Harold Kushner Quotes

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

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

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

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.

One of the basic needs of every human being is the need to be loved, to have our wishes and feelings taken seriously, to be validated as people who matter.

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.

There is no right way to do a wrong thing.

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

I'm not perfect, ... But i'm enough

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 the price we pay for being alive. Dead cells—our hair, our fingernails—can’t feel pain; they cannot feel anything. When we understand that, our question will change from, “Why do we have to feel pain?” to “What do we do with our pain so that it becomes meaningful and not just pointless empty suffering?

That is why we have to make room in our lives for people who may sometimes disappoint or exasperate us. If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.

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.

When facing a dilemma, choose the more morally demanding alternative.

When Moses says, "Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?" God answers not by telling Moses who he is, but by telling him who God is, saying, "I will be with you" (Exodus 3:12)

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

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

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.

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 cannot live without the knowledge that someone cares about us.

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.

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.

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

Thank you, Carol Lynn Pearson, for reminding us that the task of any religion is to teach us whom we're required to love, not whom we're entitled to hate. - Rabbi Harold Kushner

You don’t become happy by pursuing happiness. You become happy by living a life that means something.

For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain.

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.

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

God’s job is not to make sick people healthy. That’s the doctor’s job. God’s job is to make sick people brave.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We can't pray that God make our lives free of problems; this won't happen, and it is probably just as well. We can't ask Him to make us and those we love immune to diseases, because He can't do that. We can't ask Him to weave a magic spell around us so that bad things will only happen to other people, and never to us. People who pray for miracles usually don't get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying. But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.

We are the messiah for somebody if not for everybody.

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.

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

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.

Saya percaya bahwa orang bukannya takut mati. Mereka takut sesuatu yang lain. Sesuatu yang lebih menggelisahkan dan lebih tragis daripada maut itu sendiri. Kita takut tidak pernah hidup, menjelang akhir hayat kita dengan perasaan bahwa kita tidak pernah benar-benar hidup. Bahwa kita tidak pernah memahami, untuk apa kehidupan kita itu.

When you have a child, you start to dream of how this kid will grow up and make you proud. The only thing you can predict with 100% certainty is that the reality will diverge somehow from that dream. Some of our children will disappoint us by not being the scholars we hoped they would be. Some children will disappoint us by not being the athletes we hoped they would be. Some will disappoint us by coming out and telling us they are gay and they won't give us grandchildren...the real question is not, what book can I read, what technique can I use to raise a perfect child? The real question is how will you handle that gap between the child you dreamt of having and the real child growing up in your home...What I have learned is that any religion, if you do it wrong, will leave people feeling condemned and dismissed and unworthy and any religion, if you do it right, will leave people feeling cleansed and firmed. (118) Rabbi Harold Kushner

Our awareness of God starts where self-sufficiency ends.

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.

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.

As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, ‘Light enters at the place of the wound.

We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

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.

We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end war; For we know that You have made the world in a way That man must find his own path to peace Within himself and with his neighbor. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end starvation; For you have already given us the resources With which to feed the entire world If we would only use them wisely. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, To root out prejudice, For You have already given us eyes With which to see the good in all men If we would only use them rightly. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end despair, For You have already given us the power To clear away slums and to give hope If we would only use our power justly. We cannot merely pray to You, O God, to end disease, For you have already given us great minds with which To search out cures and healing, If we would only use them constructively. Therefore we pray to You instead, O God, For strength, determination, and willpower, To do instead of just to pray, To become instead of merely to wish. Jack Riemer, Likrat Shabbat

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.

You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. This truth was once beautifully conveyed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his interpretation of a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. “This is a table,” “This is a window,” “This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning.” And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads “The name of our village is Macondo,” and the larger one reads “God exists.” The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life—the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone number of the first house we lived in when we got married—and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost.

The Bible, after all, repeatedly speaks of God as the special protector of the poor, the widow, and the orphan, without raising the question of how it happened that they became poor, widowed, or orphaned in the first place.

God’s role is not to make our lives easier, to make the hard things go away, or to do them for us. God’s role is to give us the vision to know what we need to do, to bless us with the qualities of soul that we will need in order to do them ourselves, no matter how hard they may be, and to accompany us on that journey.

Nursing a grudge only perpetuates the offender’s power over you. He continues to live in your head, reinforcing your frustration, polluting your imagination with thoughts of getting even. Don’t let him get away with that. He may or may not deserve forgiveness, but you deserve better than to waste your energy being angry at him. Letting go is the best revenge. Forgiveness is the identifying marker of the stronger party to the dispute. It is truly a favor you do yourself, not an undeserved gesture to the person who hurt you. Be kind to yourself and forgive.

