O1B4F7E. JOURNAL-WHEN ALL WE EVER WANTED ISN’T ENOUGH 2003

MOMENTS IN OUR LIVES-1 2026-05-27

O1B4F7E. JOURNAL-WHEN ALL WE EVER WANTED ISN’T ENOUGH 2003

(Gemini) This is a profound and poignant summary of Harold S. Kushner’s book, “When All We Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” (1986). The themes addressed here - the search for meaning, the limitations of competition and power, the necessity of experiencing both pain and joy, and the acceptance of life’s uncertainties - speak directly to the universal human condition.

Key Lessons

1. The Search for Meaning (Versus the Disease of Boredom)

· The True Desire: Humans do not truly crave fame, wealth, or power. Our deepest need is for our lives to make sense and for the world to be a better place because we were here.

· The subtle tragedy: While sudden disasters force us to refocus, the "disease of boredom" (the feeling that life is pointless) is much more dangerous because it suffocates our zest for life without noticing it.

2. The Wisdom of Ecclesiastes

· A realistic outlook: Ecclesiastes stands out in the Bible because it honestly acknowledges the harsh realities: life is often unfair, good people suffer, and death comes to all regardless of their actions.

· The lesson: Instead of seeing life simply as a transactional system of "punishment and reward," Ecclesiastes forces us to seek meaning beyond material or superficial success.

3. Love versus Power

· The loneliness of 'Number One': The drive to always win or control others creates isolation and jealousy. It distances us from colleagues and friends.

· The incompatibility: You cannot control and love someone at the same time. True humanity and love flourish only in vulnerability and in the freedom we allow each other.

4. The Balance of Pleasure and Self-Control

· God's Gifts: According to the Talmud, we will be held accountable for the good things on earth that we have refused to enjoy.

· The Golden middle ground: It is as much a mistake to deliberately seek pain as to blindly pursue pleasure. True joy lies in enjoying life's gifts in moderation.

5. The Risk of Love and Emotion

· No Pain, No Joy: Protecting yourself from fear and loss by "not caring" builds an emotional ceiling and floor. It may immunize you from great sorrow, but it also robs you of ecstasy, great joy, and hope.

· The Waves of Life: Being truly human means opening yourself up to the full spectrum of emotions - including tears.

6. The Limits of the Mind

· Wisdom vs. Intelligence: Intelligence without a heart leads to cold decisions. Wisdom is the ability to recognize that the human mind has limits and to have respect for the great unknown.

· Accepting the Darkness: You don’t have to analyze or understand everything. Sometimes it’s our job to simply accept the things that can’t be explained.

7. Who’s Afraid of the Fear of God?

This seventh installment of your journal notes gets to the very heart of Harold Kushner’s theological shift in “When All We Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough.” It tackles the age-old, often uncomfortable tension between childlike obedience out of fear and adult integrity out of awe.

Kushner brilliantly uses Jean Piaget’s model of moral development to show that true faith doesn’t mean remaining an eternal spiritual child in fear of a punishing “Parent” in heaven.

Here’s a structured summary of this powerful concluding chapter for your archives:

The Crisis of Ecclesiastes 's Faith

· The Search for Security: At the end of his life, Ecclesiastes turns to religion to try to "cheat" death and find meaning that his wealth could not give him.

· The Failure of Piety: It did not work for him, because the religion of his time was based on a transaction: obey rules and be blessed; transgress and be punished. When this assumption collapsed in practice, it shook his moral foundation. However, it was not God who failed him, but his own expectations of what religion was for.

Piaget's Three Stages of Rules and Authority

Kushner draws a parallel between how children play marbles and how humanity has viewed God over the centuries:

Stage	Child's Attitude (Marbles)	Religious / Social Parallel
1. As a Child	Rules are absolute, given by a higher authority and must not be questioned.	Dictatorship & Fear Religion: God is the absolute ruler; "good" simply means to slavishly and meekly obey.
2. Adolescent	Rules are challenged and broken in a quest for freedom, often resulting in chaos.	Revolution & Skepticism: Humanity rebels against absolute monarchies and begins to see the Bible/laws as man-made and fallible
3. Adult	Rules are understood as instruments made by humans to make the game fair and enjoyable. They can be adapted.	Democracy & Adult Faith: Faith is driven by an informed conscience. Morality is about shared responsibility and justice.

