Rabbi Kushner Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What Jewish law wants is an ongoing conversation between man and G-d, and between man and man--but most of all, between man and himself. It's not a command, exactly, but a conversation: an inner song, full of melody and refrain, sometimes heard only by what Rabbi Soloveitchik so movingly called the lonely man of faith

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.

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

Only God can give us credit for the angry words we did not speak. —Rabbi Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, page 187

PRIOR: Why does everyone here play cards? ... RABBI CHEMELWITZ: Cards is strategy but mostly a game of chance. In Heaven, everything is known. To the Great Questions are lying about here like yesterday's newspaper all the answers. So from what comes the pleasures of Paradise? Indeterminacy! Because mister, with the Angels, may their names be always worshipped and adored, it's all gloom and doom and give up already. But still is there Accident, in this pack of playing cards, still is there the Unknown, the Future. You understand me? It ain't all so much mechanical as they think.

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

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.

The letters of the name of God in Hebrew… are infrequently pronounced Yahweh. But in truth they are inutterable…. This word {YHWH} is the sound of breathing. The holiest name in the world, the Name of Creator, is the sound of your own breathing. That these letters are unpronounceable is no accident. Just as it is no accident that they are also the root letters of the Hebrew verb ‘to be’… God’s name is name of Being itself.

The lack of attention to Moses’s sons here and elsewhere in the Torah—essentially nothing is said about them—needs to be explained. And the explanation is probably this: They did not amount to much. This raises the interesting issue of the difficulty many children of great people face in leading successful and satisfying lives. In a book about Moses, ‘Overcoming Life’s Disappointments’, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes about this: Sometimes the father casts so large a shadow that he makes it hard for his children to find the sunshine they need to grow and flourish. Sometimes, the father’s achievements are so intimidating that the child just gives up any hope of equaling him. But mostly, I suspect, it takes so much of a man’s [the father’s] time and energy to be a great man—great in some ways but not in all—that he has too little time left to be a father. As the South African leader Nelson Mandela’s daughter was quoted as saying to him, ‘You are the father of all our people but you never had time to be a father to me.’ Kushner relates a remarkable story he read in a magazine geared toward clergy, a fictional account of a pastor in a mid-sized church who had a dream one night in which a voice said to him, ‘There are fifty teenagers in your church, and you have the ability to lead forty-nine of them to God and lose out on only one.’ Energized by the dream, the minister throws all his energy into youth work, organizing special classes and trips for the church’s teens. He eventually develops a national reputation in his denomination for his work with young people. ‘And then one night he discovers his sixteen-year-old son has been arrested for dealing drugs. The boy turned bitterly against the church and its teachings, resenting his father for having had time for every sixteen-year-old in town except him, and the father never noticed. His son was the fiftieth teenager, the one who got away.’ Of course, this was not necessarily true of Moses’s children, but the silence of the Torah concerning his children (which is not the case with the children of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Aaron) serves as an important reminder to parents who have achieved success to be sure to make time for their children. They need to try to ensure their children feel they occupy a special place in their parents’ hearts and no matter how pressing the parent’s responsibilities he or she will always find time for them.

As Rabbi Milton Steinberg has written, “Consider the pattern of human affairs: how falsehood, having no legs, cannot stand; how evil tends to destroy itself; how every tyranny has eventually invoked its own doom. Now set against this the staying power of truth and righteousness. Could the contrast be so sharp unless something in the scheme of things discouraged evil and favored the good?” (Anatomy of Faith)

It is acceptable and mainstream to hate Africans in Israel. In March 2018, one of Israel’s two chief rabbis, Yitzhak Yosef, called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew version of the word “nigger” during his weekly sermon.3 Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, both advisors to then US President Donald Trump, were blessed by the rabbi when they visited Israel in May 2018. The rabbi paid no professional price for his racism because it was shared by so many others.

This is the setting out. The leaving of everything behind. Leaving the social milieu. The preconceptions. The definitions. The language. The narrowed field of vision. The expectations. No longer expecting relationships, memories, words, or letters to mean what they used to mean. To be, in a word: Open.

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." Rabbi Harold Kushner

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.

Medical science has discovered that the body’s nervous system that conveys pain to us is designed to save our lives. Scientific research on leprosy has revealed that most of the loss of fingers and toes is not caused by the disease but by the leper himself. Leprosy destroys the ability to sense pain. Hence the leper has no warning when he is in dangerous situations that can cause harm or even death to his body. For example, if one cannot feel pain, then he could be severely or fatally burned without even knowing it. Lesson Two: In order to save us from self-destruction the pain has to be strong enough. In addition, experiments done with lepers demonstrate some of pain’s main purposes. When lepers were equipped with bleeping devices to warn of pain, it was discovered that they did not work. Why? Because a bleep is not painful, it did not divert them from unwitting self-destructive activity. Lesson Three: In order for pain to work it has to be out of our control. Further, doctors learned that hooking up a shock mechanism did not work either. Once the leper learned he would be shocked by a sharp warning pain in certain situations, he would turn the system off so as not to be confronted with it again. Now, it is difficult to imagine a better way to utilize pain for our benefit than the world in which we live. Certainly the pain is strong enough, and it is often beyond our control. Rabbi Harold Kushner admitted this point in When Bad Things Happen to Good People: “I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of [my son] Aaron’s life and death than I would have ever been without it” (133). But he added, “If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way” (ibid.). And that is the point: None of us will to go through suffering, and yet most of us admit we are better persons for having done so.

You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.

As noted author and speaker Rabbi Harold Kushner once wisely wrote, “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 at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it.

Jared has not only a political conflict of interest by serving as a White House adviser on the Middle East, but a financial one.32 It is also a humanitarian conflict of interest. As Netanyahu transforms Israel into a more hard-right state, employing extreme violence against Palestinians and lobbing vitriolic rhetoric against liberal Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora, extremist rabbis have flourished—and Kushner favors them. In 2018, Ivanka and Jared were blessed by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who calls black people “monkeys” and believes that non-Jews exist in Israel solely to be