O1B4F6E. JOURNAL-WHEN CHILDREN ASK ABOUT GOD 2002

MOMENTS IN OUR LIFE-1 2026-05-23

O1B4F6E. JOURNAL-WHEN CHILDREN ASK ABOUT GOD 2002

(Gemini) Rabbi Harold Kushner’s insights offer a beautiful, liberating shift in perspective. For many people, religion is introduced through a lens of fear, surveillance, and rigid rules. Kushner gently deconstructs that anxiety, offering instead a framework that emphasizes human resilience, internal maturity, and a God found in our highest human capacities.

Here is a thematic breakdown and synthesis of the profound principles he shares in these excerpts:

1. Moving Beyond "The Bearded Old Man in the Sky"

Kushner addresses a critical milestone in spiritual development: outgrowing a childish concept of God.

· God as a Presence, Not a Person: He describes God not as a cosmic monarch or a literal figure sitting in heaven, but as a Force, Power, or Process.

· The Divine Within Us: When we say "God," we are naming the highest expressions of human potential - Truth, Justice, Mercy, Generosity, and Love. The impulse you feel to be a good person, to learn, and to help others is the universe's purposefulness reflecting through you.

· The Mirror Analogy: His quote perfectly captures the personal nature of spirituality:

"God is like a mirror, which never changes, yet everyone who looks into it sees another face."

2. From External Fear to Internal Maturity

A major focus of the text is how a healthy concept of God fosters emotional and psychological growth, rather than crushing a child's spirit.

· The Trap of Guilt: A religion that relies on fear, cowering submission, and the constant worry of losing love over a broken rule keeps humans from living fully.

· The Snooper vs. The Liberator: Kushner rejects the idea of an omniscient God who "snoops" or reads minds to catch us doing wrong. He argues that this view damages a child’s vulnerable ego. Instead, God is the power that helps us sift through our thoughts and choose the good ones.

· Internalizing Morality: Drawing a parallel to developmental psychology (like Jean Piaget's work), Kushner notes that mature adults don't do the right thing to avoid punishment from an external authority. They do it out of a commitment from within to maintain their own integrity.

3. The Future is Unwritten (Free Will vs. Predestination)

Kushner firmly rejects the idea that God knows the future before it happens, noting that true human freedom and moral responsibility cannot exist if everything is pre-recorded.

· The Movie Reel Misconception: The future does not exist like a pre-made movie reel waiting to be played.

· Human Responsibility: We shape the future ourselves. God does not anticipate our choices or do things for us; rather, God stands for unlimited possibilities and gives us the strength to do things for ourselves.

4. Nature, Chaos, and Why Bad Things Happen

Perhaps Kushner's most famous theological contribution (which he expanded on in his acclaimed book, When “Bad Things Happen to Good People”) is his view on suffering and "divine punishment."

· Consequences vs. Punishment: In the natural world, there is no divine punishment - only consequences. If you light a match and get burned, that is physics, not God punishing you.

· Residual Chaos: The universe contains a layer of randomness. Natural laws are blind and inflexible; they do not make exceptions for good people. God does not distribute diseases or pick victims.

· Where is God in Tragedy? If God doesn't cause or prevent disasters, what good is He? Kushner provides three powerful answers:

· God gives us an orderly world governed by predictable laws we can study and use.

· God gives us the intelligence to minimize tragedy through medicine, science, and learning.

· God gives us the superhuman strength to endure, rebuild, and comfort one another.

The Ultimate Takeaway: Disaster is a reflection of blind nature or destructive human choices. The true "Act of God" is the resolve of human beings to comfort the brokenhearted and rebuild their lives after the storm.

 

5. Functional Truth and Humility

Kushner looks at how we navigate different religious beliefs. He prioritizes how a belief functions over whether it can be physically proven.

· Does it "Work"? A religious idea is valid if it achieves the purpose of helping people live up to their highest ideals. Kushner evaluates beliefs based on whether they successfully build whole, healthy, compassionate human beings.

· Humility Toward Others: Even if we are convinced of our own worldview, decency demands that we respect our neighbor's right to see things differently. Because the ultimate goal of religion is not winning an argument - it is creating a person who lives up to the full potential of their humanity.

6. Death, Afterlife, and True "Reward"

Kushner addresses the afterlife with refreshing honesty, redirecting our attention from a speculative heaven to the tangible impact we leave behind.

· The Honest Truth: Nobody knows what happens when we die. Kushner notes that concepts of a physical heaven were invented out of a human desire for comfort and a deep resistance to the idea of total cessation. Because the soul is non-physical, emotions and senses (which rely on a physical body) cannot exist in a traditional "heaven in the sky."

· Immortality Through Legacy: The most reasonable assumption is that our souls continue to live on earth in the memories and actions of the people we left behind. Judaism emphasizes taking this world seriously because it is the only one we can be certain of.

· Redefining Reward and Punishment: God does not manipulate physical circumstances to reward the good or punish the bad. If we measure reward by wealth or health, life is clearly unfair. Instead, Kushner argues that the true rewards of a good life are internal:

· Growth of character, a clear conscience, the esteem of friends, a good name to bequeath to your children, and the satisfaction of realizing your potential as an authentic human being.

· The Natural Punishment of Evil: Living a life devoid of generosity, self-control, and self-esteem - unable to trust anyone or relax - is all the punishment an evil person needs. They simply live without God, which Kushner defines not as a demonic force, but merely as the absence of light and goodness.