Fear vs. Awe

Kushner redefines the biblical concept of the "Fear of the Lord":

· Fear is a negative emotion. It makes you shrink, crawl, or flee from things that threaten you. It creates a feverish obsession with sin and rules (like the anxious believers who cannot enjoy the Sabbath or compliments).

· Awe is positive. It draws you closer. You stand in awe before something infinitely greater than you, without having to demean or hate yourself.

The Voice of an Adult God

Kushner imagines God’s response to the crawling, rule-obsessed believer is:

“What joy do you think I get from your crawling?... I expect obedience from children. But from you, ‘unconditional obedience’ is just another name for your failure to act like an adult... Stop saying, ‘I just did what you told me to do’ and start saying, ‘You may or may not like it, but I have thought it through and this is what I feel is right.’”

The Goal: To Be a Mensch

True religion is not a report card or a nagging parent who awards points for perfection. It is a purifying fire that burns away all falsehood until only your true self remains.

The ultimate goal of this maturation is to become a mensch:

· Someone who is made of one piece (integrity).

· Wise, but not cynical.

· Acts not out of fear or to make a good impression, but out of a deep, inner conviction of what is right.

· Have a "quiet confidence" and peace of mind, without the fear that God will judge him for every little mistake.

Ecclesiastes finally found what he was looking for precisely because he refused to be satisfied with a superficial, childlike faith.

This is an incredibly powerful conclusion to this section of your journal. It challenges one to take responsibility for one's own moral compass.

INTRODUCTION

How does one live a life that truly matters? This is the central question that Harold Kushner grapples with in his mature and timeless work, "When All We Ever Wanted Isn't Enough." Where his previous writing has focused on the walls of acute human tragedy, here he turns his gaze to a much more subtle, yet more universal crisis: the "disease of boredom." It is that gnawing, gray emptiness that can creep into even the most successful lives when material wealth, status, and power are no longer enough to nourish the soul.

By weaving his own vulnerable quest with the ancient, honest struggles of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, Kushner challenges us to take off our masks. This journal is a journey through seven critical life lessons. It is a roadmap that leads us away from the anxious, childish pursuit of external rules and approval, and guides us to the maturity of an informed conscience, the acceptance of life’s waves, and the ultimate discovery of true human integrity.

WHEN ALL WE EVER WANTED ISN’T ENOUGH

Harold S Kushner (1986)

When the emptiness inside you cannot be satisfied by anything

A third of my patients suffer not from their nerves, but from the emptiness caused by their meaningless lives. It is the common neurosis of our time.

- Carl Jung : “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”

All comes to nothing, to nothing - Ecclesiastes 1:2

1. (Kushner) Was I supposed to do anything with my life?

Our longings are not for fame, status, comfort, wealth or power - these are things that cause as many problems as they solve. Everyone longs for your life to have meaning, to feel that you know what life is about, and to have the confidence that the world will be a slightly better place because you were here. This book is not about how to be happy or popular - there are many other books for that. It is about how to be truly human, to know that you have lived the way God intended you to be so that your life will not be aimless. This book is about giving meaning to your existence, to make you feel that you have used your time well. I want to tell you about some of the things I wish I had known when I was younger.

My previous book, “WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE” (1981), was written to help people whose lives have been torn in two by personal tragedy: before and after that event that shattered your life - the death of a loved one, a life-changing accident, or the diagnosis of an incurable disease. Such a tragedy causes the threads of your life to be pulled together into a focal point, your mind inevitably caught up in the struggle to determine how your life going forward will be different as a result.

