Harold S. Kushner Quotes & Sayings

I believe that God is totally moral, but nature, one of God's creatures, is not moral. Nature is blind. — Harold S. Kushner

The idea is to find some bit of holiness in everything-food, sex, earning and spending money, having children, conversations with friends. Everything can be seen as a miracle, as part of God's plan. When we can truly see this, we nourish our souls. — Harold S. Kushner

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 ... What frustrates us and robs our lives of joy is this absence of meaning ... Does our being alive matter? — Harold S. Kushner

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. — Harold S. Kushner

I'm Free "

Don't grieve for me, for now I'm free.
I'm following the path God laid for me.
I took God's hand when I heard the call;

I turned my back and left it all.
I could not stay another day

To laugh, to love, to work or play.

Tasks left undone must stay that way,
I found that place at the close of day.
If my parting has left a void,

Then fill it with remembered joy.

A friendship shared, a laugh, a kiss.
Ah, yes, these things, I too, will miss.
Be not burdened with times of sorrow,

I wish you the sunshine of tomorrow.
My life's been full, I savored much,

Good friends, good times, a loved one's touch.
Perhaps my time seemed all too brief;

don't lengthen it now with undue grief.
Lift up your heart and share with me,
God wanted me now, God set me free. — Harold S. Kushner

We can endure much more than we think we can; all human experience testifies to that. All we need to do is learn not to be afraid of pain. Grit your teeth and let it hurt. Don't deny it, don't be overwhelmed by it. It will not last forever. One day, the pain will be gone and you will still be there. — Harold S. Kushner

For Judaism, sin is a deed, not a condition. — Harold S. Kushner

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. — Harold S. Kushner

Being kind to others is a way of being good to yourself. — Harold S. Kushner

The conventional explanation, that God sends us the burden He knows that we are strong enough to handle it, has it all wrong. Fate, not God, sends us the problem. When we try to deal with it, we find out that we are not strong. We are weak, we get tired, we get angry, overwhelmed. We begin to wonder how we will ever make it through all the years. But when we reach the limits of our own strength, and courage, something unexpected happens. We find reinforcement coming from a source outside of ourselves. And in the knowledge that we are not alone, that God is on our side, we manage to go on. — Harold S. Kushner

This is what it means to be human "in the image of God." It means being free to make choices instead of doing whatever our instincts
would 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. — Harold S. Kushner

Wilder offers this as his
explanation of why good people have to suffer in this life. God has a pattern into which all of our lives fit. His pattern requires that some
lives be twisted, knotted, or cut short, while others extend to impressive lengths, not because one thread is more deserving than
another, but simply because the pattern requires it. — Harold S. Kushner

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time. — Harold S. Kushner

I suspect that the happiest people you know are the ones who work at being kind, helpful and reliable - and happiness sneaks into their lives while they are busy doing those things. It is a by-product, never a primary goal. — Harold S. Kushner

Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party. — Harold S. Kushner

How seriously would we take person who said, "I have faith in Adolf Hitler, or in John Dilinger. I can't explain why they did the things they did, but I can't believe they would have done them without a good reason." Yet people try to justify the deaths and tragedies God inflicts on innocent victims with almost these same words.
Furthermore, my religious commitment to the supreme value of an individual life makes it hard for me to accept an answer that is not scandalized by an innocent person's pain, that condones human pain because it supposedly contributes to an overall work of esthetic value. If a human artist or employer made children suffer so that something immensely impressive or valuable could come to pass, we would put him in prison. Why then should we excuse God for causing such undeserved pain, no matter how wonderful the ultimate result may be? — Harold S. Kushner

You don't become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something. — Harold S. Kushner

It is to this dimension of God, a God who cannot tolerate the reduction of a human being, fashioned in His image, to less than human status, that Job may be appealing. Job, in his extremity, is calling on God, saying, "I have no one left. I am without family. My friends have deserted me. You who are the Father of all humanity, is it not Your obligation to atone for my children's deaths as their go'el and to extract me from my current situation as my go'el?" Zophar — Harold S. Kushner

There are some things we should feel guilty about, but the guilt feelings should attach to the deed, not to the doer. — Harold S. Kushner

I believe in the reality of God the way scientists believe in the reality of electrons. I see things happening that would not happen unless there is a God. — Harold S. Kushner

We not only have today; we have all the yesterdays we are capable of remembering and all the tomorrows we can envision. — Harold S. Kushner

There is no right way to do a wrong thing. — Harold S. Kushner

Children need parents who will let them grow up to be themselves, but parents often have personal agendas they try to impose on their children. — Harold S. Kushner

If you have been brave enough to love, and somtimes you won and sometimes you lost; if you have cared enough to try, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't; if you have been bold enough to dream and found yourself with some dreams that came true and a lot of broken pieces of dreams that didn't, that fell to earth and shattered,then you can look back from the mountaintop you now find yourself standing on, like Moses contemplating the tablets that would guide human behavior for a millenia, resting in the Ark alongside the broken fragments of an earlier dream. And you, like Moses, can realize how ful your life has been and how richly you are blessed. — Harold S. Kushner