7. Science vs. Religion: Different Tools for Different Jobs

When children encounter the clash between Genesis and geology (evolution), Kushner provides a brilliant framework that eliminates the need for conflict.

· Complementary, Not Contradictory: Genesis and science do not conflict; they are looking at the same world from entirely different vantage points.

· The Division of Labor:

· Science (Geology/Biology): Tells us how the world came into being, objectively and without value judgments. It defines Homo sapiens.

· Religion (Genesis): Is a book of moral insight, not physics. It tells us what the world means and teaches value judgments. It envisions what it means to be authentically human.

· Who Wrote the Bible? Kushner rejects the idea that God "dictated" the Bible to human stenographers. The Bible is a collection of national literature, written by many human hands over centuries, capturing ancient science (which has been superseded) and timeless moral insights (which remain valid). It is "God's word" because God inspired the human authors with new, transformative ideas about how to live.

8. Miracles Reimagined

By the age of eleven, children often begin to doubt the literal truth of biblical miracles like the splitting of the Red Sea. Kushner helps navigate this transition.

· The Evolution of a Miracle: In ancient times, people saw God in the suspension of natural laws. Today, we see God in the unchanging consistency of nature.

· Miracles Today: The supernatural aspects of biblical stories likely grew through generations of oral storytelling. However, miracles still happen today. A modern miracle isn't a broken natural law; it is something entirely possible happening precisely when it didn't have to happen, providing people with the hope and strength to keep going.

9. Re-evaluating Prayer

If God is not a "Super-person" pulling strings, why do we pray? Kushner warns against the "Santa Claus" mentality of presenting God with a shopping list.

· The Purpose of Prayer: Prayer is worship through words. It is an expression of our dependence on the beneficial forces of the universe that make us fully human.

· Where Prayers are Answered: Kushner states that prayers asking for changes in the outside world are not answered. Prayer only works when we pray for a change within ourselves - praying for clarity, strength of purpose, and the courage to face adversity. In doing so, a person invokes their own "better self."

10. Where to Find God: A Practical Guide

Kushner concludes with a beautiful roadmap for parents to help children find God in three distinct places:

In the World & Nature

We find God in the beauty and orderliness of the cosmos - the majestic mountains, the ocean, or the secret of life buried in a tiny seed - and in our uniquely human capacity to be awed by that beauty.

In Other People

· The Role of Parents: A child’s concept of God is a reflection of their parents. Parents who love, accept, and cherish their children teach them to trust the universe. Parents who constantly nag, scold, and overprotect inadvertently teach their children to believe in a punitive, demanding God.

· The Joy of Connection: The stirrings of God can be felt in the simple joy of friendship, liking and being liked, and looking up to heroes of courage and dedication.

• In Oneself

• Children find God when they listen to their inner voice of conscience, experience the good feelings of sharing, or learn compassion by caring for a pet.

INTRODUCTION

When children begin to ask the monumental questions of life - inquiring about the nature of God, the reality of suffering, or what happens after we die - parents and educators often find themselves caught between rigid, outdated dogmas and a desire to nurture a healthy, rational mind. In “When Children Ask About God”, Rabbi Harold Kushner offers a liberating, profoundly compassionate alternative to traditional religious frameworks built on fear, surveillance, and guilt. Rather than painting God as a celestial monarch pulling strings or a cosmic judge tallying human mistakes, Kushner gently deconstructs these anxieties to present a faith deeply rooted in psychological health and human dignity. By reframing the divine as the ultimate force behind our capacity for love, resilience, and moral growth, his pastoral philosophy guides us away from cowering submission and toward the lifelong adventure of becoming fully, authentically human.

WHEN CHILDREN ASK ABOUT GOD

                                                          Harold S Kushner (1971)

In the spiritual realm, I am attracted tremendously to Harold Kushner, a Jewish rabbi (1935-2023), whose way of thinking I identify with in almost every way. Here are excerpts from his first book. Ask a bookstore like Wordsworth or Exclusive Books to get the complete book for you, or perhaps on the Internet.

(Kushner)(p4) There is something wrong with a religion or concept of God which emphasizes fear and guilt. Human beings are not meant to live in cowering fear and meek submission. They cannot live fully, humanly, if they are constantly obsessed by the worry that they have broken some rule and because of that have lost the love of their parents, their religious leaders or of God.

There is something wrong with a religion or concept of God which fosters in our hearts unrealistic expectations of the world, telling us that no harm comes to good people, that we only get what we deserve, that sincere prayers will be answered. All this is simply not true, and the child who is taught that it is, will end up incapable of believing in himself, his parents, his religion, or God.

If human intelligence, curiosity and the capacity for outrage in the presence of injustice are qualities God has given us, how can it be an act of disloyalty to God to use these qualities in seeking answers to some of the most important questions about life? Whatever God may be, I cannot believe that He stands for obsessive guilt, false expectations, and artificial ignorance.

If God isn’t a Bearded Old Man in the Sky, What is He?

(p15) God is something like a Force, a Power, a Process, a quality of relationship. God is the name we attached to the fact that we find certain things possible and meaningful in the world and in our lives, and the fact that we find ourselves stirred to move in the direction of realizing these possibilities. We call God the force behind our growing and learning, our curiosity to discover and our impulse to share and to help. God is no less real for not being a thing or a person. A Force can be real, just as love and courage are real, even though you cannot show it to people.