This book is written to help people cope with a more subtle tragedy: the disease of boredom, the feeling that our aimless, meaningless existence means nothing. In some ways it is a more dangerous problem, because we do not realize how it is stifling our joy and zest for life. When we do realize it, it is too late, because we have forgotten how to enjoy the beautiful things in life. This book can help us cultivate a perspective on life that will prevent us from realizing that when we die, neither our lives nor our deaths have made any difference to those around us. In an attempt to ensure authenticity, I realized that I should write the book not about other people's problems, but about my own experience. Not about man's abstract search for truth, but about my own search, with all my mistakes and frustrations that were part of it.

2. The Most Dangerous Book in the Bible

From our earliest beginnings, religion (service to a divine being) has sought to reconcile man with God, in an attempt to make natural forces over which man has no control seem less frightening. It has connected people to one another, so that they do not have to be alone in their joys, or when they grieve. As people began to realize that there was more to life than simply surviving, they began to look to religion as a guide to a better life.

Today, we are too often disappointed when we look to traditional religion for a clear direction. Although we find much truth and wisdom there, their promises often differ from our experience of reality. The Bible promises in many places that we will be well if we follow the narrow path, and punishment if we deviate. We would like to believe this, but find it difficult, because there is often no connection between a person's good or bad actions and whether he is blessed or punished.

However, one book in the Bible, barely 10 pages long, differs drastically from all the others in this. Ecclesiastes was written by an angry, cynical and skeptical man who doubts God and asks penetrating, straightforward questions about whether there is any value in doing good. "What is the point of working hard? One generation follows another, but the world remains the same forever. Man is no better than the beasts, for both die and return to dust. In my life, which has come to nothing, I have seen it all: a righteous man perishes despite all his virtues, and a wicked man enjoys a long life despite his doing wrong. (Ecclesiastes 7:15)

Nowhere in the Bible does anyone dare to speak like that. On almost every other page in the Bible, we are assured that everything we do, no matter how small, matters and that we will be judged accordingly. Ecclesiastes, on the contrary, says the opposite - that God does not look at our actions and deeds in that way. Everyone is treated the same, regardless of whether they are rich or poor, wise or foolish, righteous or wicked. Regardless of how we live, we all grow old, die, and are soon forgotten. How we live seems to make no difference to this at all.

3. The Loneliness of Being First

When we are young, our drive to succeed is our purpose in life. And it is hard for us to resist a challenge - we want to find out how high our abilities can take us. As we get older, things begin to change within us and our outlook on life. Instead of seeing life as a competition and victory as an end in itself, we begin to see success as a means to an end. Instead of looking at how high we can climb, we ask ourselves what we can achieve with it, what vistas it can gain for us, a life we ​​can feel good about.

For us to be able to "win," it means they have to "lose." These feelings make it difficult for us to be truly kind and open to our colleagues, and they can easily cause us to become dissatisfied with what is good in our own circumstances because it does not meet the high expectations raised by our striving to be number one. We can easily become lonely, jealous, and bitter, blaming others, who are more successful than us in this pursuit, for our unhappiness. Only when we have outgrown this extreme competitiveness can we welcome colleagues as friends. Nothing has changed in our circumstances, but we have looked ahead, and now we can look forward to our remaining years as productive opportunities that can give us satisfaction.

Even overwhelming power is not enough to ensure total control. The exercise of that power tends to distance you from other people. Where one commands others to obey, there may be loyalty and gratitude, but not love. And who wants people who matter to you to be afraid of you, to obey grudgingly and reluctantly rather than freely and out of love? And where will your exalted status leave you? You will be all alone, number one and lonely.

Love and Power are not compatible. You can love someone and give them the space and right to be themselves, or you can control them and force them to do your will, but you cannot do both at the same time. Nor can any of us be truly human in isolation. The qualities that make us human are only expressed and developed in the way we relate to other people.

