How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 6- Final thoughts

  [I started this blog series well over a year ago on Harold Kushner's How Good Do We Have to Be? and life got in the way and I never got a chance to finish reviewing the book. I recently recommended this book to other people which caused me to dig up this long unfinished post.]

In the last couple chapters Kushner explains that life after Eden wasn't a punishment at all but a gift to be cherished. We are conscious about our death and having that knowledge makes our days that much more beautiful, or at least it should but we allow guilt and fear to overtake our lives. How good do we really have to be? There is no bar we have to meet that any higher power requires of us. What we can do is forgive, love and accept our friends and family for who and what they are, human. We are going to make mistakes and holding the ones we love to unreasonably high expectations will only feed the damage caused by guilt and fear. It is hard to be humble and vulnerable but if we open ourselves to others and understand our shared suffering then we don't have to suffer alone. And by opening ourselves to others we allow love to flow freely between us.

Kushner closes with what he deems is the most important word in the Bible found in Genesis 17:1. Tamim, which is usually translated as perfect or blameless, can translate to mean something like whole-hearted. Kushner states that God, as a God of forgiveness, doesn't want us to be perfect but to strive for integrity. As fallible humans unable to go back to Eden (existence before eating from the Tree of Knowledge) we should strive to be true to the core of who we are and the goodness found within all of us. In the final chapter Kushner shares one of my favorite stories, The Missing Piece, by Shel Silverstein. Like the circle who is content with searching for its missing piece after finding and leaving it behind, Kushner suggests we are more whole when we are incomplete.

"The man who has everything is in some ways a poor man. He will never know what it feels to yearn, to hope, to nourish his soul with the dream of something better...There is a wholeness about  the person who has come to terms with his limitations, who knows who he is and what he can and cannot do, the person who has been brave enough to let go of his unrealistic dreams and not feel like a failure for doing so."

There is a wholeness in coming to terms with our humanity, with our fallibility. When we give up our search for perfection, accept ourselves and others for who we are, and strive to be our best selves, then we find there's plenty of love and forgiveness to go around.

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Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts

How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 5- Is there Enough Love for Everyone?

  [I started this blog series well over a year ago on Harold Kushner's How Good Do We Have to Be? and life got in the way and I never got a change to finish reviewing, let alone reading, the book. I recently recommended this book to other people which caused me to dig up this long unfinished post.]

"The Original sin that affects virtually every one of us and leads to other, worse sins is the belief that there is not enough love to go around, and therefore where someone else is loved, he or she is stealing that love from us." Harold Kushner

In chapter 6 Kushner moves on to a topic most people with siblings struggle with: sibling rivalry. I admit I fought daily with my sister (she's 2 years younger than me) over simple things like who got the last pudding cup, but I don't remember fighting over anything major like my parents' affection. My sister, however, saw it differently, she's mentioned many times how our parents loved me more than her and supported me and my endeavors. We're both in our mid to late 20's now so that resentment and rivalry has completely vanished and my sister and I are closer than we ever were. Kushner points out that the book of Genesis is a series of sibling rivalries as siblings with opposite qualities and personalities fight over their parents' affections. He also states that the Original Sin is not disobedience or lust but of hatred and resentment born out of our fear that we will not be loved enough. Kushner goes on to say that this is a fear so primal it follows us into adulthood and our pain and suffering resurfaces throughout our adult years.

As a parent of three I admit I am also guilty of subconsciously attributing certain roles to my children (e.g. good vs. problem child,  responsible vs. care free child). I believe I am more blind to these subconscious acts as the eldest who was given everything, the greatest amount of love (I don't personally believe I was given the most love I'm just illustrating how younger siblings might view the eldest). These roles given out by the parents causes all sorts of guilt and pain as the child come into adulthood. The eldest, as the responsible child, feels guilty if they ever let down their parents and resentment towards the younger for not also being able to lead a carefree life. The younger, as the carefree child, is allowed to make more mistakes but feels is not given enough love and attention as the eldest and is often negatively compared to the eldest ("why can't you be more like your big brother?" or "your big brother/sister has finished school and has a career, what have you done with your life?").