Think of it this way: no scientist has ever seen an electron, but all scientists agree that electrons exist. No physicist has ever seen a quark, but all physicists believe that quarks are real. Why? Because when they look into their microscopes, they see things happening that could only happen if quarks and electrons existed. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God's goodness.

I am not sure prayer puts us in touch with God the way many people think it does--that we approach God as a supplicant, a beggar asking for favors, or as a customer presenting Him with a shopping list and asking what it will cost. Prayer is not primarily a matter of asking God to change things. If we come to understand what prayer can and should be, and rid ourselves of some unrealistic expectations, we will be better able to call on prayer, and on God, when we need them most.

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,

The Talmud, the compilation of discussions of Jewish Law which I have quoted earlier in this book, gives examples of bad prayers, improper prayers, which one should not utter. If a woman is pregnant, neither she nor her husband should pray, “May God grant that this child be a boy” (nor, for that matter, may they pray that it be a girl). The sex of the child is determined at conception, and God cannot be invoked to change it. Again, if a man sees a fire engine racing toward his neighborhood, he should not pray, “Please God, don’t let the fire be in my house.” Not only is it mean-spirited to pray that someone else’s house burn instead of yours, but it is futile. A certain house is already on fire; the most sincere or articulate of prayers will not affect the question of which house it is.

God does not send the problem; genetics, chance, and bad luck do that. 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. In

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.

The truth is, life is unfair, and we would do well to come to terms with that fact. Boorish people are blessed with athletic or musical skills that qualify them to earn more money in a year than many of us will earn in our lifetime. Saintly people are struck down by disease before they can use their gifts to help others. The task of religion is not to teach us to bow our heads and accept God’s inscrutable will. It is to help us find the resources to live meaningfully and to go on believing, even in a world where people often don’t get what they deserve.

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

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?

We totally misunderstand what it means to be alive when we think of our lives as time we can use in search of rewards and pleasure. Frantically and in growing frustration, we search through our days, our years, looking for the reward, for the success that will make our lives worthwhile, like the security guard looking through the trash in the wheelbarrow for something of value and all the while missing the obvious answer. When you have learned how to live, life itself is the reward.

怒りを爆発させてしまうと、それがあまりにも強くて、神を破壊してしまうのではないかと恐れているのでしょうか?

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths.

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.

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

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.

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.

LIFE" made it possible, "DEATH" made it necessary!

Suffering comes to ennoble man, to purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons. In sum, the purpose of suffering is to repair that which is faulty in a man’s personality.

When you have been hurt by life, it may be hard to keep that in mind. When you are standing very close to a large object, all you can see is the object. Only by stepping back from it can you also see the rest of its setting around it. When we are stunned by some tragedy, we can only see and feel the tragedy. Only with time and distance can we see the tragedy in the context of a whole life and a whole world.

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.

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.

Both love and true friendship are more than a way of knowing that we matter to someone else. They are a way of mattering to the world, bringing God into a world that would otherwise be a vale of selfishness and loneliness.

To be fully and authentically human, we have to be prepared to take off the armor we usually go around wearing to keep the world from hurting us. We have to be prepared to accept pain, or else we will never dare to hope or to love

One of the most important differences between Judaism and Christianity is that we were a people before we had a religion.........throughout it all, it is the participation in the community that defines us as Jews; the creeds and rituals are secondary.

We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. 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.

He [Franz Rosenzweig] came up with the "two covenant" theory, a way of affirming the religious validity of both Judaism and Christianity. Judaism and Christianity, he taught, needed each other, and God's plan for humanity needs them both. Christianity needs Judaism to remind it of what pure, uncompromised ethical monotheism looks like.........But Judaism needs Christianity to remind us that the Word of God is not meant to be kept for ourselves alone. We are called on not merely to live by God's ways, but to do it in such a manner that the world will be persuaded to turn to God.

I find God not in the tests that life imposes on us but in the ability of ordinary people to rise to the challenge, to find within themselves qualities of soul, qualities of courage they did not know they had until the day they needed them. God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away. Let

I don't believe that eating from the Tree of Knowledge was sinful. I believe it was one of the bravest and most liberating events in the history of the human race. Yes, its consequences were painful, in the same way that growing up and leaving your parental home can be painful, in the same way that undertaking the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood can be painful and leave you wondering, 'Why did I ever give up my less-complicated life for these problems?' But fo rate person who has experienced the complex, hard-earned satisfactions of human existence, there in no doubt that it is worth the pain

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?

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. 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 at least be a little different for our having passed through it.

