Quotes from Harold S. Kushner

What can we do, and what role, if any, can religion play in helping us? I would reiterate two important points: (1) The purpose of religion is not to explain God or to please God, but to help us meet some of our most basic human needs. (2) Religion helps us not by changing the facts, but by teaching us new ways of looking at those facts.

That insight, that God is to be found not in the crisis but in our response to the crisis, is the key to understanding one of the most important passages in the entire Bible.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.

When he thought he was doing something that made a difference to people, he could bear any burden [Moses]. When he lost that sense of achievement, he became too discouraged to keep on doing the hard things.

Typically, if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person's life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one's shelves

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.)

If a person has known love, has felt and given love, that person's life has made a difference.

God does not send the problem, the illness, the accident, the hurricane, and God does not take them away when we find the right words and rituals with which to beseech Him. Rather, God sends us strength and determination of which we did not believe ourselves capable, so that we can deal with, or live with, problems that no one can make go away.

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.

My position would be to see Jesus and Paul as people used by God to bring the monotheism and the moral message of Judaism to the world, and to teach the world that the God discovered and worshiped by the Jews was the only true God.

observant but not compulsive" and the absence of a belief in a God who would punish us for disobedience would go on to become cornerstones of my personal and professional life.

In that way, we Jews can see Christianity as God's chosen instrument for redeeming the world from paganism, and Christians can recognize their obligation to preach the message of Christianity to the world, but not to the Jewish people, who had that message before they did.