Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Harold Kushner, fully Harold Samuel Kushner

American Conservative Rabbi, Best-selling author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it."

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

"A prophet is not a man who tells the future; he is a man who tells the truth."

"Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness."

"I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived."

"Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less."

"Given the unfairness that strikes so many people in life, I would rather believe in a God of limited power and unlimited love and justice, rather than the other way around."

"I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind."

"Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party."

"If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul."

"Pain is a part of being alive, and we need to learn that. Pain does not last forever, nor is it necessarily unbeatable, and we need to be taught that."

"Anguish and heartbreak may not be distributed very evenly around the world, but they are distributed very widely. If we knew the facts, we would very rarely find someone whose life was to be envied."

"God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different."

"We are here to change the world with small acts of thoughtfulness done daily rather than with one great breakthrough."

"In the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened."

"The circumstances of your life have uniquely qualified you to make a contribution. And if you don't make that contribution, nobody else can make it."

"All we can control is how well we respond to the changes, and on that question the Bible offers us two models. One is Lot and his wife, so afraid of an unknown future that they prefer to remain captives of a corrupt and limiting present. The other is Lot’s uncle Abraham and Lot’s cousin Jacob, each summoned to leave a relatively comfortable situation and step into a world being born, armed only with the confidence born of God’s promise, ?Do not fear, for I will be with you and your life will be a blessed one.?"

"A soul is what makes us human. A soul is the religious term for all the qualities that human beings have that animals don't. The danger is that through either fatigue or apathy, we will lose touch with our souls. We will stop exemplifying the qualities that make us human and not animals--we'll be content to just eat, sleep, and have sex. Every human being has the potential to be bad, and every human being has the potential to be a very good person. But if you lose your way, which is very easy, I think you need God to get you on the path again. In this sense, God represents the apex toward which humanity is trying to grow. The qualities which we ascribe to God are largely the qualities that human beings would have if they were fully realized--the compassion, the sense of justice, the reaching out, the self-restraint. When we lose those things, and our animal selves take over, I think we need the contact with God, at least the vision of God, to get us back on the path again."

"An Israeli man whose daughter had been badly burned in the bombing of a school bus was quoted as saying, “There are worse things than dying, and one of them is to live every hour of every day of your life in fear. We are not going to do that.”"

"A small dose of fear keeps us alert and alive, but an overdose can leave us perpetually tense, emotionally closed, and paralyzed to the point of inaction."

"An unforgettable story from the Holocaust tells of a group of Jewish inmates in a Nazi concentration camp. It was the first night of Hanukkah, the winter holiday that recalls the victory of the weak over the powerful and the few over the many in the second century B.C.E. Hanukkah always falls at the darkest time of the year, and Jews mark it by lighting candles against the cold and dark. Holiday celebrations were forbidden in the camp, but one man saved a bit of the bread from his evening meal, dipped it in grease from his dinner bowl, fashioned it into an impromptu candle, said the appropriate prayer, and lit the bread. His son said to him, “Father, that was food you burned. We have so little of it. Wouldn’t we have been better off eating it?” The father replied, “My son, people can live for a week without food, but they cannot live for one day without hope.”"

"And you do it by understanding the difference between being a good person and being a perfect person. The first is possible; the second is unrealistic."

"And this is what I would say to anybody who immerses himself or herself in bitterness toward the end of their life: The only person you're harming is yourself."

"But a people must always remember that violence should be a departure from its authentic way of life, not an expression of it. That is why Solomon tried to keep his Temple, the House of God, a refuge from the clash of arms and the exercise of iron weapons."

"Anger is perhaps the only emotion the average man can recognize in himself. Fear can break the ice jam and open us up to feel such emotions as hope, relief, and gratitude."

"As I understand it, to ask, “Was the hurricane or the tsunami the will of God?” is not really a question about God. It is not asking, Was God pleased or saddened when the flood nearly destroyed New Orleans? It is a question about the kind of world we live in. Does our world make sense? Does everything happen for a reason? For many people, the only way to go on believing that our world is a safe and reliable one is to insist that the hurricane is in fact an ?act of God,? that there is a moral reason for every natural disaster and every malignant tumor even if we cannot understand it, that everything is part of some overall plan. It is a very comforting answer to many people. But it is one I cannot affirm."

