Part 3

Living a Life that Matters
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner

(Page 3 of 4)

I tried to tell him that the problem was his father's, not his, that his father was part of an older generation of men who had trouble knowing what they were feeling, let alone putting it into words. I reminded him that his father had grown up in the 1930s, during the hard years of the Depression, and had probably been forced by circumstance to grow a hard outer shell over his sensitive inner core, because sensitive, caring people were often left behind in those years. I prompted him to remember all the nonverbal ways in which his father had shown love and concern for him. But I don't know how much that helped. My congregant may be a permanent member of that army of men and women who will always feel a little bit incomplete because they never got the message of father love — I love you for what you have made of yourself — and will keep on working and struggling until someone they care about tells them that.

People need to hear the message that they are good. And people who are not entirely sure of their goodness may need that validation even more. That may be why churches and synagogues attract people who are bothered by the lapses in their behavior as husbands and wives, as parents, and as children of aging parents, and crave the reassurance that they are welcome in God's house. That may be why a wealthy businessman cherishes a twenty-five-dollar plaque given him by his church, synagogue, or lodge for being honored as Man of the Year. It may explain why we do things that don't benefit us economically but benefit us psychologically, giving charity, volunteering for good causes. We do them to nourish our self-image as generous, caring people. I have met many people who joined the local Rotary Club or Young Presidents Organization to make useful contacts, but stayed and became active because they came to enjoy the feeling of making their community a better place. And it may be why we make excuses for the things we do that embarrass us. How do most of us handle our mistakes? We blame others, we blame our upbringing, we rationalize what we did, in an effort to reassure ourselves of our essential goodness. (Our rationalizations do seem aimed at ourselves; they rarely persuade anyone else.) In his book Three Seductive Ideas, Dr. Jerome Kagan, professor of psychology at Harvard, writes, "The desire to believe that the self is ethically worthy . . . is universal." He points out that children as young as two years old evaluate their behavior in terms of right and wrong and need to think of themselves as good. Without that innate moral sense, Kagan believes, children could not be socialized.

We tend to assume that people who violate the law in a serious way — violent criminals, gang members, bank robbers — are immoral people, people who don't care about society's rules or what others think of them. But a psychologist friend of mine who has spent time working with prisoners in a federal penitentiary learned something different. He told me that when he started he assumed that he would be dealing with hardened criminals, people who were indifferent to moral obligations and considerations of right and wrong. To his surprise, he learned that prison inmates hold to a very strict moral code. It may not be our moral code; it may not be a moral code we would find admirable or even acceptable. But in the prison setting, there is behavior for which you gain approval (not ratting on associates) and there is behavior that sinks you to the bottom of the moral pecking order (imprisonment for hurting women or children). Similarly, gang members may appear to us as having total disregard for moral considerations and public opinion, but within the gang, they will risk injury and hardship to live up to its rules. Apparently, even people on the fringes of society (or well beyond the fringe) cannot bear to think of themselves as bad people. They will insist on their innocence, they will blame the circumstances of their growing up, or they will defend the morality of what they do. In Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather, Michael Corleone says of his father, Don Vito, "He operates on a code of ethics he considers far superior to the legal strictures of society."

We human beings are such complicated creatures. We have so many needs, so many emotional hungers, and they often come into conflict with each other. Our impulse to help needy people or support medical research conflicts with our desire to have the money to buy all the things we are attracted to. My commitment to doing the right thing impels me to want to apologize to people I have offended, but my desire to protect my image and nourish my sense of righteousness persuades me that the problem is their hypersensitivity, not my behavior. What happens when our need to think of ourselves as good people collides with our need to be recognized as important? Is it possible to do both? How often do we find ourselves betraying our values, violating our consciences, in our struggle to have an impact on the world? Political candidates compromise their values to raise funds and gain votes. Salesmen exaggerate the virtues of their wares. Doctors, lawyers, and businessmen neglect their families in the pursuit of professional and financial success. Often we don't like what we find ourselves doing (although it is remarkable how easily we get used to it after the first few times), but we tell ourselves we have no choice. That is the kind of world we live in, and that is the price we have to pay for claiming our space in it.

This may well be the central dilemma in the lives of many of us. We want — indeed, we need — to think of ourselves as good people, though from time to time we find ourselves doing things that make us doubt our goodness. We dream of leaving the world a better place for our having passed through it, though we often wonder whether, in our quest for significance, we litter the world with our mistakes more than we bless it with our accomplishments. Our souls are split, part of us reaching for goodness, part of us chasing fame and fortune and doing questionable things along the way, as we realize that those two paths may diverge sharply. Our self-image is like an out-of-focus photograph, two slightly blurred images instead of one clear one. Much of our lives, much of our energy will be devoted to closing that gap between the longings of our soul and the scoldings of our conscience, between our too-often conflicting needs for the assurance of knowing that we are good and the satisfaction of being told that we are important.

The people we find ourselves admiring most tend to be people who strike us as having closed that gap, having resolved that conflict. Many of the biographies we read, and especially the life story to which we will turn in the next chapter, are accounts of people struggling to reconcile those two longings, to be good and to matter. We examine their lives, not only to gain information but to gain insight as to how they managed to do that, in the hope that we too will be able to gain the two prizes for which our souls yearn.

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?