rabbi Harold Kushner died Thursday in Canton, Massachusetts.
His death in hospice care was confirmed by his daughter Ariel Kushner Haber.
Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became bestsellers and resonated beyond his conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries. One reviewer called his book When All You Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, a “helpful spiritual survival manual.”
Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son Aaron. Just hours after the Kushners’ daughter was born when he was three years old, Aaron was diagnosed with progeria, a rare disease that causes the body to age rapidly.
When Aaron was 10, he was physiologically in his 60s. When he died in 1977, two days after his 14th birthday, he weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as his 3-year-old.
“Like many children who feel they are going to die soon, he feared that he would be forgotten because he did not live long enough, not knowing that his parents would never forget,” said Ravi. Kushner told the alumni magazine. Columbia University Today “I promised to tell his story.”
The book was rejected by two publishers before being accepted by Shocken Books. It reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and turned Ravi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.
In 1996, he told The Times, “For the first time, I learned that there is suffering in the world that religion has failed to address.
His thesis was as straightforward as he wrote in his book.
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
“I don’t know why some people get sick and others don’t, but I can only assume that there are laws of nature at work that we don’t understand. God makes certain people sick for certain reasons. I can’t believe you “send” the . I don’t believe in God who has weekly assignments to distribute malignant tumors. Consult God’s computer to find out who deserves it most and who can handle it best.
“What have I done to deserve this?” I can understand the protests from those who are afflicted with illness, but that is actually the wrong question. It doesn’t matter what you decide to give us. A better question is, ‘What should I do now if this happens to me, and who will be there to help me?’ “
He argued that there persists a dark corner of the universe where God has not yet succeeded in creating order out of chaos.And chaos is evil. It’s not bad, it’s not malicious, but it’s evil nonetheless,” he wrote.
Journalist, critic, and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing for The New York Times Magazine in 1995, dialectically reduced Rabbi Kushner’s thesis. It is clear that he is a bystander in the fight against evil. “
“In effect, we have to root for good with him. Our job is to help cheer him up.”
However, Rabbi Kushner argued that God is omnipotent as a source of empathy and love.
Harold Samuel Kushner was born on April 3, 1935 in the East New York section of Brooklyn to Julius and Sarah (Hartman) Kushner. His mother was a housewife. His father owned Playmore Publishing, which sold toys and children’s books, especially Bible stories, from stores on 5th Avenue and his 23rd Street. Harold felt that he lacked his father’s business acumen.
“The only thing worse than competing with my father and failing is to compete with him and beat him,” he said. “Entering the Rabinate was not a way of saying, ‘I refuse to do what you’re doing,’ I swear.”
He grew up in Brooklyn (the family moved to the Crown Heights section when he started elementary school) and he was an avid Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1955 and a master’s degree from the same university in 1960.
He planned to major in psychology, but turned to literature after studying with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Professor Mark Van Doren. A lark, but armed with a solid religious upbringing, he enrolled in an evening program at the Jewish Seminary. By his junior year at Columbia, he decided to become a rabbi.
After Columbia, he enrolled full-time in an ordained seminary, graduating in 1960 and earning a doctorate in 1972. He later studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He volunteered for two years in the Army Chaplains at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he became a lieutenant. After he was discharged, he returned to New York and served for four years as an assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Great Neck, Long Island, New York.
Rabbi Kushner married Suzette Estrada in 1960, moved to Massachusetts, and in 1966 became Rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, a suburb of Boston. There she served as the congregation’s rabbi for 24 years and remained a member of the congregation until she moved. She moved to Canton senior housing in 2017.
his wife died His older brother Paul, Rabbi of Belmore and Merrick of Long Island, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, two grandchildren survive.
Another book by Rabbi Kushner is How Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness” (1997), “Living a Life That Matters” (2001), “The Lord Is My Shepherd: The Healing Wisdom of Psalm 23” (2003).
He also collaborated with novelist Chaim Potok on the editing of Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary, the official commentary of the Conservative Judaism, published by the Rabbinical Council and the Jewish Publishing Society in 2001.
Rabbi Kushner often said that he was surprised by the broad readership beyond the theological field. In 1999, he was named Clergyman of the Year by the organization Religion in American Life. In 2007, the Jewish Book Council awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award.
In his books, other writings, and on-air commentary, as a guest on radio and television talk shows, he became a font of aphorisms acceptable to clergymen of all denominations. Much lonelier than we want to be.
“People who pray for miracles usually don’t get them. Just as children who pray for their bikes, good grades, or good boyfriends get miracles as a result of their prayers,” he wrote. “But those who pray for courage, strength to endure the hardships, grace to remember what they have left, not what they have lost, are often answered.”
He explained that his book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough aims to “look at why successful people aren’t happy with their lives.”
“To quote the Bible book of Ecclesiastes suggests that people need to feel that their lives will make a difference in the world,” he wrote. I am not afraid to die.”