One of the most sublime experiences we can ever have is to wake up feeling healthy after we have been sick. — Harold S. Kushner

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends. — Harold S. Kushner

The Israelites got out of Egypt, but Pharoah and his army chased after them. They got to the Red Sea and they couldn't cross it. The Egyptian army was getting closer. So Moses got on his walkie-talkie, the Israeli air force bombed the Egyptians, and the Israeli navy built a pontoon bridge so the people could cross." The mother was shocked. "Is that the way they taught you the story?" "Well, no," the boy admitted, "but if I told it to you the way they told it to us, you'd never believe it." Centuries ago, — Harold S. Kushner

Much of the time, we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we respond to what happens to us. If we cannot choose to be lucky, to be talented, to be loved, we can choose to be grateful, to be content with who we are and what we have, and to act accordingly. — Harold S. Kushner

You nourish your soul by fulfilling your destiny. — Harold S. Kushner

We tend to take on the coloration of the setting in which we find ourselves. — Harold S. Kushner

People are so busy chasing happiness- if they would slow down and turn around, they would give it a chance to catch up with them. — Harold S. Kushner

We can do our best to change people, to summon them to be whom they are capable of being, but ultimately they only people we will always have the power to change will be ourselves. — Harold S. Kushner

When a mentally retarded child is born, the religious question we often ask is, "Why does God let this happen?" The better question to pose is to ask, "What kind of community should we be so that mental retardation isn't a barrier to the enjoyment of one's full humanity?" — Harold S. Kushner

We are here to finish God's labors ... so that we could be His partners in completing the work of creation. — Harold S. Kushner

Our human bodies are miracles, not because they defy laws of nature, but precisely because they obey them. — Harold S. Kushner

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

Do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return, but because of who you are — Harold S. Kushner

Fun can be the dessert of our lives but never its main course. — Harold S. Kushner

It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that we keep the world orderly and understandable ... But [this belief] has a number of serious limitations ... It teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt when there is no basis for guilt. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts. — Harold S. Kushner

LIFE" made it possible, "DEATH" made it necessary! — Harold S. Kushner

But at the end, if we are brave enough to love, if we are strong enough to forgive, if we are generous enough to rejoice in another's happiness, and if we are wise enough to know that there is enough love to go around for us all, then we can achieve a fulfillment that no other living creature will ever know, we can reenter paradise. — Harold S. Kushner

Is it ever acceptable to be angry at God? I would suggest that it is not only acceptable, it may be one of the hallmarks of a truly religious person. It puts honesty ahead of flattery. — Harold S. Kushner

I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God "sends" illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. "What did I do to deserve this?" is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is "If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?" As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world. — Harold S. Kushner

No good deed ever goes wasted. — Harold S. Kushner

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. — Harold S. Kushner

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

Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. — Harold S. Kushner

Why bad things happen to good people — Harold S. Kushner

I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enough — Harold S. Kushner

Many biblical verses are like inkblot tests, revealing more about us than about the text in question. — Harold S. Kushner

True success consists not in becoming the person you dreamed of being when you were young, but in becoming the person you were meant to be, the person you are capable of being when you are at your best. — Harold S. Kushner

When I talk to people who feel this emptiness and lack of fulfillment, I recommend they find a source of balance in their lives. I suggest they find a way to "give back" to the world in order to feel a sense of completeness ... — Harold S. Kushner

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

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts. — Harold S. Kushner

You don't have to be religious to have a soul; everybody has one. You don't have to be religious to perfect your soul; I have found saintliness in avowed atheists. — Harold S. Kushner

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible. — Harold S. Kushner

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.
Some years ago, when the "death of God" theology was a fad, I remember seeing a bumper sticker that read "My God is not dead; sorry about yours." I guess my bumper sticker reads "My God is not cruel; sorry about yours. — Harold S. Kushner

Sometimes, marriages fail because people are immature, or because expectations are unrealistic on both sides. Sometimes people die because they have incurable diseases, not because their families turned to the wrong doctor or waited too long to go to the hospital. Sometimes business fail because economic conditions or powerful competition doom them, not because one person in charge made a wrong decision in a crucial moment. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehaviour. We are really not that powerful. Not everything that happens in the world is our doing. — Harold S. Kushner

The purpose in life is not to win. The purpose in life is to grow and to share. When you come to look back on all that you have done in life, you will get more satisfaction from the pleasure you have brought into other people's lives than you will from the times that you outdid and defeated them. — Harold S. Kushner

The soul is not a physical entity, but instead refers to everything about us that is not physical - our values, memories, identity, sense of humor. Since the soul represents the parts of the human being that are not physical, it cannot get sick, it cannot die, it cannot disappear. In short, the soul is immortal. — Harold S. Kushner

We cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us. — Harold S. Kushner

When your life is filled with the desire to see the holiness in everyday life, something magical happens: Ordinary life becomes extraordinary, and the very process of life begins to nourish your soul. — Harold S. Kushner