Sometimes it seems as if God’s Power clashes with His Love. When we submit to God because we are afraid of disobeying, afraid of challenging Him, then He has our obedience but not our love. We can only give our love in surrender to God if He gives us the space to choose for ourselves and thereby truly become ourselves.

God does not seek to be Number One. He has compassion especially for those who are least able to take care of themselves. He has compassion especially for the poor and the brokenhearted, because the poor and the oppressed find it easier to need and belong to each other - they have so much less reason to imagine themselves anything. They are more vulnerable, less self-confident, more exposed. Because they have less to hide behind, they open up more easily to each other and to God, and there is something genuinely human about this.

4. When it hurts too much to feel

We often give in to the excesses of our senses, only to feel guilty afterwards and torment our bodies with withdrawal. I think there is an attempt in people to balance their comfort and pleasure by enduring the pain in life.

If I had to sum up the moral value of the Bible in one sentence, it would be Do not do what your heart desires; Do what the Lord requires of you. The pagans saw divinity in the exercise of man’s natural instincts, while the Bible sees the image of God in man’s ability to control his innate inclinations.

In the Talmud (the first five books of the Bible), it is recorded that in the world to come, each of us will be held accountable by God for all the good things He has placed on earth that we have refused to use. Here there is no reproach or aversion to the body or its desires, but rather a sense of reverence and veneration for the joys of life that God has placed in our lives to enjoy, as a way of seeing life through the experience of pleasant moments. Like all gifts, they can of course be misused, but then it is our fault and damage, not God’s. Used in moderation as God intended, all these desires can be seen as God’s gifts to us, to bring joy to our lives.

To view the human body and the entire natural world with aversion and distrust is as much heresy as to revere it. The man who chooses pain and discomfort because he thinks he deserves it and who thinks it is sinful to enjoy life is as much as astray as the person who blindly pursues pleasure as the sole purpose of life. Both of them will eventually, like Ecclesiastes, come to the gloomy conclusion that their life was futile and a chasing after the wind.

5. If you want to feel no pain, there can be no joy

The Hindu faith is not to ignore or deny pain and suffering, but to rise above it by learning the art of detaching oneself from pain and overcoming it, transcending it. They do to their bodies what they try to do to their souls, to teach themselves not to feel the pain. The pain is real, but they don't feel it. When you have learned not to desire, you rise above suffering.

I strongly disagree with this view of suffering. I believe that I become less human if I were to learn the art of not feeling pain, if the death of a friend or a family member or someone's suffering does not affect me emotionally. When I protect myself from the danger of loss (through death, divorce or just a close friend leaving) by teaching myself not to care, not to let anyone get too close to me, then I lose a part of my soul. To be compassionate is to open yourself up to pain and hurt. When we lower our expectations of life in an attempt to avoid pain and disappointment, then we forfeit a part of the image of God within ourselves. Being less attached to my children and less ambitious about my work, because life is unfair and unpredictable, will in some measure immunize me from great sorrow, but it will also rob me of great joy and hope for the future.

I have seen the effects of divorce and marital strife on families in my congregation. Perhaps the greatest harm that divorce does to children and to their friends is that we raise a generation of children who are afraid to love, afraid to give themselves completely to another person, because they have seen how deeply it hurts people who have taken the risk of loving and opening up to each other, only to find that it doesn’t work out. They may be so afraid of the pain of disappointment that they would rather forgo the possibilities of love and happiness. Most often, the problem of boredom lies within ourselves. Because of our fear of being hurt or disappointed, we have chosen a life with little emotional room to maneuver. We have built for ourselves an emotional floor below which we cannot sink, to ensure that nothing can ever hurt or depress us, and an emotional ceiling above which we cannot rise, because the risk of falling is too great. And then we wonder why we feel so caged in and so bored.

Like everything in life, our emotions also work in waves. Some finely tuned people experience great emotional waves, with great ecstasy and deep moods of depression. Unfortunately, one extreme cannot be separated from the other. To experience the ecstasy you have to accept that there will also be a despondent phase at times. What we must try to do is to shift our entire emotional wave upwards from the negative to the positive. But do not try to completely suppress that falling of of a tear now and then, the tightening of the throat, because then you suppress your sensitivity, and therein lies much of your humanity.

