THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610280196
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BARBARA MCADEN BETTS
LENGTH: 62 lines
HOW GOOD DO WE HAVE TO BE?
A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness
HAROLD S. KUSHNER
Little, Brown. 181 pp. $21.95.
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, who gave wounded people the courage to endure through the dark night of the soul in his best-selling When Bad Things Happen to Good People, offers the route to life-affirming joy in his new book, How Good Do We Have to Be?: A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness.
Kushner refutes the image of a score-keeping God who awaits the chance to punish those who try but miss the mark.
The message of his book is ``God does not stop loving us every time we do something wrong, and neither should we stop loving ourselves and each other for being less than perfect.''
Writing for people of all faiths, the man who was a congregational rabbi for 30 years insists ``that the essential message of religion is a liberating message, not a restricting or punitive one. I believe that the fundamental message of religion is not that we are sinners because we are not perfect, but that the challenge of being human is so complex that God knows better than to expect perfection from us.
``Religion comes to wash us clean of our sense of unworthiness and to assure us that when we have tried to be good and have not been as good as we wanted to be, we have not forfeited God's love.''
With that liberation, childhood memories of inadequacies, parental disappointment (real or perceived) and guilt from failures lose their power to shackle adult lives.
The liberation empowers us to love our imperfect selves - and others.
Otherwise, the knowledge that we can - and do - fail can tempt us to give up.
``Should we ever conclude that there is no point in trying to be good because we can never be good enough, that is when we lose everything,'' Kushner warns. ``Being human can never mean being perfect, but it should always mean being as good as we can and never letting our failures be a reason for giving up the struggle.''
With his characteristic compassion and warmth, Kushner writes ``Religion is the voice that says, I will guide you through this minefield of difficult moral choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, and I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.''
Kushner offers a new and radical interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve in his book. He sees the story as Paradise Outgrown instead of Paradise Lost. When eating from the tree of knowledge results in the need for work, the pain of children and the awareness of mortality, Kushner defines these as blessings, not punishment, as part of of being human.
As readers of Kushner's earlier books know, the death of his beloved 14-year-old son made the rabbi a hurting part of all humanity.
But then and now, he keeps an affirmative view of life - and a loving relationship with his God. And he believes in the essential decency of the human race. MEMO: Barbara McAden Betts is special sections editor of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB