The Man Who Dared to Dream

Overcoming Life's Disappointments
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

From Harold S. Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a book that shows us how to be our best selves even when things don't turn out as we had hoped - that is, how we can overcome life's disappointments.

Kushner turns to the experience of Moses to find the requisite lessons of strength and faith. Moses towers over all others in the Old Testament: he is the man on the mountaintop to whom God speaks with unparalleled intimacy, and he leads his people out of bondage. But he is also deeply human, someone whose soaring triumphs are offset by frustration and longing: his people ignore his teachings, he is denied entrance to the Promised Land, his family suffers. But he overcomes.

From the life of Moses, Kushner gleans principles that can help us deal with the problems we encounter. Through the example of Moses' remarkable resilience, we learn how to weather the disillusionment of dreams unfulfilled, the pain of a lost job or promotion, a child's failures, divorce or abandonment, and illness. We learn how to meet all disappointments with faith in ourselves and the future, and how to respond to heartbreak with understanding rather than bitterness and despair.

This is a book of spiritual wisdom - as practical as it is inspiring.

Chapter 1

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Langston Hughes, "Harlem"

In these lines, the poet Langston Hughes wonders what happens to dreams that don't come true. I wonder what happens to the dreamer. How do people cope with the realization that important dimensions of their lives will not turn out as they hoped they would? A person's marriage isn't all he or she anticipated. Someone doesn't get the promotion or the recognition he had set his heart on. Many of us look at the world and see two groups of people, winners and losers: those who get what they want out of life and those who don't. But in reality life is more complicated than that. Nobody gets everything he or she yearns for. I look at the world and see three sorts of people: those who dream boldly even as they realize that a lot of their dreams will not come true; those who dream more modestly and fear that even their modest dreams may not be realized; and those who are afraid to dream at all, lest they be disappointed. I would wish for more people who dreamed boldly and trusted their powers of resilience to see them through the inevitable disappointments.

History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win. Most biographies, excluding works of pure scholarship, are meant to inspire as much as to inform, so they focus on a person's successes. But in real life, even the most successful people see some of their efforts fail and even the greatest of people learn to deal with failure, rejection, bereavement, and serious illness.

The lessons of this book will come in large part from examining the life of one of the most influential people who ever lived, Moses, the hero of the Bible, the man who brought God's word down to earth from the mountaintop. When we think of Moses, we think of his triumphs: leading the Israelites out of slavery, splitting the Red Sea, ascending Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the law. But Moses was a man who knew frustration and failure in his public and personal life at least as often and as deeply as he knew fulfillment, and we, whose lives are also a mix of fulfillment and disappointment, can learn from his experiences. If he could overcome his monumental disappointments, we can learn to overcome ours.

What can we learn from Moses' story to help my congregant who is overlooked for a promotion or the elderly man or woman whose children and grandchildren ignore him or her? What can I learn from Moses to share with all the wives and husbands who find it hard to feel affectionate toward a mate who takes them for granted? Let us turn to the story of Moses, the man who dared to dream, to see what lessons it reveals.

Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel has written in Messengers of God that Moses was "the most solitary and the most powerful hero in biblical history . . . the man who changed the course of history by himself. After him, nothing was the same again." He goes on: "His passion for social justice, his struggle for national liberation, his triumphs and disappointments, his poetic inspiration, his gifts as a strategist and his organizational genius, his complex relationship with God and God's people . . . his efforts to reconcile the law with compassion, authority with integrity - no individual ever, anywhere accomplished so much for so many people in so many domains. His influence is boundless." The teachings of Jesus and Paul in the New Testament would be unintelligible unless read against the background of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. The revelation to Muhammad at the inception of Islam assumes that the earlier revelation to Moses contained the authentic words of God. Even such secular prophets as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud drew their passion for justice and freedom from the life and teachings of Moses.

We may think that we know about Moses, if not from Sunday school classes, then perhaps from one of the movies about his life. If we do, chances are that we relegate that knowledge to the dusty corner of our consciousness reserved for old Sunday school lessons, entertaining and probably edifying but not that relevant to our daily lives. But let me give you a fuller view of him, not only the man on the mountaintop, the man to whom God spoke with unparalleled intimacy, but Moses the human being, a man whose soaring triumphs were offset by crushing defeats in some of the things that mattered most to him, a man who came to realize the price his family paid for his successes. In the end, I trust we will still see him as a hero to admire and learn from, maybe even more heroic when the all-too-human qualities of longing, frustration, regret, and resiliency have been added to the portrait. Let me review his story, as told in the book of Exodus and the narrative portions of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

Jacob, the third of the biblical patriarchs, son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham, moved his large family from Canaan to Egypt during one of the droughts that often afflicted that part of the world. There they were welcomed warmly in a country where Jacob's son Joseph, by a series of fortuitous events, had become an important government official and had arranged for Egypt to be the only country with abundant food during hard times. The clan of Israel (as Jacob was sometimes called) settled there and flourished.

A generation or two later, "there arose a new king in Egypt who knew not Joseph" (Exodus 1:8). The reference may be to a native Egyptian Pharaoh who resented the prominence of some of the non-Egyptians in his kingdom. He may have seen them as a threat to his rule and reduced them to slavery, setting them to the task of building the royal fortifications and storehouses.

Copyright © 2006 by Harold S. Kushner.

About the Author

Harold S. Kushner is Rabbi Laureate of Temple Israel in Natick, Massachusetts, where he lives. His books include When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Who Needs God, and How Good Do We Have to Be?