6. But the fool walks in the dark

The essence of wisdom is a respect for the limits of the human mind, awe and reverence for the vast unknown reality where reason cannot penetrate. If our education does not instill in us a sense of humility, reverence and awe, we will be smart enough to lead, but not wise enough to know where we should go. Intelligence without sensitivity, the mind without the heart, will lead us to make decisions that unnecessarily hurt innocent people. At such times, reverence for a human spirit should be more important to us than attention to what the law says. Sigmund Freud reminds us that we think we act according to logical reasons, but we probably do the things we do for reasons we cannot understand.

Should some of life's joys be experienced rather than analyzed and understood? Some people are afraid to be openly emotional. Love, ecstasy, anger, and tears scare them because they feel out of control when they cannot control emotions that do not make sense. While we will walk in darkness for much of our lives, we are aware that we do not have all the answers, but also that it is not always necessary for us to find a path or to walk to a defined end point.

What you know at fifty that you did not know at twenty has nothing to do with formulas or words, but with people, places, actions - knowledge acquired through the senses of touch, sight, hearing, victories, failures, sleepless nights, devotion, love - the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of people and of yourself.

There is a cycle of light and darkness, reason and emotion within me just as there is in the world around me. Sometimes it is our job in life to shed light where there is darkness, to try to make sense of the things that happen around us, to find reason and explain them. But sometimes it is our job to accept the darkness, the things that cannot be explained, and probably should not be explained, as part of the world we live in. In the end, when it is our turn to go into the darkness, if we have learned how to live, we will be able to go there, neither wise nor foolish, but courageous and unafraid.

7. Who is Afraid of the Fear of God?

In my mind I can see, as Ecclesiastes grows older, how he realizes in despair that his time is running out, afraid that he might come to the end of his life without doing anything meaningful with it. He was wealthy, influential, and his life was pleasant, but these are such fleeting things - they slip from a man’s grasp when death comes to take you. He knows that in the end he will have to face the darkness alone, without his wealth or entertainment to protect him. And if he were asked, by himself or someone else, “What have you done with your life, with all the opportunities and the talents you have had?” what would he answer?

By this time in Ecclesiastes’ life he is wise and well-read, knowledgeable enough to know that there is no answer in all that he knows to provide a satisfactory answer. As he grows older and more frustrated, he turns his search, like so many aging people, to faith: he will devote himself wholeheartedly to his God and to doing His will.

People do not live forever. What is the point of being rich or wise, if rich and poor, wise and foolish, are all doomed to die and be forgotten? God alone is eternal and forever. If we surrender ourselves to Him and dedicate our lives to His service, wouldn’t that be a way to cheat death and avoid that sense of futility and finality that renders all our efforts futile? Ecclesiastes set out to do the things that are eternally right and true, hoping thereby to gain passage to eternity.

He never tells why it didn’t work. Maybe he was too much of an individualist, or maybe he found hypocrisy and meanness in the church (Ecclesiastes 8:10), or maybe he was just too old to change (Ecclesiastes 4:17, 7:16-18). Piety alone apparently wasn’t the answer for him either.

It’s an overwhelming thought that God can fail you. Whatever your understanding of God and whatever name you give Him, to base your life on certain fixed assumptions and then have those assumptions crumble beneath you is a shocking experience. It leaves you with a feeling not only that your faith is wrong, but that nothing else in the world is right and that everything here is meaningless. It is the destruction of the moral basis of your life. Ecclesiastes turned to God seeking security, peace of mind, freedom from fear and doubt, and it was not God’s fault that he turned to religion in search of the wrong things.