(p16) “God” stands for all those qualities in the world and in ourselves which our religious traditions labels as divine, that is, as compromising fully human spiritual development, fashioning Man into what he is at his best and most fully realized – Truth, Justice, Mercy, Generosity and Love amongst them. Belief in God is no so much a statement about Somebody living in Heaven as it is an affirmation of the world and the human beings who inhabit it, what they are and what they are capable of becoming. It means believing that the universe has order and direction, that it encourages human goodness and moral growth and that the impulse each of us feels to be a good person is a reflection of the purposefulness existing in the cosmos at large.

(p18) In the process of developing a mature idea of God, there are stages through which we pass. There are beliefs about God which we accept when we are children and later outgrow, even as there are conceptions of God which mankind as a whole held when the human race was younger, which it is now outgrowing.

(p19) The ways in which people understood the term “God” in the past have undergone a process of evolution. Society has outgrown some beliefs and exchanged them for new ones and we find that the course of the change closely parallels the individual’s changing concept of authority as he grows up. To the infant, the external world exist just to satisfy his needs. As he grows older, he learns that the world around him is not merely a extension of his own ego. The child’s parents are now seen as figures of authority – making demands, telling him what he must do and not do. Their approval can only be won by obedience to these demands. Accompanying this attitude is the child’s conviction that this external authority is all-wise and all-powerful. Some people never develop beyond this stage. For the rest of their lives, their point of reference is that omniscient, omnipotent external authority.

(p20) But there is a level beyond this which man must reach if he would be fully mature. He must learn to internalize the standards of right and wrong by which he lives. The “still, small voice” which tells him how to behave should be his own voice, not an external command. The mature individual act not in order to avoid punishment or win approval, but to maintain his own integrity. He does things, and abstain from others, because he had accepted certain standards by which he intends to live. Authority has become for him a commitment from within, not something imposed from above. (refer Jean Piaget, “The Moral Judgment of the Child”, p28). The history of the idea of God in religion closely follows this same developmental pattern.

(p23) Unquestioning obedience, however, is not adult maturity. “God” will come to mean that impulse in the human collective and in the universe as a whole corresponding to conscience in the individual, the name given to that force existing in the cosmos and in everyone of us which helps us to identify that which is good and true and worthwhile and which moves us to pledge ourselves to live up to it. Some of us would like to return to a simpler time when an all-wise, all-powerful figure made all the decisions for us and earned our love and loyalty in the process, a time when all we had to do was to follow instructions. But we know that if we are to grow to our full spiritual stature as human beings, we have to outgrow this habit.

(p25)  The God in which I believe is in a real sense a personal God; it is not that He has personality but that He affects people personally. Love, justice, charity, beauty, creativity and other qualities we call “divine” affect different people differently according to the individual personality of each. What stirs and inspires one man leaves another cold. Two people go through the same experience; one finds his life transformed by it, the other remains indifferent. This can be equated with God treating us personally, each of us according to his own inner personality.  “God is like a mirror, which never changes, yet everyone who looks into it sees another face.”

Does God Know Everything I Do?

What does it do to a child when he is taught that God is invisible, that He is everywhere and knows everything we do? Could anything be more perfectly calculated to produce fear and guilt? Their egos are incredibly vulnerable, and they are only too ready to accept verdicts of others that they do not measure up.

(p45) There was a time when religion was based on “the fear of the Lord” (in the Bible it really means “awe” and not fear). We do not want our children to obey us because they are afraid of us, or because they are afraid of being discovered and punished. We want them to heed us because they have come to understand that what we stand for is right and because they have learned to trust and respect our judgment and fairness. Let us teach them to believe in a God who helps them become strong enough to sift through their thoughts and resist the bad ones, rather than to believe in a God who snoops, reads minds, and condemns to death.

(p47) The idea that God is omniscient and knows everything that happens and is going to happen may be an attempt to express the greatness of God, but it raises the immensely complex problem of Free Will vs. Predestination: “I had no choice but to do it and therefore I should not be held responsible for what I did.”

(p48) I simply cannot accept the notion that God “knows the future” before it happens, because Man’s freedom and his responsibility for what he does is in direct contrast. The future does not exist like the next reel of a movie, while we wait for it to happen to us. We shape the future and it has no shape or content until we provide them. God is not all-knowing in the sense of anticipating all of our decisions before we ourselves have decided upon them. A God who stands for unlimited possibilities and can help us to do those fulfilling things which we decide to try to do, who won’t do things to us or for us, but will make it possible for us to do things for ourselves – such a God liberates us and helps us grow. We are free to decide for ourselves what we want to do and what sort of people we want to be.

 (p50) Man is not hopeless and unworthy and for the most part knows it. He may not be everything he ought to be and may not be everything he would like to be. He is certainly not everything he might be. Al the same, he has done some marvelous things in the world of science, healing arts, creativity and compassion. We know enough of the human soul to realize that we don’t improve him by constantly harping on his unworthiness. We would certainly not appreciate that sort of attitude from our friends. We should not treat our children that way as parents, nagging them about their mistakes and wondering how much longer we will be able to stand them. Why then should anyone say God is like that, keeping track of every little thing we do wrong? I would rather our children think of God in terms of what they can do with Him and because of Him, if they let Him help them, rather than in terms of what He can do to them if they disobey His will or try to hide from His “all-seeing eye.” Rather let your children know that everything we do does count and cannot be ignored or disregarded. Every deed, good or bad, leaves its mark on our character, and therefore by doing bad things we do ourselves a disservice.