Even with all this sibling rivalry Genesis also demonstrates how we can overcome this original sin: by coming to terms with our feelings towards our siblings (and also friends, coworkers, etc.) and by understanding that love for one child doesn't negate or reduce the amount of love given to the others. Like Isaac and Ishmael coming together at their father's, Abraham's, grave and Joseph reunited with his brothers who sold him into slavery, we can outgrow the roles given to us in childhood and move past the primal fear of being unloved. That is the great thing about love there is plenty to go around, the only restrictions on love are the ones we impose on ourselves. This doesn't mean that suffering will disappear, it just means we don't have to go through it alone. We don't have to wander through life restlessly like Cain who murdered the only other person who understood what it was to fight for a parent's (i.e. God's) affection. We don't have to be alone, and in the end that's all we really want, to love and be loved.


Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts

How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 4- The Wholeness We Seek

 "Such a union (marriage), when it works can provide us with the most sublime feeling many of us will ever know, the sense of transcending our isolation in the world and finding a new sense of wholeness, a sense of having the empty places in our lives filled." Harold Kushner


How Good Do We Have to Be? continues to simultaneously break and heal my heart with every turn of the page. I find myself realizing how right he is every time he reveals how wrong we've been on how we view each other. Our individuality is both overwhelmingly awe-inspiring and dreadfully lonely, which is why we seek someone to complete and make us whole. Kushner starts the marriage chapter with an interesting twist on the Hebrew word commonly translated as "rib" during Eve's creation in the book of Genesis. The word tsela is more commonly translated as "side" which hints at a creation of an androgynous two-sided human paralleling myths found in Greek and Hindu sources. So when it states in Genesis 1:27 "male and female he created them" the text can be read to say that God originally made a two-sided human which he then split apart making them suitable mates for each other.  So when two people come together and feel that restored sense of unity they once again become the androgynous creature they once were at the time of Creation. I found that to be an interesting myth which perfectly describes the wholeness we discover when we find our partners.

The issue then becomes how we interact with our partner as this newly unified creature. We seek out a partner that completes us but this also means we each bring our flaws into this new union.We become so drunk on the experience (love) of being this new beautiful creature that we explain away/ ignore our partner's flaws in the beginning. But as we become accustomed in our new body those new flaws become more prominent. The illusion of the perfect mate begins to melt and we begin to question whether or not we chose the right mate for us. "Which is why", as Kushner beautifully sums up,"the essence of marital love is not romance but forgiveness."

We are immensely fallible creatures who are destined to screw things up. When we join with our partners as  this new creature we must open our whole selves to each other, which allows for a tremendous amount of love to flow in both directions. This also leaves us incredibly vulnerable to personal injury which is why trust and forgiveness is foundational to marriage. Kushner boils down our interactions with our mates (as well as neighbors) to two choices: we can choose to seek a life of righteousness or happiness. Kushner defines righteousness as remembering every time someone has hurt or let us down and never letting them forget it. It is the life of the eternal victim living in defense mode from the world. It is an alienating, lonely life trying to live by impossible standards of perfection. However, living a life of happiness embraces our imperfect humanity with a spirit of forgiveness. We come to terms with the fact that nobody is perfect and the foundation to a happy and fulfilling marriage lies in our ability to forgive our partner for simply being human. This spirit of forgiveness does not mean a battered wife must continue to suffer at the hands of an abusive husband, nor that either partner continue to lie to the other about extramarital affairs. I'll leave you with Kushner's definition of this spirit of forgiveness we should embrace when it comes to our most personal relationships.

"Forgiveness as the truest form of love means accepting without bitterness the flaws and imperfections of our partner, and praying that our partner accepts our flaws as well. Romantic love over-looks faults ('love is blind') in an effort to persuade ourselves that we deserve a perfect partner. Mature marital love sees faults clearly and forgives them, understanding that there are no perfect people, that we don't have to pretend perfection, and that an imperfect spouse is all that an imperfect person like us can aspire to."

