Gleanings (5) Rabbi Kushner, ‘Was there something I was supposed to do with my life?’

After his immensely helpful book When bad things happen to good people, Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote another equally insightful book, which in many ways is more challenging still: When all you’ve ever wanted isn’t enough: the search for a life that matters. (Pan books, 1986.) It is a wonderful book, from which I have often quoted the following story.

In a chapter entitled ‘Was there something I was supposed to do with my life?’, Kushner recounts the story of a deeply troubled man who asked to meet with him: The man explained that a work colleague had died suddenly, just two weeks earlier. The colleague had already been replaced, and his wife and family had moved inter-state already.

The man reflected: ‘It’s as if he never existed. It’s like a rock falling into a pool of water. For a few seconds, it makes ripples in the water, and then the water is the same as it was before, but the rock isn’t there anymore. Rabbi, I’ve hardly slept at all since then. I can’t stop thinking that it could happen to me, that one day it will happen to me, and a few days later I will be forgotten as if I had never lived. Shouldn’t a man’s life be more than that?’ (p.20)

Rabbi Kushner wrote this book soon after the death of his own father and at the time he turned 50 years of age. Kushner explores themes from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, which asks whether indeed all of life is ‘vanity’ or eventually without consequence. What is it, if anything, that gives our lives meaning and may also provide us with consolation as we approach its inevitable end?

I think the most challenging insight of this book is his assertion that most people are not in fact afraid of death: we are afraid of never having lived. The great challenge of life is to learn from our mortality to live.

As he reflected upon his own phase of life, Kushner observes, following the 23rd Psalm, that God does not save us from dying:

God does not redeem us from death. We will all die one day. But He redeems us from the shadow of death, from letting our lives be paralyzed by the fear of death. He helps us prevent death from casting its shadow over the years we do have to live. (p. 161)

Then follows this truly lovely parable:

I was sitting on a beach one summer day, watching two children, a boy and a girl, playing in the sand. They were hard at work building an elaborate sand castle by the water’s edge, with gates and towers and moats and internal passages. Just when they had nearly finished their project, a big wave came along and knocked it down, reducing it to a heap of wet sand. I expected the children to burst into tears, devastated by what had happened to all their hard work. Instead, they ran up the shore away from the water, laughing and holding hands, and sat down to build another castle. I realized that they had taught me an important lesson. All the things in our lives, all the complicated structures we spend so much time and energy creating, are built on sand. Only our relationships to other people endure. (pp. 165-166.)

Kushner returns to his question: Was there something I was supposed to do with my life? He cites the wisdom of the Talmud, three things one should do in the course of one’s life: have a child, plant a tree, write a book. These are not literally for everyone, but represent investment or contributions in creative ways. Earlier (p.162). he offers his own triad, from the book of Ecclesiastes:

Belong to people; 
Accept pain as part of your life;
Know that you have made a difference.

What, then, should we hope for, to do with our lives? The challenge is not to strive for some superhuman achievement, but rather to find in the everyday ordinariness of life ‘something truly human to do with our lives’. We need not search for it: it is right there in front of us in the relationships of women and men with whom we live. The operative term is live.