(p51) To believe that “Man was made in the image of God” certainly does not mean that we look like God physically, because He has no physical form. Rather it means that there is a little bit of God, of that Spirit which makes the world a certain kind of place, in every one of us. Some people call it our soul or our conscience, just as the Power we call God can be thought of as the Soul or Conscience of the universe. This Soul is not a thing, but a collection of feelings and attitudes we are capable of having. A soul is what makes it possible for Man to be in tune with the Power we call God and to be capable of growing into a spiritual masterpiece. It is this belief about God and about the godliness in each of us, that lets us have faith in ourselves and in the future, even when it disappoints our expectations.

Can I Be Absolutely Sure That There Is a God?

Can we be sure that the sort of God we have been talking about is real and not a figment of our imagination or a result of wishful thinking? There are few enough things about which we can be absolutely sure. Even a scientist can only say about the physical laws with which he works “they seem to fit what we know about a subject and therefore we assume they are true until new evidence turns up that invalidates our assumption.

(p56) Faith is what you accept as true even in the absence of definitive proof. To believe that God is real means believing that the qualities we associate with God are real, that they truly exist in the world. If we have experienced love, trust, generosity, either as donors or recipients, if we have known the feeling of being honest or helpful, then we know from our own experience, not based on anyone else’s philosophy or persuasiveness, that these qualities are real beyond all question. If we have felt the strivings of goodness in ourselves, this is evidence of the reality of God in our own hearts, and then we can definitively prove that God, the Source of growth, love and truth, does exist.  God will be with you as you grow physically from a child to a man, for God is the Power that makes for growth. God will be with you as you grow emotionally, from an infant who thinks primarily of his own pleasure, to a true human being who somehow comes to care about the needs of others, for God is the Power that makes for love.

How Do I Know There is a God?

(p66) If there were a God, how would the world be different? There would be a moral intelligence to the world. We would see examples of people around us devoting their lives to being honest, helpful, creative. We would see ordinary people discovering resources of courage and dedication they never knew they had within themselves. We would find ourselves and others responding to good deeds, acts of self-sacrifice or restraint with a feeling of satisfaction, of “rightness”. We would find ideals and serious purposes highly attractive and the goal of improving the world and leaving it a better place for our having lived in it a moving one.

Young people tend to be great liberals, convinced that everybody can believe and act as he wants to, as long as he doesn’t hurt anybody else. However, morality is not relative:

1. Even if there are such things as Right and Wrong, it doesn’t mean that everything is either absolutely right or totally wrong. There are many areas, like eating or clothing habits, or customs of a society, in which morality does not apply.

2. When it comes to our bodies, we know that certain things are true whether we are in favor of them or not, like eating unhealthy food, or jumping off buildings without being hurt. The human soul operate in the same fashion. There are things it needs to do, and things it needs to avoid, if it is to grow up to be strong and healthy. And religion, when it speaks to us of Right or Wrong, is trying to share with us its discoveries and experiences about what our spirits need in order to grow and thrive. There is a sense of injustice, our instinctive capacity to say in certain situations “that’s not fair,” where something is so self-evidently wrong that no society has the right to legalize it, like murder. These are absolute standards and God is the name we give to the fact that it do indeed exist in the world.

3. We come to know God’s will much more gradually and less clearly, as we learn by trial-and-error methods of discovering what enhances human life and what restricts and distorts it. Little by little we come to know what the Lord requires of us as we struggle to become authentically human. This raises the important issue how to respond to other people’s different beliefs about God and the world. We must still recognize our neighbor’s right to different conclusions. Even if we are sure that we are right and our neighbor wrong, humility and decency gives us no cause to act on that conviction. When our children’s friends (Jewish, Christian, atheist) believe differently, we must remember that children want to be the same as their friends, and we should not stress their differences. We should note that the beliefs of many of such friends are really much like ours, though phrased in different words or using different forms.  Some of their ideas are different but do not conflict with ours because they don’t deal with the same subject. We are different but not in conflict. Where they do disagree irreconcilably, lets remember that the ultimate purpose of religion is concerned with the truth as an intermediate step on the way to an ultimate end – the creation of the kind of person who will live up to the full potential of his humanity.

(p72) I am not much concerned with the issue of religious truth. A religious idea can be true in one of two ways. It can be literally true in the sense that it describes accurately a condition that actually exist or took place historically. (Either the world was created in six days or it wasn’t; either there is an afterlife in which the good are rewarded or there isn’t.) Or it can be functionally valid, in the sense that it achieves the purpose of helping people to understand the world and live up to certain ideals in it. A great many religious ideas, which can never be proven or disproven, works in the latter fashion.  My concern is not with physical or historical accuracy. My answers to questions about God differ from the answers of Orthodox Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism, not solely because we think their answers are inaccurate (something which is not provable) but because we don’t believe that they “work.”

(p74) God as Punisher

We must rid ourselves of the habit of thinking of God as a Super person. He is not a wise, powerful old man, doing what people do but doing it perfectly and free of human fallibility. Neither is He a Judge sitting in judgment and deciding the fate of man. This is another example of poetic language which, if taken literally, is dangerously misleading.

(p75) It is tempting for parents to picture God thus and to believe that the world is run that well, to invoke His judgment, as so many parents do, in order to insure that their own commands are obeyed, even when they are not around. It is tempting for children too to believe in such a God, because their minds seem to gravitate instinctively towards orderliness, to an arrangement in which everything is in its place and there are no loose ends. It is fascinating to learn of the fantasies they concoct and the intricate theories they invent in order to make the known facts of their world fit neatly together. However, ultimately we have to give up the neat view and acknowledge there is an amount of randomness in the world, a residue of chaos. There are things that happen for no discernible reason.