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Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts

How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 3- The Cycle of Guilt

"The relationship between a parent and a child is the most complicated one a person will ever have, even more than between wife and husband." -Rabbi Harold Kushner

Chapter 4 entitled, "Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters" was so moving and struck such a tremendous chord with me that I read it twice. Kushner delicately describes our roles as children and parents and what everyone involved needs from each other. Both parents and children yearn for the other to admire and love them unconditionally, yet children need our protection and acceptance. Children can only hurt and embarrass their parents to a limited degree, yet parents can inflict untold damage which may cause a chain reaction affecting all relationships in the child's future.

"We harm them them not only with physical and emotional violence. We harm them with unrealistic expectations. (A colleague of mine says that 'being disappointed' is a uniquely middle-class form of child abuse.) And we harm them by not modeling an adult lifestyle for them, an approach that includes a willingness to make and admit mistakes and learn from them rather than always insisting that we are right. Children need to admire their parents. And one of the things we should teach our children to admire about us is our willingness to say, 'I'm sorry,' 'I was wrong about that,' 'I don't know.'I can remember times I had to tell my children that I had been wrong about something, how fearful I was that they would lose respect for me because of that admission, and how astonished I was to find that they love me all the more for being willing to say that. They needed to hear that from me. They needed to be assured of my integrity more than of my perfection." -Ch. 4, "Fathers and Sons, Mothers and Daughters"

If there is only one chapter you read from this book make it this one (I say that now although I have yet to finish the book. I'm a slow reader.) I used to question why parents in general mistreat their children the way they do as I've witnessed in public settings, to me it would make sense to avoid any action which may hurt the child physically, emotionally, and psychologically. That was of course before I had children of my own. Now that I'm a parent I catch myself treating my children the same way I was treated. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't abused in any way nor do I abuse my children, but I have found myself making the same minor, although crucial, mistakes my parents made. I hold them to higher expectations than I should, being disappointed in them when they fail. I put too much pressure on them to succeed while forgetting that they're children (in fact they're not even in pre-school yet).

So what can we do to stop the generational cycle of guilt? We should begin by acknowledging to our children and to ourselves that we are broken and fallible creatures. Admitting that we, as protector and guide to our children, can and will make mistakes shows our children that even though we are surrounded by imperfection we are capable of learning from our mistakes. We can overcome them and not be defined by and bound to them. We have to allow our children space to grow into the beautiful living creatures they are, to grow into their humanity. Unfortunately this means they can, will, and must make their own mistakes. As a parent we want to stop them from experiencing any pain whatsoever. We want to shield them from the suffering we endured while we were young. But shielding them from pain also shields them from beauty, from truly living out the human experience. We so desperately want to carve out the perfect life for them but doing so we weaken them by building up a false reality, a reality of high expectations and unattainable images of perfection. We must allow them to live their lives and not hijack their dreams with our own. Sure, we may not have been the ball player we always wanted to become but we shouldn't force our children to take up a sport they have no interest in or push them to unrealistic levels of success. They must always know we will love them even if they make mistakes, but this can only be done if we break through the illusionary world of perfection by admitting our own faults and failures. This takes guts, guts that I wish I had at times. I know that my relationship with my children is affected by my history with my parents, and this is the same for most (if not all) of us. I yearn for their continuous love and affection as much as my children yearn for mine. So why not give it to them? Why deny them the love they need to grow and become parents themselves.

"When we liberate ourselves from the myth that God will love us only if we are perfect, then we will no longer feel that we need to be parents of perfect children to be admired, or children of perfect parents to survive and succeed."

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Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts

How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 2- Guilt and Shame

Does God really expect perfection from a fallible creation? And if God doesn't expect perfection why do we collectively strive for it? Even though it's irrational we all feel as if we're expected to achieve perfection and as a result we expect it from others. In chapter 3 of How Good Do We Have to Be? Kushner tackles the issue of guilt and shame, two words which is commonly used interchangeably for feeling bad about ourselves. But why do we place so much pressure on ourselves? Why is perfection necessary in an imperfect world? And what can we do to relieve the immense pressure of perfection?

