.1 •
.!‘
Searching For Meaning
Bill Pugliano
•
In the midst of
middle age,
Rabbi Harold
Kushner
advises: don't
judge your
success by
conventional
means
SUSAN WELCH
Special to The Jewish News
44
Friday, August 8, 1986
Vil
hen you get to my stage
in life," says author
Harold Kushner, "What
you need is not just the
applause or the
encompassment of success. You need
the knowledge that you've made a dif-
ference."
Rabbi Kushner is 51. He has
reached middle age, which is not, he
says an arbitrary point on a calen-
dar, or a physical phenomenon," but
the time when "your orientation
towards time changes; when you start
thinking you have less future and
more present"; when not only the
flesh but expectations sag, particu-
larly in a society in which we set the
peak of life so early, somewhere
around 28 or 30, and so condemn
people to spend two-thirds of life on
the downhill side."
It is also a time -which brings to
most people, Kushner believes, not so
much a fear of death itself, as "fear
that their lives will not have mat-
tered, that as far as the world is con-
cerned, they might as well not have
lived."
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Kushner, who was in town re-
cently to give the keynote address at
the annual meeting of the Jewish
Community Center, can hardly doubt
that he has "made a difference."
Wherever he travels, he acknowl-
edges, at least a dozen readers of his
best-seller, When Bad Things Happen
to Good People, will come up to him
and tell him that he has changed their
lives. Knowing that he can reach and
help so many is, he says, the "really
satisfying part of being a writer."
But success itself did not make
him immune to the sense of futility,
boredom and meaninglessness, the
sense that "there must be more to life
than this," which, he came to realize,
increasingly afflicts men and women
in all walks of life, including, perhaps
even particularly, those who have
achieved the money, power or fame of
conventional success.
The realization prompted him to
write his latest book, When All You've
Ever Wanted Isn't Enough, just pub-
lished by Summit Books. Like his
previous book, it draws heavily on
personal experience.
"The book that finally got pub-
lished was the third version," says
Kushner. "I started to write a very
abstract, psychological book, about
other people going through mid-life
crisis. My editor called me in and said
`You're not he or she. You're Harold
Kushner. Stop trying to write a book
that anyone could write. Write about
your personal struggles. Don't just
give the answers. Tell us what you
went through to get there. And make
it theological, because there's a real
need out there, on the part of Jews
and Christians alike, to find out how
God fits into all of this, .and most
theologians can't tell them.' "
The huge success of When Bad
Things Happen to Good People — it
was a best seller for 18 months and
has been translated into ten foreign
languages — owed a lot to the frank,
personal, simply told account of
Kushner's own doubts and anguish.
It was a book he felt he "had to
write," after the death of his 14-year-
old son, Aaron, from progeria, the dis-
ease of rapid aging. His son's illness
forced Kushner to ask the classic