(p76) This principle of the existence of coincidence and residual chaos in the world, and the idea that Man has the moral freedom to choose between good and evil deeds and to act on his choice, are the twin pillars of our new understanding of God’s relationship to the evil and suffering that exist in the world:  There are things which God cannot do. He cannot act in violation of the laws of Nature. He cannot compel men to be good, nor can He protect them from the consequences of their own actions, or the consequences other people’s actions have on them.

In the world of God and man, there is no punishment; there are only consequences.  If a child plays with matches and one ignites and burns his hand – that is a consequence. If his mother slaps his hand – that is a punishment. If a person falls from the roof of a building, he will probably die, regardless what his reason were for being on the roof. And if he does survive, it is not because God decided, but due solely to physical-natural causes. Only a childish notion of God-as-heavenly-Puppeteer who determines what happens to us gives us leave to believe in God only when a tragedy happens to someone else, and to decide there is no God when it touches us. God does not punish. What we gratuitously call acts of God are sometimes acts of destructive men and sometimes acts of blind, inflexible Nature.

If God doesn’t cause these things, and if He can’t prevent them, what good is He?

First of all, He gives us a stable and orderly world in which all things conform to regular laws, so that we can learn to understand these laws and use them.  Secondly, God has helped men to discover ways of minimizing tragedy through understanding and controlling Nature’s laws, through learning from experience. To the extent that Man uses his intelligence and develops his conscience, he turn to God for help to reduce chaos and misfortune.  And thirdly, He gives men the power to overcome tragedy and find reasons for going on with life. He moves men to comfort the bereaved, to give each other new strength and faith. Disaster, accident, sudden death are not acts of God. The resolve of men to rebuild their lives after disaster is the true act of God.

(p79) Suffering and Evil from the Child’s Point of View

Young children need to believe there is a Power in the big and bewildering world – if there is no one, they feel terribly threatened. At first they believe their parents are all-powerful. When they learn that this is not the case, they eagerly fasten on God as being the Super-Parent in control, capable of all things.

When a child loses a parent, is born handicapped, or is seriously crippled in a accident, he naturally views his misfortune as punishment – God has found him wanting and punishes him for something he did wrong. Our first responsibility is to maintain the child’s sense of his own worth. Under no circumstances whatsoever should his religion ever be permitted to condemn him as one who has been judged and found wanting. This is the very reverse of the function religion should perform in any person’s life.

(p81) Why did God let it happen?

God doesn’t make things happen, or let them happen. God does not judge or punish. He doesn’t distribute tumors and heart attacks, choosing His victims. Things happen for natural reasons, some of which we understand and some of which we don’t yet. God helps people when they get hurt. The laws of Nature don’t make any exception because they are good people. When misfortune happens, they call upon God and find strength and the courage to go on living and working and making the best of their situation.

God cannot reverse the course of an incurable disease or put back a severed leg. There are laws of Nature which are always the same for all people.  Sometimes an apparently incurable disease does suddenly disappear, but not necessarily to the most religious or moral people, so we can’t say God has chosen to intervene. God gives men the intelligence and the desire to help others, as He gives the suffering person and his family the strength to console each other and go on living.

(p90) Where Do People Go When They Die?

The first and most honest answer to this is that we don’t know; nobody knows. No one who has ever died has been able to tell those left behind what happened to them.  When he was alive, the person was more than a body. He was also a soul, a personality. He was good at certain things; he cared about certain things and certain people. Things happened to him and he remembered them. All this made up his soul, that let him be him and nobody else.

Early in the history of religion people found it hard to believe that when a person died that was the end of him. So they made up stories about a place where souls went after death, where the souls looked the way the people had looked on earth, so that family and friends who died later would recognize each other. Nobody can say for sure how it will be. Many people of different religions still believe in a heaven today, but there are reasons for being sceptical. Firstly, people invented the story because they wanted to believe it. Secondly, the soul is a non-physical object and, detached from the body, it cannot see or hear or feel either happy or sad, because these emotions depend on physical reactions. If a man with children dies young, and they eventually die after a long life, how would they all eventually appear in heaven, the father younger than his children? The most reasonable assumption is that people’s souls continue to live here on earth only in the memories and actions of other people. Judaism has always taught us to take this world seriously, to try and live a full and rich and satisfying life in this world, because that is all we can be certain about – the afterlife is and should remain speculation.

(p93) Reward and Punishment

Another reason that people have been speculating about an afterlife, is that life on earth often seems so unfair, especially for good and righteous people who suffer one misfortune after the other, while certain blatantly bad people are well off and seems to get away with murder. It was tempting to believe that there is another world beyond the grave, where the good will be rewarded and the evil punished. Again, we have no way of actually knowing whether such a world exists.

Are the good rewarded and the bad punished in this world? God does not punish, nor does He reward. God does not intervene to change the consequences of people’s deeds to fit their moral desserts.  However, He has given us a world where certain things lead to good consequences while others lead to bad ones. If a dishonest businessman loses the trust of his customers or is exposed, shamed and sent to prison, it isn’t because God is punishing him – it is simply the result of his own wrong behavior. However, it is too obvious that if we measure reward and punishment in terms of health, wealth, comfort and length of days, the most deserving people aren’t always rewarded, nor are the immoral ones always punished. This is the way the world really is and it serves no purpose to try and explain it away.

