Harold S. Kushner

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, isone of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But anexcessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem andperhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

(Many religions, from Judaism to Zoroastrianism, use light and fire as symbols for the presence of God, perhaps because light, like God, cannot be seen but permits us to see everything there is, perhaps because fire liberates the energy hidden in a log of wood or a lump of coal just as God liberates the potential energy to do good things that is hidden in every human being, just as God will be the fire that burns within Moses, enabling him to do the great things he will go on to do, but not consuming him in the process.)

Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are

If that were God's plan, it's a bad bargain; I don't want to have to deal with a God like that...My sense is God and I came to an accommodation with each other a couple of decades ago, where he's gotten used to the things that I'm not capable of and I've come to terms with things he's not capable of...and we care very much about each other.

God is the One who is with us when we have to do something we don't think we are capable of doing.

Sooner or later, we all learn that our immortality is rooted not in our professional involvements and achievements, but in our families. In time, all of our wins and losses in the workplace will be forgotten. If our memories endure, it will be because of the people we have known and touched.

If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, wewould put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimateresult may be?

Pain is the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells__ur hair, our fingernails__an__ feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When weunderstand that, our question will change from, __hy do we have to feel pain?_ to __hat do we do with our pain so that it becomesmeaningful and not just pointless empty suffering? How can we turn all the painful experiences of our lives into birth pangs or intogrowing pains?_ We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have alot to say about what the suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter andenvious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of painmeaningful and others empty and destructive.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)

Perhaps that is the only cure for jealousy, to realize that the people we resent and envy for having what we lack, probably have woundsand scars of their own. They may even be envying us.

Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people?...The response would be_to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all_no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.

We may not ever understand why we suffer or be able to control the forces that cause our suffering, but we can have a lot to say about what suffering does to us, and what sort of people we become because of it. Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate. It is the result, not the cause, of pain that makes some experiences of pain meaningful and others empty and destructive.

If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrationalfeeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everythingthat happens in the world is our doin

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

This is what itmeans to create: not to make something out of nothing, but to make order out of chaos. A creative scientist or historian does not makeup facts but orders facts; he sees connections between them rather than seeing them as random data. A creative writer does notmake up new words but arranges familiar words in patterns which say something fresh to us.

This is what it means to be human __n the image of God._ It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instinctswould tell us to do. It means knowing that some choices are good, and others are bad, and it is our job to know the difference.