Resolving the Conflict Between Conscience and Success

Living a Life that Matters
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

From the celebrated author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a profound and practical book about doing well by doing good.

For decades now, from the pulpit and through his writing, Harold Kushner has been helping people navigate the rough patches of life: loss, guilt, crises of faith. Now, in this compelling new work, he ad-dresses an equally important issue: our craving for significance, the need to know that our lives and our choices mean something. We sometimes do great things, and sometimes terrible things, to reassure ourselves that we matter to the world. We sometimes confuse fame, power, and wealth with true achievement. But finally we need to think of ourselves as good people, and we are troubled when we compromise our integrity in the pursuit of what we think of as success.

Harold Kushner tells us that the path to a truly successful and significant life is through friendship, through family, and through acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. He describes how, in affecting the life of even one person in a positive way, we make a difference in the world, and prove that we do in fact matter.

Persuasive and sympathetic, anecdotal and commonsensical, Living a Life That Matters inspires and uplifts.

Chapter 1

The Two Voices of God Like many people, I live in two worlds. Much of the time, I live in the world of work and commerce, eating, working, and paying my bills. It is a world that honors people for being attractive and productive. It reveres winners and scorns losers, as reflected in its treatment of devoted public servants who lose an election or in the billboard displayed at the Atlanta Olympic Games a few years ago: "You don't win the silver medal, you lose the gold." As in most contests, there are many more losers than winners, so most of the citizens of that world spend a lot of time worrying that they don't measure up.

But, fortunately, there is another world where, even before I entered it professionally, I have spent some of my time. As a religiously committed person, I live in the world of faith, the world of the spirit. Its heroes are models of compassion rather than competition. In that world, you win through sacrifice and self-restraint. You win by helping your neighbor and sharing with him rather than by finding his weakness and defeating him. And in the world of the spirit, there are many more winners than losers.

When I was young, most of my time and energy were devoted to the world of getting and spending. I relished competition. I wanted to be challenged. How else could I find out how good I was, where I stood on the ladder of winners and losers? I was living out the insight of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung that "act one of a young man's life is the story of his setting out to conquer the world."

Of course, I was not the only person who did that. Most people lived as I did. For several years, our next-door neighbor's son was a nationally renowned professional athlete. It wasn't money that kept him playing and risking serious injury. It was the challenge, the competition, the opportunity to prove once again that he was better than most people at what he did.

When I was young, I saw that second world, the world of faith, as a kind of vacation home, a place to which I repaired in order to relax from the stress of the world of striving, so that I could emerge refreshed to resume the battle. At times, it seemed almost a mirror image of my first world, a place where different people played by different rules. Old people were respected there for their wisdom and experience, as were old ideas and old values. People were described as "beautiful" because they exuded compassion and generosity rather than wealth and glamour. "Success" had a very different meaning there.

As my life increasingly became a story of giving up dreams and coming to terms with my limitations (Jung went on to say, "Act two is the story of a young man realizing that the world is not about to be conquered by the likes of him"), I found myself returning more and more to that second, alternative world. I would often recall the words of my teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel: "When I was young, I admired clever people. As I grew old, I came to admire kind people."

Looking back at my life, I realize that I was commuting between those two worlds in an effort to meet two basic human needs, the need to feel successful and important and the need to think of myself as a good person, someone who deserved the approval of other good people.

We need to know that we matter to the world, that the world takes us seriously. I read a memoir recently in which a woman recalls staying home from school one day as a child because she was sick. Hearing the noises of the world outside her window, she was dismayed to realize that the world was going on without her, not even missing her. The woman grew up to be devoutly religious, a pillar of her church, active in many organizations, picketing abortion clinics, feeding the hungry. As I read her story, I wondered if she became an activist to overcome that childhood fear of insignificance, to reassure herself that she did make a difference to the world.

In my forty years as a rabbi, I have tended to many people in the last moments of their lives. Most of them were not afraid of dying. Some were old and felt that they had lived long, satisfying lives. Others were so sick and in such pain that only death would release them. The people who had the most trouble with death were those who felt that they had never done anything worthwhile in their lives, and if God would only give them another two or three years, maybe they would finally get it right. It was not death that frightened them; it was insignificance, the fear that they would die and leave no mark on the world.

The need to feel important drives people to place enormous value on such symbols as titles, corner offices, and first-class travel. It causes us to feel excessively pleased when someone important recognizes us, and to feel hurt when our doctor or pastor passes us on the street without saying hello, or when a neighbor calls us by our sister's or brother's name. The need to know that we are making a difference motivates doctors and medical researchers to spend hours looking through microscopes in the hope of finding cures for diseases. It drives inventors and entrepreneurs to stay up nights trying to find a better way of providing people with something they need. It causes artists, novelists, and composers to try to add to the store of beauty in the world by finding just the right color, the right word, the right note. And it leads ordinary people to buy six copies of the local paper because it has their name or picture in it.

Because we find ourselves in so many settings that proclaim our insignificance — in stores where salespeople don't know our name and don't care to know it, in crowded buses and airplanes that give us the message that if we weren't there someone else would be available to take our place — some people do desperate things to reassure themselves that they matter to the world. I can believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy and that John Hinckley, Jr., tried to kill President Reagan in large measure to prove that the world was wrong in not taking them seriously. They had the power to change history. At a less crucial level, there are people who confuse notoriety with celebrity, and celebrity with importance. They go to extreme lengths to get their names in the Guinness Book of Records, or to appear on daytime television shows, revealing things about themselves and their families that most of us would be embarrassed to reveal to our clergyman or our closest friends. They may come across as pitiable; the audience may scorn them. But for one hour their story holds the attention of millions of Americans. They matter.

Copyright © 2001 by Harold S. Kushner. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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?