Why does God let these injustices happen? Well, God isn’t in the business of letting them happen or preventing them. Some happen because men are less just and less kind; others happen for reasons we cannot begin to comprehend. I cannot believe that God’s will is one of them. But People are rewarded in growth of character, satisfaction with what they have accomplished, clear conscience, the esteem of good friends, a good name to bequeath to children, the expectation that their children will grow up with moral values and above all, a sense of having realized one’s potential as an authentic human being, being a mensch (see When All We Ever Wanted isn’t Enough). Many people who lack affluence, comfort and perfect health have these other satisfactions and find them rewarding enough.

God isn’t a master Puppeteer, pulling strings and making everything happen. However, God can help us to know what the ground rules are and can lead us to discover where real satisfaction can be found, how to measure success accurately. He can help us to find the faith and the strength to go on living in this world, no matter how unfairly it may treat us.

(p95) Why Does God Make Bad People?

God does not make people bad. God creates people, He makes it possible for people to be born with certain abilities and options, and then leaves it to them what sort of people they want to be. Some people use the choice and the power they have for good, and some use it for evil.  We do not really know what makes people tick. Some do bad things because they are angry, some because they do not know any better. Some people hurt someone else because they are afraid they are not as strong as they would like to be and think they have to prove how strong they are to make them feel stronger. Sometimes people have been told along the line that they are no good, so they stopped trying to be good.

(p97) Just about everybody feels like doing something bad at one time or another, but most people are strong enough and believe in their own ability to be good, so they don’t do evil things. The really strong child is never a bully and the really brave one is never a show-off, because they don’t always have to prove how strong and brave they are. Most of the bad people feel bad and disappointed in themselves, whether they are caught or not. And all of them miss out on the greatest satisfaction there is in life – of knowing you are living the way people are meant to live. When a man exerts himself to be honest, loving and truthful, he calls upon the Power we know as God to help him grow. When a man choose to be mean and selfish, he does not call on any demonic Power of Evil – he simply lives without God, just as darkness is the absence of light.

(p99) God’s justice may be a blunt instrument rather than a precise scalpel, but essentially there is a divine justice, however imprecise, in the world. No good deed is ever wasted; it always leaves you a better person. No transgression is ever really escaped from; its punishment, in one form or another, always follows. Having to go through life, the only one we will ever have, without ever being able to relax and trust the people around us, without ever knowing the satisfaction of self-control, generosity and self-esteem, is all the punishment we would wish anyone.

Does it make a difference if I am a good person? It may not make a difference in how long you live, how rich or famous you become, but it makes all the difference in what you think of yourself, what others think of you, how satisfying you find life and what sort of memories you leave behind when your life is over.

(p110) Genesis versus Geology

Around the 5^th grade your child is given an account of how the world came into being which conflicts totally with the beautiful poetic account of Creation he has read of in the Bible. Moreover, the living things in it are pictured as having evolved naturally, blindly and automatically, not as having been fashioned by God. His school teacher might be telling him that the Biblical story is what people believed before Science discovered the truth, while the defender of the Biblical story might react with embarrassment and vagueness to try to explain the differences, such as that the Psalmist say “A thousand years in Your sight is but as a day.”

It may be best to reply that the two accounts don’t tell the same story in different words, but neither do they conflict. They tell us different things about the same subject – our world and how it came to be – each speaking from its own vantage point and pursuing its own purposes. Geology tells us, objectively and without value judgment, what happened, how the world came into being. Genesis has no quarrel with any aspect of this account, but teaches the value judgments about the facts; it tells not what happened, but what it means for us.  Genesis cannot be expected to serve as a geology, anthropology or biology textbook, but it is a religious book meant for religious enlightenment, not physics.  Only a religious description of the complex and orderly world can properly call it good, in the image of God, hospitable to the qualities a man needs to develop if he is to become fully human. No scientific document can speak in these terms and remain a scientific document, yet this religious concept is at least as important for our full understanding of what Man is as the biological story of his emergence from among the primates. Science can define Homo Sapiens; Religion can envision what it means to be authentically human.

(p114) The key to reading the Creation story and to much of the rest of the Bible is that it is a mixture of ancient science, since superceded, and moral insight, which remains valid. It teaches a little about what the world has been but a great deal about what it might be. Although Genesis and geology tell different stories about the origin of the world and the human race, they do not conflict, nor do we have to reject one in order to accept the other. We get as much into difficulty when we try to take Genesis as a scientific description of what happened, as when we try to draw moral conclusions from scientific findings and hypotheses.

(p115) Who Wrote the Bible? Where did we get it? Did God Tell People What to Write?

Firstly, the Bible is not a book, but a collections of books. Our understanding of God does not allow Him to play the part of a Ventriloquist, speaking through Isaiah or Jeremiah, nor for Him to dictate Hebrew sentences to His stenographer Moses. Secondly, our studies of Biblical material indicate that even a single book, especially the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), is composed of several different strata, written by different hands in different times and welded into a single entity. The Bible was created by many men over an extremely long period, each writing down stories, ideas and memories which the people of Israel had passed on from generation to generation. The most important stories and ideas, the ones they wanted everyone to remember in the right way, became the Bible, a body of national literature which describes the world, God’s place in it and His involvement with the Jewish people.

