The rabbi who wrote a book of comfort

Harold Kushner 1935–2023

Harold Kushner taught millions how to make sense of loss. In 1966, the rabbi’s 3-year-old son was diagnosed with progeria, a rare and fatal genetic condition. The boy died 11 years later. Drowning in grief, Kushner questioned how there could be a God when the world held so much suffering. But he wrote through his pain, and the resulting When Bad Things Happen to Good People, published in 1981, became a best-seller. “What I felt was a deep, aching sense of unfairness. I had always tried to do what was right,” Kushner said. “If God existed, if He was minimally fair, let alone loving and forgiving, how could He do this to me?”

Born in Brooklyn, Kushner “was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan,” said The New York Times. He studied at Columbia University and took evening classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He was ordained as a rabbi in 1960 and got a master’s from Columbia the same year. In 1972, he earned a doctorate in Hebrew literature and eventually became the rabbi of a Conservative synagogue in Natick, Mass.

The success of his bestseller pushed Kushner to become a full-time author, writing more than a dozen books. Because he dismissed the argument that God allowed suffering in order to teach lessons, some theologians “objected to what they regarded as his minimizing” of divine power, said The Washington Post. But that intellectual shift was how he survived grief. “If I, walking through the wards of a hospital, have to face the fact that either God is all-powerful but not kind or thoroughly kind and loving but not totally powerful,” he said, “I would rather compromise God’s power and affirm his love.”