Harold S. Kushner is the author of several best-selling books. This book was also a national bestseller. (For his books I’ve read, click on his name.) I'm glad that a good friend lent me books 299 and 300 when I told him I bought book 297.

In his Introduction, Rabbi Kushner says, “Even as a child, I was bothered by the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. A God who punished people so severely for breaking one arbitrary rule was not a God I wanted to believe in, especially since the story seemed to suggest that Adam and Eve had no knowledge of what good and bad meant before they broke the rule.” … “As I grew older, I encountered so many people doing what they thought God had done in the Bible, rejecting someone for making one mistake, for not being perfect.” … “I hope that our sense of self worth, our relationships to our parents, our children, our mates, our siblings, and friends will improve once we learn the lesson that one mistake need not lead to rejection and banishment, and I hope that this book will guide you to gaining that blessing.” His basic message here, as equally simple as was his message of book 297, is that “God does not stop loving us every time we do something wrong, and neither should we stop loving ourselves and each other for being less than perfect. If religious teachers tell us otherwise, that is bad religion.”

As he did in books 297 and 299, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner focuses on the common misinterpretation of a Bible story (here the story of Adam and Eve) in his discussions of the themes quoted above. The bad theology of “The Fall” or “Original Sin,” which are based upon this metaphorical story (or myth), are not dismissed and replaced by a God that he (and many other thinking believers) can believe in – a God whose love is unconditional and whose compassion is unlimited. Chapter titles indicate how he goes about this, some with comments (my summary of his conclusion) given in square brackets: Ch 1 is God Loves You Anyway [Of course!]. Ch 2 is What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden? [Child-like creatures became human.] Ch 3 is I thought I Had to Be Perfect [I thought wrong!]. Ch 4 is Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters [Parental love must be steadfast, especially when children are growing up]. Ch 5 is Choose Happiness over Righteousness. [This is what God intends for us]. Ch 6 is Cain and Able: Is There Enough Love to Go Around? [Of course! The more love you give, the more you have to give]. Ch 7 is Life after Eden. [Life as God intends for humans who know what good and evil are]. Ch 8 is How Good Do We Have to Be? [As good as we can be, without our mistakes and imperfections making us quitters.] I doubt if Rabbi Kushner would choose the same words I put in brackets, but I feel he would not say they were wrong.

As for happiness and righteousness, he says in Ch 5, “We too have the power to choose happiness over righteousness. Righteousness means remembering every time someone hurt us or disappointed us, and never letting them forget it.” … “Happiness means giving people the right to be human, to be weak and selfish and occasionally forgetful, and realizing we have no alternative to living with imperfect people.” Some mistranslations of Hebrew words into English have had great impact. Kushner discusses several, and in Ch 8 he says, “My candidate for the most important single word in the Bible occurs in Genesis 17:1, when God says to Abraham, ‘Walk before Me and be ‘tamim’.” What does that word mean? The King James Bible translates it as ‘perfect,’ the Revised Standard Version takes it to mean ‘blameless.’ … Contemporary scholars take the word ‘tamim’ to mean something like ‘whole-hearted’. My own study of the verse leads me to conclude that what God wants from Abraham, and by implication from us, is not perfection but integrity. God wants Abraham to strive to be true to the core of who he is, even if he strays from that core occasionally.” … “Not ‘be perfect,’ not ‘Don’t ever make a mistake,’ but ‘Be whole.’ To be whole before God means to stand before him with all our faults as well as all our virtues, and to hear the message of our acceptability.” [Accepting our acceptability was one of the major points made by Paul Tillich in his book 196.] I feel very strongly that both Tillich and Rabbi Harold S. Kushner has got it right as to how we should live our lives. I recommend this book highly. But I think that neither this book nor book 299 should be rated quite as highly as I rated book 297 (for which I said “think six stars!”).