Who Needs God - Softcover

Kushner, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743234774 ISBN 13: 9780743234771

Publisher: Touchstone, 2002

Synopsis

With the warmth, insight, and understanding that distinguished his phenomenal bestsellers When Bad Things Happen to Good People and How Good Do We Have to Be?, Rabbi Harold Kushner addresses a critical issue in the lives of many: a spiritual hunger that no personal success can feed.

If you have lost faith or have never known it, or if you have ever wondered "What can religion offer?" here are wise and thoughtful answers. Rabbi Kushner shows how religious commitment does have a place in our daily lives, filling a need for connection, joy, and community.

For anyone who has ever wanted a more fulfilling life or wished to make a difference in the lives of others...for anyone who has ever felt guilty, afraid, or alone...Rabbi Kushner shares a path to faith that offers new sources of comfort and strength for all of us. Powerful, provocative, and persuasive, Who Needs God is a message of universal appeal.

About this title

About the Author:

Harold Kushner has written many bestselling books that have helped millions of people find in faith a source of help for coping with life's problems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

I WROTE THIS BOOK BECAUSE I HAD TO. I love the religious tradition out of which I come and I love the several hundred members of the congregation I serve. The enduring frustration of my rabbinic career has been my inability to get my two loves to find and love each other.

I deal with bright, successful people, people I genuinely like and admire, and I sense that something is missing in their lives. There is a lack of rootedness, a sense of having to figure things out by themselves because the past cannot be trusted as their guide. Their celebrations, from their children?s birthday parties to a daughter?s wedding to a business milestone, can be lots of fun but rarely soar to the level of joy. And as they grow older, I suspect they either confront or actively hide from confronting the thought that "there must be more to life than this."

There is a spiritual vacuum at the center of their lives, and their lives betray this lack of an organizing vision, a sense of "this is who I am and what my life is fundamentally about." Some look for that center in their work, and are disappointed when corporations choose not to repay the loyalty they demanded or when retirement leaves them feeling useless. Some try to find it in their families, and don?t understand why they are so hurt when adolescent children insist, "Let me lead my own life!" and adult children move to another state and call every other Sunday. And for some reason, it never occurs to them to ask, "How did previous generations find meaning in their lives?"

For almost thirty years, I have tried to show my congregants how much more fulfilled they would be if they made room for their religious tradition in their lives. I have urged them to do it, not to make God happy but to make themselves happy. I have told them the Hassidic story of the man who got a telegram telling him that a relative had died and left him some valuable property. He was to contact the rabbi for details. Excited, he went to the rabbi, only to be told that the relative was Moses and the valuable property was the Jewish religious tradition. And much of the time, they reacted as I suspect the man in the story did, disappointed that their legacy was religious wisdom and not downtown real estate.

This book is the product of those years of thinking and teaching on the issue of what we lose when we become too intellectual or too modern to make room for religion in our lives. It is about what has happened to the souls of modern men and women under the impact of modern life, what we have lost in the process of gaining personal freedom and material comfort. But more than that, it is a summary of what my own life has been about, what has gotten me through bad times and taught me how to celebrate the good times, how I have learned to recognize the extraordinary things that even the most ordinary lives contain. In the course of the book, I will be using illustrations from the Book of Psalms, as I have used the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes in my previous writings, to ground my comments in Scriptural tradition and to show how wise and sensitive people of another time dealt with the timeless questions we face today.

The thesis of this book is that there is a kind of nourishment our souls crave, even as our bodies need the right foods, sunshine, and exercise. Without that spiritual nourishment, our souls remain stunted and undeveloped. In the physical realm, we understand that our ancestors? hard physical work built muscles and burned off calories, but we today are the victims of a modern lifestyle, so we need to diet, to jog, to work out at the gym. So, too, the kind of spiritual communion our forebears knew is less accessible to us?because the world is so noisy and full of distractions, because we are so dazzled by our power and success, because religion in the late twentieth century is often badly packaged or presented by people we cannot trust or admire.

The members of a certain West African tribe tell the legend of the Sky Maiden. It happened once that the people of the tribe noticed their cows were giving less milk than they used to. They could not understand why. One young man volunteered to stay up all night to see what might be happening. After several hours of waiting in the darkness, hiding in a bush, he saw something extraordinary. A young woman of astonishing beauty rode a moonbeam down from heaven to earth, carrying a large pail. She milked the cows, filled her pail, and climbed back up the moonbeam to the sky. The man could not believe what he had seen. The next night, he set a trap near where the cows were kept, and when the maiden came down to milk the cows, he sprang the trap and caught her. "Who are you?" he demanded.

She explained that she was a Sky Maiden, a member of a tribe that lived in the sky and had no food of their own. It was her job to come to earth at night and find food. She pleaded with him to let her out of the net and she would do anything he asked. The man said he would release her only if she agreed to marry him. "I will marry you," she said, "but first you must let me go home for three days to prepare myself. Then I will return and be your wife." He agreed.

Three days later she returned, carrying a large box. "I will be your wife and make you very happy," she told him, "but you must promise me never to look inside this box."

For several weeks they were very happy together. Then one day, while his wife was out, the man was overcome with curiosity and opened the box. There was nothing in it. When the woman came back, she saw her husband looking strangely at her and said, "You looked in the box, didn?t you? I can?t live with you anymore."

"Why?" the man asked. "What's so terrible about my peeking into an empty box?"

"I'm not leaving you because you opened the box. I thought you probably would. I'm leaving you because you said it was empty. It wasn't empty; it was full of sky. It contained the light and the air and the smells of my home in the sky. When I went home for the last time, I filled that box with everything that was most precious to me to remind me of where I came from. How can I be your wife if what is most precious to me is emptiness to you?"

This book contains what is most precious to me, the ideas and the affirmations on which I have based my life, the thoughts and guidelines with which I have tried to help others bring depth and order into their lives. I hope you will not find it empty.

Copyright © 1989 by Harold S. Kushner

First Fireside Edition 2002

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0743234774
• ISBN 13: 9780743234771
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224