by stephen mark dobbs
correspondent
Recall the adage “life is what happens to you while you are making other plans.” Rabbi Harold S. Kushner’s sequel to his best-selling “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” continues to argue that we must be reflective and resilient even when our lives do not play out as planned.
“Overcoming Life’s Disappointments” prescribes lessons for facing the frustrations, failures and unfulfilled dreams that surround and sometimes haunt us.
The book is based on a question: “How do people cope with the realization that important dimensions of their lives will not turn out as they hoped?” Disappointments cannot be avoided — whether about career, marriage, children, health or community standing. Kushner counsels that we answer challenges to our well-being with understanding, competence and passion.
Kushner draws our attention to a man of great achievements and great disappointments: Moses. The biblical leader often is cited as a paradigm for character development. Although we customarily think of Moses in connection with great triumph (leading the Exodus from slavery, overcoming the Egyptians at the Red Sea, ascending Mount Sinai), Kushner analyzes Moses’ dashed hopes and failures.
Perhaps no one in 5,000 years of Jewish history has had so much riding on his shoulders, figuratively and literally (think of Moses carrying the Decalogue). The familiar travails of the biblical leader, who Elie Wiesel called “the most solitary” figure in Jewish history, are the burdens of Moses the Man, the human being, not Moses the Hero, the archetype of liberation.
We learned in religious school about offsetting circumstances, flaws and blemishes of Moses’ life, beginning with killing the Egyptian slave master. Although Moses saved the slave from a beating or worse, the community paid a high price for correcting the injustice. Not an auspicious start for Moses who would proclaim “Thou shalt not kill” as the Word of God.
Soon Moses is leading the Israelites out of Egypt to the epochal encounter at the Red Sea, and wandering in the wilderness for 40 years. The danger, discomfort and uncertainty do not endear Moses to his people, yet he remains committed to his mission. Following the incident of the golden calf, Moses had occasion to feel frustrated and unappreciated.
Moses overcomes the disenchantments of leadership by employing traits and characteristics needed when failing big time — like being unable to settle his people in the Promised Land. Kushner’s message is “be like Moses.” In Kushner’s view, Moses’ profile is an optimist’s inventory: wisdom, insight, perseverance, resilience, forgiveness, reliability, trust and so on.
Putting this in a context linking Moses to our own less dramatic lives, Kushner asks: “Do we rail against God for the unfairness of life? Or do we look deeply into ourselves and only then discover how resilient we are?”
The greater share of the book consists of a series of anecdotes that illustrate common-sense tenets of therapy and pop psychology, such as “When life has dealt you a painful blow, let it hurt but trust yourself to get over it.” Such bromides reiterate the book’s basic themes of Get over it! and Try harder!
Bottom line: It’s not all about us. Moses’ humility represents the realization that “you are not God and it is not your job or responsibility to run the world.”
Our egocentricity is an infantile stage in life (although prolonged in some people) in which the world exists for no other purpose than to meet our needs. We need to outgrow what Kushner calls this “childish fantasy of grandiosity.” Humility, he notes, “can save us from elevating the inevitable disappointments of life to the level of life-shattering tragedy.”
Moses understood that he was but one of God’s many servants — and so are we all.
Overcoming Life’s Disappointments by Harold S. Kushner (174 pages, Knopf, $21.95)
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California