Harold S. Kushner is the author of several best-selling books. First published in 1981, this book is a classic that offers clear thinking and consolation in times of sorrow. It was a #1 bestseller with over 4 million copies sold. (For his books I’ve read, click on his name.)

I bought this book because, in book 284 (God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman), Ehrman states that nobody has a better answer than does Rabbi Kushner. In the Introduction Kushner says, “This is a very personal book, written by someone who believes in God and in the goodness of the world, someone who has spent most of his life trying to help other people believe, and was compelled by a personal tragedy to rethink everything he had been taught about God and God’s ways.” His son Aaron was diagnosed at age three with progeria (rapid aging), so he would not grow much more and would die in his early teens. He had no answer for why Aaron had to suffer. He sought an answer, but “the books I turned to were more concerned with defending God’s honor, with logical proof that bad is really good and evil is necessary to make this a good world, than they were with curing the bewilderment and the anguish of the parent of a dying child. They had answers to all of their own questions, but no answer to mine.” His answer had to come from his heart, not from philosophy.

The book’s structure is straightforward. Ch 1 is Why do the Righteous Suffer? Ch 2 is The Story of a Man Named Job. Ch 3 is Sometimes There Is No Reason. Ch 4 is No Exceptions for Nice People. Ch 5 is God leaves Us Room to Be Human. Ch 6 is God Helps Those Who Stop Hurting Themselves. Ch 7 is God Can’t do Everything, But He Can Do some Important Things. Ch 8 is What Good, then, Is Religion? Of these Ch 2 and Ch 8 are the key chapters. Ch 3-6, although containing many good examples of how he has helped others, build upon the conclusion he reaches in Ch 2.

Most everyone who has seriously read and studied the Book of Job is forced to come to some conclusion about its meaning (including why this “once-upon-a-time story” was included in the Bible). Kushner first reviews it, then explains it thusly: To try to understand the Book of Job and its answer, “let us take note of three statements which everyone in the book, and most of its readers, would like to be able to believe:

• (A) God is all-powerful and causes everything that happens in the world. Nothing happens without His willing it.
• (B) God is just and fair, and stands for people getting what they deserve so that the good prosper and the wicked are punished.
• (C) Job is a good person.

As long as Job is healthy and wealthy, we can believe all three of these statements at the same time with no difficulty. When Job suffers, when he loses his possessions, his family and his health, we have a problem. We can no longer make sense of all three propositions together. We can now affirm any two only by denying the third.” … “Job’s friends are prepared to stop believing in (C) for they want to believe in God as they have been taught to.” … “Job’s solution is to reject (B), the affirmation of God’s goodness. Job is in fact a good man, but God is so powerful that He is not limited by considerations of fairness and justice.” But Kushner suggests the author of the Book of Job “believes in God’s goodness and in Job’s goodness, and is prepared to give up his belief in (A): that God is all-powerful. 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.” This, in brief is Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s theology which he uses in the remainder of the book and which makes sense of the titles of the other chapters, along with Kushner’s knowledge of human nature. Too many people don’t get this message from the story of Job, so they suffer with feelings of guilt and despair, including too often the loss of their belief in God.

Chapter 8 includes much that ties all the preceding together. A few insights: About pain: “The most anyone promised us was that we not be alone in our pain, and that we would be able to draw upon a source outside ourselves for the strength and courage we would need to survive life’s tragedies and life’s unfairness.” About faith: “I believe in God. But I do not believe the same things about Him that I did years ago. … 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.” About why bad things happen to good people: “A better question would be: Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?” … “Our responding to life’s unfairness with sympathy and with righteous indignation, God’s compassion and God’s anger working through us, may be the surest proof of all of God’s reality.” … “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?” My answer is a resounding “Yes!” Thus I give this modern classic my very highest recommendation. Think six stars!