In the original Bible, there is no word for “religion” - the concept was too abstract. The closest phrase to it is “the fear of God.” What do these words “the fear of the Lord” evoke in you? Does this conjure up in your mind the image of an Almighty Being who dwells in heaven and who sends His will down upon us, ready to strike us down mercilessly if we dare to disobey? Does it bring to mind a God who knows your every secret thought and will punish your every wrongdoing?

If so, then you are like many people today and throughout the ages, whose understanding of God has been based on fear of retribution. Religion was a matter of God commanding and us either obeying and being rewarded or rebelling and being punished. This is how most people in Ecclesiastes’s day understood religion (Lev. 26:1-46). And that is why he could not find satisfaction when he tried to make religion the cornerstone of his life. He was probably so far ahead of his time that a life of obedience based on fear was not what he was looking for.

The book “THE MORAL JUDGMENT OF THE CHILD” by Jean Piaget was one of the forces that shaped my entire life and thinking. In this book, Piaget analyzes a child’s concept of right and wrong, what is permitted and what is forbidden. To collect data, he walked through the streets of Geneva where children were playing marbles, and asked them the following three questions:

How old are you?

How do you play marbles?

How do you know it is the right way to play?

What he learned from this was the attitude of children at different ages towards all rules of both religious and secular authority, the seriousness of breaking the rules, and the procedure for changing them. Piaget discovered that there are three stages in the development of a child's sense of authority:

1. For young children, the rules of the game and all rules are inferred to be given by an unquestionable higher authority. This is how you are supposed to play, and the thought of doing things differently has never occurred to them. Rules are rules, and one becomes part of the system by accepting and obeying the rules.

2. As children grow older and enter adolescence, they begin to ask probing questions about all rules and authority. Typically, children then go through an irresponsible phase in which they break rules and make their own, before coming to the realization that, although they have the power to make and change rules, the rules they invent must be fair and reasonable, otherwise playing will no longer be fun.

3. At this point, they are on the threshold of adulthood. They understand that rules do not come from above, but are made by people like them, tested over time, and can be changed by people like themselves. Being "good" no longer means just slavishly obeying existing rules. It now means taking on the responsibility to constantly evaluate the rules and to put in place rules that will be fair to everyone, so that we can all enjoy sharing a fair and just society.

Piaget suggests that this way of thinking about marbles also models our attitude toward all rules and all authority. When we are young, weak, and inexperienced, we think that all rules come from an all-powerful and all-knowing authority. We show our appreciation for guidance by accepting and obeying such rules. A "good" child is not necessarily a generous and morally sensitive child, but a docile and obedient one.

At this stage of development, it is difficult for us to accept that other people, other cultures, other religions may have different rules than we do. If we are right (according to our rules) and they are different, then they must be wrong, because according to our understanding, our view of right and wrong is absolute.

When children reach adolescence, they suddenly lose interest in being "good". They will reject good advice rather than be in a position to listen to their parents and other authority figures. This is their idea of ​​being "free". They will do a lot of foolish things, sometimes hurting themselves and others in the process, to show how free from rules they can be. Then, if they are lucky, they will grow up to be responsible adults, whose definition of "good" has matured to evaluate and adapt rules to circumstances, using their power and authority in the interest of fairness.

Isn't the history of humanity much like that of a child playing marbles? In the beginning there were absolute rulers and obedient subjects(1). People obeyed their rulers because they feared their power. Then came revolts and revolutions against absolute power and oppression, often followed by periods of chaos and excess, with the result that many innocent people became victims of arbitrary and unjust application of self-made "laws."(2) This revolutionary chaos then gave birth to democracy, the idea that all people are collectively responsible and should be involved in making the laws, which should be the collective wisdom of all members of the people(3).

This was also the history of religion, the way people understood God over the generations. Once God was understood as an absolute ruler, who commanded us how to live, and we showed ourselves to be His followers by our obedience. Then, at about the same time that people began to doubt the divine right of kings, they also began to question the divine right of God. They began to see the Bible as an inspired book written by human hands, rather than dictated by God. They also saw certain laws and customs as the result of the cultural and economic circumstances of the people who formed them, rather than as coming directly from the mind of God and therefore to be absolutely obeyed.

