…His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: "It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
"I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God 'sends' illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
"'What did I do to deserve this?' is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, 'If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?'"
He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. "And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless," he wrote, "because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God's goodness."
Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner's thesis more dialectically: "diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.
"In effect," he wrote, "we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up."
Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love…
Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, Reassuring Best-Selling Author, Dies at 88
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