(p116) God did not write the Bible, neither does it contains His words. God isn’t a person with a mouth, tongue and vocal cords. People thought of these stories and wrote them down, but in a sense, they are God’s word. He inspired people to have ideas about how men should live, and helped people to understand things that neither they nor anybody else had understood before. God is the Power that lets people do these things, but when you put your idea into words, in a way they are both your own words as well as His.

(p118) Is the Bible True?

The stories in the Bible may be true in the sense that they say something valid and accurate about life, but not in the sense that they describe actual events as they actually happened. Thus a portrait may capture the essences of a person more truly than a photograph. Some books of the Bible are history, and as such they are substantially true, like most history. Other parts are poems and they are true in the special way that poems are true.  In the 23 psalm the poet says “The Lord is my shepherd”, not stating that the Lord is really a shepherd, but he means that God takes care of him, saying that believing in God makes him feel good and secure.

And then there are stories that stand somewhere between history and poems. When we try to decide whether stories are true or not, we should not ask did it really happen this way? as in a history lesson. Instead, we ought to ask Is the point of this story true to life? Is this the way the world really is? as we do with a poem. After all, none of the stories in the Bible was written by the people to whom they were supposed to have happened. We can’t expect the story-teller to know what really went on and who spoke what words to whom. Neither is the author really trying to tell us what occurred a long time ago. Instead, he is trying to tell us something about the kind of world we live in and the kind of people the Jews is supposed to be.  The moral ideas of the Biblical tales are true and valid most of the time and since we turn to the Bible for moral guidance, its historical accuracy is of lesser importance.

(p123) Miracles

There are many events in the Bible which strain the credulity of the reader. The Red Sea splits at just the right moment; the sun stands still for Joshua and the walls of Jericho falls at his signal.  My experience indicates that around the age of eleven, children become disturbed by the improbabilities of the Biblical stories which up to that point they have accepted without question. Most Biblical stories were written by people who didn’t see the original events happen, but put into writing tales that have been in circulation over many generations and it is quite possible that exaggerations crept in with the telling of an otherwise true and accurate story. Today we see God in the unchanging workings of Nature, not in their suspension for our express benefit.  For the people of that time the important aspect of the miracle was that God took a hand in events and made the impossible happen. For us the important part of a miracle is that something entirely possible happened when it didn’t have to happen, when there was no way human beings by their own efforts, could have made it happen, and by happening, helped people go on believing in the reality of God and in the goodness of His world.

(p126) Why don’t miracles happen to us today as they used to? The answer is that they do happen precisely as they use to do. The miraculous supernatural aspects of the miracles never happened in Biblical times any more than they happen today. But things happen miraculously today, when we need them and have no way to command or compel them.

 (p137) God is One 

We don’t really have words to describe Him – we talk about Him with ordinary human words, because that is the only words we have. We can speak about what He makes possible in our lives, but we must remember that He is different from the ways we think of Him. As human beings we can be a little bit like God because we have souls and the ability to choose to be a little bit like God, but God will always be different from us and from the picture we have of Him. He is unique – neither on earth nor in heaven is there another force like Him.

God is one means that the same God exist for people everywhere. They all have the same rights, possibilities and the same obligations to live by the same standards which are built into the world and human nature. They must do the same things to become fully and truly human. The Bible authors understood that certain things were absolutely right and others absolutely wrong for all people and at all times. There is so much unity, order and coordination in the world that it had to derive from a single unifying Spirit.

Some people believe in two gods – a good and an evil one, but Biblical religion has it that there is no Devil as a figure independent of God. Human wickedness is the result of living without God or serving false gods, non-existent ones, not of serving a God of Wickedness. Just as darkness is the absence of light, so evil is the absence of goodness.

(p156) Prayer

The idea of prayer is difficult to understand and explain when one thinks of God as we have suggested. We cannot conceive of God as a person and we reject the idea that our prayers will influence events beyond our control. We must distinguish between prayer and worship. Worship is a form of putting ourselves in contact with God. We may worship through study, through deeds of kindness and helpfulness, acts of self-control, charity and many other ways.  Prayer is worship through the use of words. One of the chief purposes of congregational worship is to strengthen the feeling of being part of a congregation. When the individual pray it is a very different matter. The prayers of someone in danger or in illness is really a cry for help or of pain or fear. One of the reasons we pray is to express the fact that there are things we need for our lives which we cannot get through our own efforts.  We are relying on that beneficial force in the universe which makes our living fully human, and prayer is the recognition and expression of that dependence more than it is a way of influencing that force to do something additional for us.

(p159) For What Can We Pray?

Avoid the “Santa Claus” mentality which presents God with a shopping list. We can express our gratitude for the good qualities in ourselves and in the world around us. We can pray for the power to learn - remember to be grateful when we find ourselves capable of learning.

(p160) Why Prayers Are Not Answered

My opinion is that no prayer which asks for changes in the world outside is ever really answered. Only when we pray for a change within ourselves is it possible for our act of prayer to influence the results.  Only the man who prays about what sort of a person he wants to become, for clarity of understanding and strength of purpose has a chance of getting a response to his prayer. He invokes not the Father in Heaven but his own better self, and if he prays sincerely, the answer may be close at hand.

Some Affirmative Ways of Meeting God

(p162) “If you would know God, be not therefore a solver of riddles. Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children. And look into space: you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in the rain. You shall see Him smiling in the flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.”