Religious communities have developed from the stage of docile, obedient children, through the youthful stage of rejection and rebellion, to a community of free adults who demand a voice in setting the rules by which they are expected to live. Piaget does not simply show us the different options and alternative patterns of moral behavior. The later stages are better and more fully developed moral behavior, just as an adult is more developed and mature than a child. Democracy and power-sharing represent a higher, more complete, and more moral form of social organization than a dictatorship.

Those earlier stages may be appropriate for a child, just as it is appropriate and desirable for a young child to choose to live with his parents and to accept that other people make decisions for him. But there is something missing in the person who never outgrows these childish tendencies as he grows older.

Here Piaget has something to teach us about the future of faith and the search for the good life. We learn from him that obedience is not necessarily the highest spiritual virtue. A religion that defines morality as obedience to His commands is as applicable to children and immature people as it was to humanity as a whole when civilization was still in its infancy. The Bible may speak in terms of "Thus saith the Lord"; it may make promises of reward for the obedient and punishment for the wicked, because it was addressed to people in the early stages of their moral development.

The Bible may be the Word of God, but it is probably not His final word, not because God's ability to express himself was limited, but because man's ability to understand him at that time was limited. "A religion that insists on equating "good" with "unconditionally obedient" is a religion that wants to make lifelong children of us all.

I have known people who were deeply religious, people whose religion was the strongest single driving force shaping their lives, and yet I have wondered whether all their obsession with their faith was good for them. In some cases there was a feverish preoccupation with sin, a constant fear that they had unknowingly broken a rule or done something wrong that might have offended God. I have known Jews for whom the Sabbath was a weekly ordeal to survive, because they were constantly afraid that they might do something wrong. I have known Christians who cannot watch television programs without worrying that they might have lustful thoughts, or people who are afraid that they might be guilty of the sin of pride or haughtiness when someone compliments them.

Every action was undertaken in the spirit of "Now God will see what a good person I am and He will love me." I couldn't help feeling that there was something immature about this attitude, and that their interpretation of their faith prevented them from reaching full maturity.

There is a part of us that wants to remain a child forever. Sometimes the problems of life are so overwhelming that we desperately doubt that we will ever solve them. In such circumstances, we would like someone to say to us, "Don't worry about it. Let me do it for you - all I ask of you is your gratitude and your submission." That wish in us is the child in us speaking from our adult bodies. When our religion encourages that wish and wants to keep us in childish submission and dependence, by wanting to tell us what to do and expecting our obedience and gratitude, it does us a disservice. This is where the religion of Ecclesiastes' day failed him.

Genuine faith should not listen to us when we say, "This is too hard for me. Tell me what to do so I don't have to figure it out for myself." It should encourage us to grow, to leave behind our childish habits, even if we would rather remain spiritual children. Religion should even encourage us to critically challenge its own position, not out of youthful exuberance, but on the basis of an informed adult conscience. Religion should not be in a position to give us all the answers. It should encourage us to find our own way.

The Fear of God may indeed be the beginning of wisdom and the cornerstone of proper living, as the Bible repeatedly declares. But the "Fear of God" does not mean being afraid of God. It is not fear as we know the word today, but awe and reverence. Fear is a negative emotion, causing us to either run away or destroy what threatens us. But awe is something else entirely. Awe draws us closer even if we hesitate to get too close. Instead of feeling resentful about our own weakness and powerlessness, we stand open-mouthed in admiration of something infinitely greater than ourselves.

Ecclesiastes may well have asked God at the end of his religious phase, "What more do you want from me? I have knelt before you, I have given you my unquestioning obedience, I have done everything you asked of me. Why have you withheld that feeling of completeness, the promise of perfection that I have sought?"