Our responding to life's unfairness with sympathy ... may be the surest proof of all of God's reality. — Harold S. Kushner

(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.) — Harold S. Kushner

If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference. — Harold S. Kushner

History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win. — Harold S. Kushner

Only a life of goodness and honesty leaves us feeling spiritually healthy and human. — Harold S. Kushner

We don't have to beg or bribe God to give us strength or hope or patience. We need only turn to Him, admit that we can't do this on our own, and understand that bravely bearing up under long-term illness is one of the most human, and one of the most godly, things we can ever do. One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope and courage so often find resources of strength, hope and courage that they did not have before they prayed. — Harold S. Kushner

My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God. — Harold S. Kushner

But, of course, we cannot choose. We can only try to cope. That is what one does with sorrow, with tragedy, with any misfortune. We do not try to explain it. We do not try to explain it. We do not justify it by telling ourselves that we somehow deserve it. We do not even accept it. We survive it. We recognize its unfairness and defiantly choose to go on living. — Harold S. Kushner

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

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. — Harold S. Kushner

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be? — Harold S. Kushner

Seek something outside your nine-to-five job as an additional source of fulfillment and as a way to feel the joy of helping others. — Harold S. Kushner

We need other people, and we need to be needed by other people, in order to be who we might be, who we yearn to be. — Harold S. Kushner

Think about it: it is easy to see God's beauty in a glorious sunset or in ocean waves crashing on a beach. But can you find the holiness in a struggle for life? — Harold S. Kushner

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. — Harold S. Kushner

Our society puts too much emphasis on finding someone who will love you; our culture focuses too much on being loved and not enough on being a loving person. — Harold S. Kushner

Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. None of us can be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human emerge only in the ways we relate to other people. — Harold S. Kushner

We have confused God with Santa Claus. And we believe that prayer means making a list of everything you don't have but want and trying to persuade God you deserve it. Now I'm sorry, that's not God, that's Santa Claus. — Harold S. Kushner

We teach children how to measure and how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. — Harold S. Kushner

When you are kind to others, it not only changes you, it changes the world. — Harold S. Kushner

At some of the darkest moments in my life, some people I thought of as friends deserted me-some because they cared about me and it hurt them to see me in pain; others because I reminded them of their own vulnerability, and that was more than they could handle. But real friends overcame their discomfort and came to sit with me. If they had not words to make me feel better, they sat in silence (much better than saying, "You'll get over it," or "It's not so bad; others have it worse") and I loved them for it. — Harold S. Kushner

A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge. — Harold S. Kushner

Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for. — Harold S. Kushner

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

One man alone can't defeat the forces of evil, but many good people coming together can. — Harold S. Kushner

It is because you have the typical American habit of seeing everything as a test. You see the mountain as your enemy and you set out to defeat it. So, naturally, the mountain fights back and it is stronger than you are. We do not see the mountain as our enemy to be conquered. The purpose of our climb is to become one with the mountain and so it lifts us up and carries us along. — Harold S. Kushner

If we think of life as a kind of Olympic games, some of life's crises are sprints. They require maximum emotional concentration for a short time. Then they are over, and life returns to normal. But other crises are distance events. They ask us to maintain our concentration over a much longer period of time, and that can be a lot harder. — Harold S. Kushner

None of us has the power to make someone else love us. But we all have the power to give away love, to love other people. And if we do so, we change the kind of world we live in. — Harold S. Kushner

it is one thing to explain that mortality in general is good for
people in general. It is something else again to try to tell someone who has lost a parent, a wife, or a child, that death is good. We
don't dare try to do that. It would be cruel and thoughtless. All we can say to someone at a time like that is that vulnerability to death is
one of the given conditions of life. We can't explain it any more than we can explain life itself. We can't control it, or sometimes even
postpone it. All we can do is try to rise beyond the question "Why did it happen?" and begin to ask the question "What do I do now that
it has happened? — Harold S. Kushner

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

We don't have to be afraid of dying because it's not really death that scares us. We are afraid of not having lived. — Harold S. Kushner

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. — Harold S. Kushner

For all those people who wanted to go on believing, but whose anger at God made it hard for them to hold on to their faith and be comforted by religion. — Harold S. Kushner

Good people will do good things, lots of them, because they are good people. They will do bad things because they are human. — Harold S. Kushner

I wish i spent more time at the office. — Harold S. Kushner

I thought to myself, How sad to have to earn your living like that, by pretending to like everyone until you forget what it really feels like genuinely to enjoy someone's company as a friend, not just as a potential customer. Contrived emotion (What am I supposed to feel now?) replaces genuine emotion (How do I really feel about this person?) until the ability to know what you are really feeling disappears. — Harold S. Kushner

We are the messiah for somebody if not for everybody. — Harold S. Kushner

We do ourselves and others a disservice when we make old age something to be feared ... The longer we live, the more life we possess. — Harold S. Kushner