                                                                                                  Cahill Gibran, “The Prophet”

(p164) Finding God in the World

God is the Power which makes it possible for us to become fully human. As such we find Him in the beauty and orderliness of Nature and in our own ability to respond to that beauty and to understand and use that orderliness. When we are moved by the sight of the ever-moving waves of the ocean, majestic mountains, a rainbow, a field of flowers, the sun shining on a rolling valley, we become aware not only of the beauty of the world, but of our uniquely human capacity to enjoy and be moved by beauty, to be awed by God.  A feeling of awe in response to the grandeur of nature is one of the forms of religious experience that our children experience. God makes Himself real in the world through growth, change and improvement. We can teach them to marvel at the fact that in a tiny, inert seed lies buried the secret of life.

(p166) Finding God in People

A child who is blessed with loving, trusting parents, who make it clear to him that they accept and cherish him, will begin by believing in a God who loves and accepts, in a creative spirit which is behind an essentially friendly world, in which he will feel at home and view positively. Parents who nag, complain, scold, over-react and over-protect will teach that child to believe in a God who makes impossible demands and who rejects and punishes people arbitrarily and unfairly for not fulfilling His demands. The child’s religion will be compulsive, guilt-ridden and will revolve around the avoidance of punishment rather than the achievement of positive goals.  A child who has learned that he can rely on the adult world for love, patience and honesty will grow up to relate to God in the same way. A child’ belief in God is a readiness to trust the world, to assume that it will play fair with him and he will go on believing in the world despite his disappointments.  Disbelief for a young child is suspicion, withdrawal, surliness and fear – the reaction of a human being who has too often seen his limited world dash his hopes and expectations – ultimately he will have to learn that the world is often cruel and unfair.

(p168) The people in a child’s world make God and the qualities for which He stands more credible.  The joy of friendship, the lively satisfaction of liking and being liked, the sense of missing someone and being missed, the capacity to be happy in interpersonal contact and to make others happy – all of these can be identified as stirrings of the force we call God in a child’s soul.  Another important area in which children can discover God through other people is their exposure to and fascination with heroes – men of courage and dedication. Heroes of faith in the Bible in whose lives God has been a real and unmistakable influence provides the child with God-orientated models during his hero-worshipping years.

(p169) Finding God in Oneself

Since a growing child spends more time thinking of himself than about any other subject, you should endeavor to lead him to find God when he looks in his own heart and soul. Show him the qualities we believe God stands for, and as he encounters these qualities in his own life God will become that much more real to him.

 (p170) To believe in God means to take seriously all the abilities which are so important to him: the ability to grow, to heal, to learn, to improve, to create, so that he can become a real and complete person and find life enjoyable and fulfilling. As the child learns the satisfying feeling of heeding his inner voice of conscience, as he come to enjoy the good feelings of sharing and helping, God becomes real to him as the Source of these feelings. If he has a pet for whose care he is responsible, this can be a very useful framework for his discovery of God, as he learns to take care of someone, learning to feel what it is to be concerned for another’s well-being. Compassion, concern and responsibility are all aspects of the divine, qualities we need to develop if we are to be fully human – this is a way for a child to start. If we can get a child to practice compassion, generosity, honesty, forgiveness, perseverance and to find satisfaction in them, we will make the little bit of God within him a very real part of his world.

(p171) Finding God in Religion

Practicing the wrong rituals for the wrong reasons, attending the wrong services on the wrong basis can undo much of the good this book has tried to do. However, proper public and private religious expression can add a dimension to child’s encounters with God which he would get nowhere else. Being part of an adult group expressing serious things in a formal, stylized manner can have an awesome impact on a child. If adults take a religious service seriously, the mood communicates itself to the child. A feeling of awe should certainly be part of a child’s education in finding God.  If we want to raise our children to welcome religious feelings, they should see us in attitudes of reverence – at prayer, reciting blessings and bestowing blessings on them. They should hear us express awe and wonder, affirm faith and courage in the face of disappointments, then they will be more inclined to make those attitudes part of their own spiritual repertoire.

(p176) As in virtually every subject we have touched on, we begin not with what God demands, but with what we would like to become – we and our children. We begin not with doctrine or theology, but with life, with the feelings and experiences of our children. We do not start by pretending that we stand with God and calling our children to climb up and join us.

We start with our children and try to see the world through their eyes, try to share with them the two most important ideas we hold. Firstly, the commitment that man’s greatest adventure is to be found in the never-ending striving to become fully human, and secondly, the faith that if they look at the world and look into themselves deeply enough, they will find God in both.

 

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, Rabbi Harold Kushner’s theology turns traditional dogmatic religion on its head by shifting the focus from what a distant deity demands to what human beings are capable of becoming. We do not start with doctrine, theology, or what God demands. We start with life, looking through the eyes of our children. True religion is built on two pillars: the commitment that man’s greatest adventure is the never-ending striving to become fully human, and the faith that if we look deeply enough into the world and ourselves, we will find God in both. By reconciling the ancient poetry of faith with the objective realities of modern science and human suffering, he strips religion of its capacity to inflict existential dread, replacing it with a toolkit for emotional and spiritual maturity. Kushner reminds us that the true measure of a meaningful life lies not in the accumulation of wealth, health, or an unblemished cosmic record, but in the quiet satisfaction of a clear conscience, a resilient spirit, and a legacy of love left in the hearts of others. In a world full of random storms and unexpected tragedies, his words leave us with a comforting, powerful mandate for the next generation: we do not need to look up to the sky to find the divine; we need only look deeply into the beauty of the world and the untapped goodness within ourselves.