Rabbi Kushner on guilt and shame.

"Psychologist and anthropologists see them as different emotions. Basically they see guilt as feeling bad for what you have done or not done, while shame is feeling bad for who you are, measured against some standard of perfection or acceptability. The distinction is crucial, because we can atone for the things we have done more easily than we can change who we are."

Taken to the extreme, guilt and shame sucks the marrow out of life, they are not completely useless emotions but are necessary in our evolutionary growth as complex social creatures. So how do we cure shame and guilt which is commonplace in our daily lives? Kushner suggests that religion should have been the cure and not the cause as it has been steered by religious spokesman. Religion was meant to connect one to the other and all to the Divine. From my personal experience as a churchgoer, I've heard 10 sermons guilting the congregation to repent for every 1 sermon on the immense unconditional love of God. It seems to me that if the Church, or any other religious community, is to be a place of healing and mending of broken hearts it should contain less damnation and more acceptance. Kushner shares his accounts of everyday people approaching him after public talks and interviews who pull him aside to tell him of their religious experiences which often happen outside the sanctuary and within support groups like AA, which offer shared weakness instead of shared strength. These support groups are made of equally broken and suffering people who support and trust one another because they understand and recognized our shared fallibility, our shared brokenness which is intrinsic to being human. To embrace our humanity is to embrace our brokenness, our inevitability to make mistakes. One of my favorite lines which summarizes God's transcendent love for mankind reads, "God condemns the sin but loves the person who did it too much to brand him a sinner".

We should feel guilty for some things, but only for things we have control over anything else would be needless self-punishment. Our irrational guilt really comes from the feeling that we have more influence than we really do over people and events. We can no more control the weather than we can stop someone from committing suicide. Oh, we can try, but someone bent on committing suicide will find a way to do it regardless of whatever we say or do. The best we can do is let them know they are truly loved for who they are, and if their suicidal thoughts are based on feelings of being unloved hopefully our words may do some good.

The chapter wrapped up rather oddly, or at least I failed to understand his closing statements (I am human, you know). Kushner ends chapter 3 with a remedy for irrational guilt: counterbalance it with an random act of compassion and kindness. Maybe I'm thinking too hard or maybe I don't understand it because it's an irrational act, it's not suppose to make sense! Maybe an intentional random act of thoughtfulness and charity is suppose to help us realize our irrational emotions. Of course religion may not be for everyone, but Kushner states that religion done right should alleviate guilt not increase it. The irrational rituals of religion should reacquaint us with our better nature, helping us to realize that sometimes we can do bad things (and own up to them) but we are also capable of much good. We should walk away with feelings of forgiveness not just from our fellow man and God, but from ourselves.

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Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts

How Good Do We Have to Be? Part 1- A Story of Emergence

I've recently dusted off and began reading Harold Kushner's enlightening book, How Good do We Have to Be?, and so far I'm enthralled by it. In this book Rabbi Kushner addresses the issues of guilt and forgiveness before a compassionate, and understanding God.
Everyone knows the story: Adam and Eve, the parents of mankind, made one fatal mistake and we continue to pay the price for it. The story is often interpreted as detailing the origin of our Fall from Paradise and ever since then the divine has been harder and harder to reach. As you read along through the Old Testament, God distances himself further and further away from mankind as we struggle to hold onto that relationship. The writers of the New Testament wrote their books of the One who bridged God and man together again both by his actions and his being, Jesus Christ. As the followers of The Way began to flourish the early Christian community looked back into the scriptures for prophecies of Jesus and introduced a new creative spirituality to the world, Christianity. These are the lens in which the concept of Original Sin and the nature of Man are understood within mainstream Christianity. Kushner introduces the reader to questions which puts our previous interpretation of the Eden story under a microscope, not to tear it apart but because the old interpretation leads to too much guilt and an unreasonable quest for perfection.