And God might have replied, "What joy do you think I get from your creeping? Do you really think I'm so insecure about myself that I need you to humble yourself so that I can feel great? I wish people would stop quoting what I told humanity in their childhood, and listen to what I tell them today. From children, and from spiritually immature people, I expect obedience. But from you, "unconditional obedience" is just another name for your failure to act like an adult and take responsibility for your own life - that's what I expect from you. Do you want to feel fully human, like someone who has finally learned how to live? Then stop saying 'I just did what you told me' and start saying 'You may or may not like it, but I've thought it through and this is what I feel is right."

True religion should not tell us "Obey! Adapt to the dictates! Cling to the past!" It should encourage us to grow, to dare, to make wrong choices at times, rather than repeatedly preventing us from using our own reason and understanding. For responsible, believing adults, God is not the authority telling them what to do. God is the divine force urging them to grow, to reach out, to dare.

When God speaks to such people, He does not say, as to a child, “I will watch you to make sure you don’t do anything wrong.” Rather, He says, “Go forth into an unknown world where you have never been before. Struggle to find your own way. But whatever happens, remember that I will always be with you.” Like a father who is genuinely proud when his children succeed completely on their own, so God is mature enough to find joy in our growth, not in our dependence on Him.

Genuine religion does not want obedient people. It wants real people, people with integrity, undivided, whole people. To live with integrity means to find out who you really are, and to be that person through and through. Religion does not expect us to be perfect. Not only is that impossible, but it will only cause us to become inevitable failures. If we were perfect, we could never grow or change, and we would have no need for religion.

Religion expects us to be whole in another sense, not flawlessness, but constant oneness, a symbol of unbroken steadfastness. The challenge that real religion should have for us is not to try to be perfect, but to get ourselves together, and to try to be our best selves at all times.

Religion should not be a nagging parent or a report card that keeps track of all our achievements and failures, grading us according to our achievements. It should be a purifying fire to help us get rid of everything that is not ourselves, everything that distorts, dilutes, or compromises, a comparison of the person we truly want to be, until only our authentic self remains.

What is a person of integrity? There is a Jewish word that is untranslatable that describes him perfectly, a mensch. To be a mensch means to be the kind of person God intended us to be, someone who is honest and trustworthy, wise enough not to be naive but not yet cynical, a person whose advice you can trust to be for your own benefit and not his. A Mensch does not act out of fear or a desire to make a good impression, but out of a burning inner conviction of what he is and what he stands for. A Mensch is not a saint or a perfect man, but someone from whom all falsehood, selfishness and vindictiveness have been burned away so that only the true self remains. A Mensch is fully human and is one with his God.

There is a quiet confidence about them, a sense of tranquility that comes when you have found out what you stand for and who you are. Not like anxious religious people who are consumed by their fear that they may have inadvertently broken some rule and offended God.

People of integrity focus on living up to their own high standards and do not worry about whether God approves of their actions or not. In their presence one always feels that their actions carry God’s approval.

Ecclesiastes turned to religion to make himself whole as a person, to help him live a life of lasting meaning. But because the religion of his day demanded obedience rather than authenticity, fear rather than awe, it could not make him whole. He expected more from God than to be “good” and obedient, and in the end he found what he sought because he did not stop seeking.

CONCLUSION

The journey through Kushner’s memories and theological shifts ultimately leads us to a profound redefinition of success and faith. Faith is not a shelter from the storms of life, and God is not a cosmic principal waiting for us to make mistakes. The ultimate goal of our existence is not perfection or blind, fearful obedience, but maturity. It is the journey of being made whole in the midst of an unpredictable world of pain and ecstasy.

Becoming a mensch - a person of authenticity and quiet inner peace - requires that we replace the fear of God with awe of life, and that we accept responsibility for our own moral compass. When the curtain one day falls on our lives and we step into the final darkness, it will not be our wealth or our slavish adherence to rules that remain. What will count is the integrity with which we have lived, the love we have freely given, and the knowledge that the world is a richer, more beautiful place because we were here. That is the only answer that is truly enough.