Book Review: Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life

Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life

Author: Harold S. Kushner

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 171 pages

Reviewed by Rev. Garth Wehrfritz-Hanson

The Author 

At the time this volume was published, Harold S. Kushner was rabbi laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, having long served that congregation. He is best known as the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In 1995, he was honoured by the Christophers, a Roman Catholic organization, as one of the fifty people who have made the world a better place in the past half century, and in 1999, the national organization Religion in American Life honoured him as their clergyman of the year. Rabbi Kushner is the author of a number of other popular books. 

Contents

This volume consists of a Preface, nine chapters—the titles of which reveal the themes addressed—and “A Love Letter to a World That May or May Not Deserve It.”

In his first chapter, Lessons Learned Along the Way, Rabbi Kushner states that even though he enjoyed studying and learning the centuries-old Jewish traditions at Jewish Theological Seminary; he realized that his congregants’ questions could not be answered by what he learned in seminary. He learned that traditional Jewish theology needed to be reformulated to address questions about God, suffering and the meaning of life and forgiveness. “When I was ordained a rabbi at age twenty-five, they told me I was ready to go forth and teach. The truth was, I was at best ready to go forth and learn” (p. 16). 

In God Is Not a Man Who Lives in the Sky, Rabbi Kushner goes into some detail about the God he does and does not believe in. When he prays the traditional prayer that God is one, he believes that “God embraces all polarities, male and female, young and old, scolding and forgiving. Everything—all polarities—finds its place in God. “God is one” means something like “God is all” (p. 24). He does not believe that one has to beg or bargain with God. Rather, God is with us to help us do what we need to do as we journey through life. 

According to Kushner, God Does Not Send the Problem; God Sends Us the Strength to Deal with the Problem, genetics, chance, and bad luck are the cause of problems. “And God cannot make the problem go away, no matter how many prayers and good deeds we offer. What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned” (pp. 48-49). I do not completely agree with the rabbi on this. Sometimes God answers prayer, and works miracles. Sometimes our problems are due to/caused by our or others’ sins and evil in the world. Sometimes we do feel abandoned. 

Rabbi Kushner, in his chapter titled, Forgiveness Is a Favor You Do Yourself, cites examples of the necessity of forgiving in order to prevent the offending party from continuing to victimize and having power over the one who is offended. He cites the story of Joseph as an example. Forgiving someone does not mean you are excusing the offending party for what they have done. Rather, the person who forgives does not have to live as an angry victim for the rest of their life. 

In his chapter, Some Things Are Just Wrong; Knowing That Makes Us Human, the author makes the case against Original Sin, and for Original Virtue: “...the uniquely human gift and burden of being able to know right from wrong, good from bad” (p. 94). He is sceptical of the Christian view of inherited guilt and shame from Adam and Eve. Rather, he claims that human babies are born with a sense of good and bad, fairness and empathy. 

According to Kushner’s chapter Religion Is What You Do, Not What You Believe, unlike Jesus who taught that sin comes from the heart, the rabbi states that lustful thoughts and feelings are not sinful until they are carried out in deeds. 

In his chapter, Leave Room for Doubt and Anger in Your Religious Outlook, Rabbi Kushner emphasizes that doubt and anger are not expressions of the lack of faith. Rather, they are expressions of faith, citing Jeremiah and Moses as examples.

In his chapter, To Feel Better About Yourself, Find Someone to Help, Kushner, commenting on Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness, renders Genesis 21:18 as follows: “make your hand strong in his.” He adds, “You will make yourself feel stronger by reaching out to someone else” (p. 137). 

In this chapter, Kushner cites Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s insight that he learned from his grandmother: “Knowledge refers to know how to do something; wisdom means knowing when and whether to do it” (p. 139). 

In his chapter, Give God the Benefit of the Doubt, the author provides a comparison of several translations of Genesis 15:6, and then offers his interpretation of it. He favours the rendering Abraham trusted or believed God rather than trusted in or believed in God. Abraham trusted God’s promise that God would fulfil it in the future. According to Kushner, because Abraham trusted that God would keep his promise, Abraham was able to offer Isaac as a sacrifice in Genesis 22. 

Out of Abraham’s trust of giving God the benefit of the doubt, Kushner suggests there is a “theology of not-yet” (p. 162). For Kushner, this not-yet theology is one where the world is not as God intended it to be. However, when people of faith work together: “...to bring about the day when what should be, will be” (p. 169). 

I leave it up to readers of this review to read this volume, if they wish to discover the contents of Rabbi Kushner’s love letter. 

Although I differ from Rabbi Kushner on a few subjects, I do appreciate his many insights, wisdom, knowledge and compassion, which have grown out of five decades of faithful ministry.