BOOK REVIEW by Dan Haarer

Harold S. Kushner, OVERCOMING LIFE’S DISAPPOINTMENTS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 174 pp.

Have you ever experienced any significant disappointments in life? If not yet, it is inevitable. Disappointments will happen. They are part of life. What do you do when your dreams don’t come to pass, or they break?

In this book Rabbi Kushner, probably best known to most of us for When Bad Things Happen to Good People, uses the example of Moses to illustrate some ways of handling disappointments and broken dreams. Moses, the great leader and prototypical prophet of God’s people, experienced many frustrations and difficulties in leading God’s people, and near the end of life learned he would not be able to enter the Promised Land. Even though we will not likely aspire to or expect to be another Moses, what can we learn from his life that will help us cope, to carry on with faith and meaning, and to hear God’s voice rather than succumb with bitterness or depression?

Rabbi Kushner, wise pastor and counselor, reviews significant events of Moses’ life, from his early beginnings; his mountaintop conversations with God; the crushing betrayal of his people, symbolized by the broken tablets of stone which then required being refashioned; the ongoing saga with the people; and ending with his final mountaintop view, gazing into the land of promise and the future for his people. Rather than a theological discussion, the author searches for the human and symbolic meanings that can help us with our own struggles.

Some of the lessons this author reflects on include Moses’ perseverance, loyalty, keeping promises, humility, nurturing the ability to forgive, and being able to look back with thanks and gratitude rather than bitterness. He suggests we learn more from Moses’ failures than his successes. Like Moses, we should not let failures define us or keep us from dreaming, but we also need to free ourselves from the “tyranny of the dream.” Life will not always seem fair, but there are still possibilities and compensations. In the overall perspective of life most disappointments may be trivial. And what if we never make it to our “promised land”? How get over our angers? He suggests a delicate balance of remembering and forgetting. There are some keys to contentment in life. We will not be able to control what all happens to us but we do have the power to choose how to respond.

This book is well written, easy to understand and flows well. There are many life illustrations. Rabbi Kushner points especially to marriage, family, children and work where people may have dreams and which can easily be broken. If we have any such broken dreams we are not alone. One of the major things missing with Moses appears to be his family life.

This book can be helpful for any stage of life. It will perhaps be most poignant for those coping in the midst of a broken dream and for those in later life, perhaps having suffered or carried broken dreams, to be able after all, to contentedly finish well.