"Change makes us uncomfortable; change means loss of control, but change is inevitable."

"Choosing to conceive and bear a child is a theological statement, a way of saying that this is a world worth bringing a child into. It is an endorsement of the future, even by people who have found the past unacceptably painful. Children carry the promise of seeing and doing things differently than life-weary adults would."

"Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted – a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul."

"Change can be good or bad and is often both at the same time. I am grateful for the medical advances of recent years, for computers and e-mail and jet travel. I celebrate the end of racial segregation and the passage of laws against sexual harassment instead of shrugging it off with the cliché “boys will be boys.” But at the same time, I lament an economy that uses people up and discards them, a culture in which movie and television producers compete in a “race to the bottom” to see whose mindless vulgarity will draw larger audiences, and an ecology that puts meat on our tables by treating cows and chickens as if they were not living, sentient creatures and offers us food from factories instead of from fields and farms."

"Change threatens to render us irrelevant, no longer competent, no longer in a position to speak with authority and pass our wisdom on to others. That wisdom is being devalued even as we watch."

"Doing something, however unproven or irrational, even something potentially harmful, is their way of saying that they are not giving up. They are taking charge of their own fate."

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

"Even people who are well beyond the age of bearing children can make a viable human future more likely by doing things today that will bear fruit long after they are no longer around to see them. They can advocate for better schools, strive to eliminate diseases, work to limit the using up of natural resources so that future generations will not lack them."

"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian."

"Fear is hard on bodies. Anxiety is the number one health problem in the country, leading to epidemic depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and prescription drug addiction. American society is violent because it is so fearful. It would seem that we need to add unrealistic fears to the list of things we realistically need to be afraid of."

"Fearful people cannot be happy. Fearful people cannot be generous, charitable, or forgiving. Fear constricts the soul and keeps us from being as fully human as God would like us to be."

"For human beings as for no other creature, the act of bringing a child into this world is more than a biological event. It affirms our belief that the past is worth passing on to the future, and that the future, the world that will be here after we are gone, is worth investing our care in."

"For many people, change can be more than just unpleasant or unsettling. It can be terrifying. It can carry the threat of serious loss, the danger that something we have cherished will be taken from us."

"Forgiveness is not a matter of exonerating people who have hurt you. They may not deserve exoneration. Forgiveness means cleansing your soul of the bitterness of ‘what might have been,’ ‘what should have been,’ and ‘what didn’t have to happen.’ Someone has defined forgiveness as ‘giving up all hope of having had a better past.’ What’s past is past and there is little to be gained by dwelling on it. There are perhaps no sadder people then the men and women who have a grievance against the world because of something that happened years ago and have let that memory sour their view of life ever since."

"For understandable reasons, natural disasters tend to hurt poor people more than affluent ones, causing more damage to vulnerable shacks and mobile home parks than to substantial mansions, hurting the underinsured more than the adequately insured, the economically marginal more than those who had the resources to flee to hotels in other cities."

"Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course."

"Feeling scared reassures us that we are alive, that we are capable of feeling."

"God is the light shining in the midst of darkness, not to deny that there is darkness in the world but to reassure us that we do not have to be afraid of the darkness because darkness will always yield to light. As theologian David Griffin puts in, God is all-powerful, His power enables people to deal with events beyond their control and He gives us the strength to do those things because He is with us."

"God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws. The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God's part. Because the tragedy is not God's will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are."

"God's job is not to make sick people healthy. That's the doctors' job. God's job is to make sick people brave."

"I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago, when I was growing up or when I was a theological student. I recognize His limitations. He is limited in what He can do by laws of nature and by the evolution of human nature and human moral freedom. I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it, more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason."

"Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human."

"He succeeded in causing immense harm and the deaths of millions, but ultimately he lost because he could not control his appetite for conquest and destruction. I believe that the forces behind the attack on New York City and Washington on 9/11, forces that lust for world domination in the name of a fanatical version of their religion, will follow a similar trajectory: Their early success against an unprepared victim will ultimately lead to defeat, because I believe that God’s world is made in such a way that it will not tolerate evildoers for long."

"I can give you the answer in six words: God is moral; Nature is not. Nature is blind, uncaring, incapable of distinguishing between good people and bad ones, between the deserving and the undeserving."