In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people translates 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 has happened. Are you capable of forgiving and accepting in love a world which has disappointed you by not being perfect, a world in which there is so much unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime, earthquake and accident? Can you forgive its imperfections and love it because it is capable of containing great beauty and goodness, and because it is the only world we have? Are you capable of forgiving and loving the people around you, even if they have hurt you and let you down by not being perfect? Can you forgive them and love them, because there aren't any perfect people around, and because the penalty for not being able to love imperfect people is condemning oneself to loneliness? Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not prefect, 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? And if you can do these things, will you be able to recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world?

In other words, Job is saying to God: If I am important enough for You to keep track of my every mistake and punish me for them, then am I not worth five minutes of Your time to tell me what I am being punished for? And if I am too insignificant to merit Your personal attention, then why am I important enough for You to measure out my punishment?

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.

The idea that God gives people what they deserve, that our misdeeds cause our misfortune, is a neat and attractive solution to the problem of evil at several levels, but it has a number of serious limitations. As we have seen, it teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt even where there is no basis for guilt. It makes people hate God, even as it makes them hate themselves. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.

Judaism minimizes the distinction between body and soul. ... Judaism rejects that duality. First, it does not see death as liberation from earthly bondage and a graduation to a better world. It sees death as a tragedy. Death puts an end to a person's ability to sanctify the world. The death of a good person diminishes God's presence on earth. Second, Judaism does not see the material world, the world of food and sex and sleep and other bodily needs, as being less worthy than the realm of the spirit. Nothing created by God is vile or useless. Everything can be made holy or made base by the way in which it is used. The Talmud tells of one of the sages seeing workers cleaning and decorating a statue of the emperor and musing, "If that statue, which is an image of a flesh-and-blood king, is worthy of being cared for so carefully, how much more so my body, which is an image of the King of Kinds.

I am afraid that we may be raising a generation of young people who will grow up afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they'll have seen how much it hurts to take the risk of loving and have it not work out. I'm afraid they'll grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. They'll be so fearful of the pain of disappointment that they'll forgo the possibilities of love and joy.

Does God "temper the wind to the shorn lamb"? Does He never ask more of us than we can endure? My experience, alas, has been otherwise. I have seen people crack under the strain of unbearable tragedy. I have seen marriages break up after the death of a child, because parents blamed each other for not taking proper care or for carrying the defective gene, or simply because the memories they shared were unendurably painful. I have seen some people made noble and sensitive through suffering, but i have seen many more people grow cynical and bitter. I have seen people become jealous of those around them, unable to take part in the routines of normal living. I have seen cancers and automobile accidents take the life of one member of a family, and functionally end the lives of five others, who could never again be the normal, cheerful people they were before disaster struck. If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us the burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.

Several recent authors have written of “the imposter phenomenon,” describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are. For all the outward trappings of success, they feel hollow inside. They can never rest and enjoy their accomplishments. They need one new success after another. They need constant reassurance from the people around them to still the voice inside them that keeps saying, If other people knew you the way I know you, they would know what a phony you are.

Einstein preferred to believe that "God does not play dice with the cosmos." It may be that Einstein and the Book of Genesis are right. A system left to itself may evolve in the direction of randomness. On the the other hand, our world may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creative impulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters, operating over the course of millennia to bring order out of chaos, It may yet come to pass that, as "Friday afternoon" of the world's evolution ticks towards the Great Sabbath which is the End of Days, the impact of random evil will be diminished. Or it may be that God has finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to be with us, the kind of evil that Milton Steinberg has called "the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice of God's creativity." In that case, we will simply learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that earthquakes and the accidents, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represents that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.

There is an old Chinese tale about the woman whose only son had died. In her grief, she went to the holy man and said, 'What prayers, what magical incantations do you have to bring my son back to life?' Instead of sending her away or reasoning with her, he said to her, 'Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to drive the sorrow out of your life.' The woman set off at once in search of that magical mustard seed. She came first to a splendid mansion, knocked at the door and said, 'I am looking for a home that has never known sorrow. Is this such a place? It is very important to me.' They told her 'You've certainly come to the wrong place,' and began to describe all the tragic things that had recently befallen them. The woman said to herself, 'Who is better able to help these poor unfortunate people than I, who have had misfortune of my own?' She stayed to comfort them, then went on in her search for a home that had never known sorrow. But wherever she turned, hovels and in palaces, she found one tale after another of sadness and misfortune. Ultimately, she became so involved in ministering to other people's grief that she forgot about her quest for the magical mustard seed, never realizing that it had in fact drive the sorrow out of her life.

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?