"Isn't this a harsh punishment for one small mistake-- pain and death, banishment from Paradise, for breaking one rule? Is God really that strict?...And perhaps the most troubling of all, if the forbidden tree was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, does that imply that Adam and his mate had no knowledge of good and evil before they ate it? If so, how could they have been expected to know that it was wrong to disobey God? And why were they punished if they had no sense of good and evil before they ate it?" -How Good do We Have to Be, Chapter 2.

You may interpret and read the story as a historical retelling of literal events but I believe the questions should still be asked regardless of our beliefs. Atheist point to this story as an example that the God of the Bible is a petty, strict, and all around unloving God who does not deserve worship. Christians point to this story as proof that the gulf between Man and God is our fault and we deserve death for our sinfulness, for making that one fatal mistake. So how do we interpret this in the 21st century without falling into the trap of eisegesis? What does a 21st century listener get from these old tales? Rabbi Kushner reinterprets the Genesis story of not one of guilt, sin, and punishment but a tale describing our journey of evolution out of our animal life,

"It is the story of the first human being graduating, evolving from the relatively uncomplicated world of animal life to the immensely complicated world of being human and knowing that there is more to life than eating and mating, that there are such things as Good and Evil. They enter a world where they will inevitably make many mistakes, not because they are weak or bad but because the choices they confront will be such difficult ones...The story of the Garden of Eden is not a story of the Fall of Man, but of the Emergence of Humankind." [Ch. 2]

I doubt that the writers of Genesis knew about evolution (the sun did revolve around the Earth back then) but were at least aware of our differences between human and animal existence. Our lives are much more complex than theirs with the flexibility to commit acts of Good and Evil. The God of Vengeance no longer speaks to us in the 21st century not because we have outgrown the divine but because the vengeance, which took the form of natural disasters and illness no longer spooks mankind. We have studied the mechanics of the universe, the divine vengeance portrayed in the Bible is no more than mankind's limited understanding of nature in an age when everything was attributed to the gods. The curtain has been pulled back, and the Wizard has been revealed. Mankind understands now that things just happen, and God may not have the power to stop it. But as Rabbi Kushner expresses in his incredible book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, God may not have the power to stop it but he will sit with you through the darkest of storms.

God's decree of work, parenthood, and our sense of morality is exactly what separates us from the animals, what makes us human. Kushner points out that God gave mankind a cautionary warning about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as if saying "it will hurt to know Evil, but what joy it is to know Good." Is Rabbi Kushner's creative interpretation worth retelling? Does it speak to you, and if so what is it saying? How would history have turned out if we began with an interpretation of emergence instead of an interpretation of guilt, or was this interpretation only possible with the emergence of the enlightenment and our knowledge of the cosmos?

The second chapter ends with a beautiful retelling of Genesis as to how the story might have ended if Adam and Eve chose to remain in Paradise (i.e. living an animal life).

HOW THE STORY MIGHT HAVE ENDED

So the woman saw that the tree was good to eat and a delight to the eye, and the serpent said to her, “Eat of it, for when you eat of it, you will be as wise as God.” But the woman said, “No, God has commanded us not to eat of it, and I will not disobey God.”
And God called to the man and the woman and said to them, “Because you have hearkened to My word and not disobeyed My command, I shall reward you greatly.” To the man, He said, “You will never have to work again. Spend all your days in idle contentment, with food growing all around you.” To the woman, He said, “You will bear children without pain and you will raise them without pain. They will need nothing from you. Children will not cry when their parents die, and parents will not cry when their children die.” To both of them he said, “For the rest of your lives, you will have full bellies and contented smiles. You will never cry and you will never laugh. You will never long for something you don’t have, and you will never receive something you always wanted.” And the man and the woman grew old together in the garden, eating daily from the Tree of Life and having many children. And the grass grew high around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil until it disappeared from view, for there was no one to tend it.

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Part 1: A Story of Emergence
Part 2: Guilt and Shame
Part 3: The Cycle of Guilt
Part 4: The Wholeness We Seek
Part 5: Is There Enough Love for Everyone
Part 6: Final Thoughts