Rating: 
Summary: exercises in life
Review: A very good essay about life. A book that does not explain why things happen but ackowledges that for the most part, there is no logical explanation. I came away with the following: 'GOD HELPS THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES'
Rating:
Summary: A must read when searching for God after a loss.
Review: After the recent loss of my infant daughter, I was searching for answers and trying hard to stay connected to God and continue to believe in Him. Being faced with the death of an otherwise perfectly healthy baby it was very difficult to believe that 1. God is a good, loving God.
2. God is a just/fair God.
3. God controls everything. How could God be fair and good when he would take the life of an innocent child? Why, if God controls everything, and is good, would he not spare this precious life? Why, if God is fair, would he "punish" this little girl with months of pain and suffering before her ultimate death? For anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one, particularly a child, this is a powerful book. Rabbit Kushner has addressed these painful questions with clarity and love for God. He uses the bible to back up his analysis and tells his story in a manner that everyone can understand. He also speaks to the horrible things that so many people, who think they are helping, say to those who have lost a loved one. What matters is not so much if one agrees with Rabbi Kushner's analysis, it matters that he puts forth a way to stay close to God while working through your grief. At this time, I choose to agree with Rabbi Kushner's analysis. For all those who wish to tell me it is incorrect, I know they do not have my best interest at heart. Staying close and connected to God and not turning from him must be my goal. If I cannot at this time reconcile what I thought to be true with my reality, and it causes me to turn away from God or question God, nothing else matters. Anything that can help me continue love and give praise to God while I continue to work through my grief is valuable. I commend Rabbi Kushner and consider this book a must read for anyone who has suffered a loss.
Rating:
Summary: A must read when searching for God after a loss.
Review: After the recent loss of my infant daughter, I was searching for answers and trying hard to stay connected to God and continue to believe in Him. Being faced with the death of an otherwise perfectly healthy baby it was very difficult to believe that 1. God is a good, loving God.
2. God is a just/fair God.
3. God controls everything. How could God be fair and good when he would take the life of an innocent child? Why, if God controls everything, and is good, would he not spare this precious life? Why, if God is fair, would he "punish" this little girl with months of pain and suffering before her ultimate death? For anyone who has experienced the loss of a loved one, particularly a child, this is a powerful book. Rabbit Kushner has addressed these painful questions with clarity and love for God. He uses the bible to back up his analysis and tells his story in a manner that everyone can understand. He also speaks to the horrible things that so many people, who think they are helping, say to those who have lost a loved one. What matters is not so much if one agrees with Rabbi Kushner's analysis, it matters that he puts forth a way to stay close to God while working through your grief. At this time, I choose to agree with Rabbi Kushner's analysis. For all those who wish to tell me it is incorrect, I know they do not have my best interest at heart. Staying close and connected to God and not turning from him must be my goal. If I cannot at this time reconcile what I thought to be true with my reality, and it causes me to turn away from God or question God, nothing else matters. Anything that can help me continue love and give praise to God while I continue to work through my grief is valuable. I commend Rabbi Kushner and consider this book a must read for anyone who has suffered a loss.
Rating: 
Summary: "There are better choices to understand the mind of God..."
Review: Dr. Kushner was well-intentioned in his authorship of this book to be sure. However, his basic conclusion is that God is either all-powerful or all-loving. Since bad things happen, God isn't all powerful. The theology is faulty. As Christ was fully God, and still fully human, so God can be loving and powerful without losing either attribute. God's power never works outside His perfect will, and sometimes that will permits evil. A much better book on endurance through adversity is "With Joseph in the University of Adversity". This book will answer most questions Kushner poses from a much more conservative and scriptural point of view.
Rating:
Summary: Elegant in its simplicity
Review: Elegant in its simplicity, this book will provide comfort and a sense of hope in the face of loss. Rabbi Kushner works through examples from personal experiences, including the illness and death of his son, to help develop an understanding of how we can live with the fact that bad things happen to good people. This book helped widden my understanding of prayer, relationship to community, and how God and religion can play a crucial role in the healing process. The author helped me to understand how I can pray so that the good in me lives on, even in the face of inevitable loss that is a part of life.
Rating:
Summary: Good People Turn to be Better humans Indeed!
Review: Harold Kushner's book has an insight for a heart touching, warming feeling for those who got to be content with Suffering. Some of the other time in life, we suffer. Why do we have to suffer? Why do Bad things Happen? Why Me? These and many questions surface our minds and that's when our 'Faith' is challenged. Why do we turn to the same God who makes it happen? The author came to see god when he faced the worst trials in his life of having lost his son Aaron when he was fourteen. God weeps with us and would not abandon us and can fill the deepest needs of an anguished heart says Harold. The story of job inspires and builds the strength and courage. Harold provides invaluable reassurances and his words are source of comfort in times of bad things happening just out of the blue. His logic that when bad things happen we dump our anger on others or turn it on ourselves. Sometimes angry on God. Why me? And then referring to Cain killing his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy...all through Harold soothes the mind to relax and be at peace saying 'God can't do everything, but he can do some important things' This ticks the mind Fate, not god, sends us the problem. If we are weak, we get angry, overwhelmed. Its faith strong all the way and God rewards in his own fashion; Knows much better what he has to do. A must book to be read by all people in trouble, no matter what their religios faith. Indeed, When Bad things happen, be positive, What happens, happens for good. Good People turn to be Better.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely helpful and uplifting
Review: I bought this book nearly 9 years ago after I lost my mother to a devastating illness that September, and my daughter was delivered stillborn a week before my due date in January. My father went on to die from cancer the following September. None of it made sense, and it caused me to question all that I'd believed in.
Rabbi Kushner's message -- that things don't "happen for a reason" but that God gave us this world and nature and that sometimes bad things just happen, helped me better understand that my mom didn't do anything to cause her illness and my daughter didn't do anything to miss her chance at life. More importantly, the latter (and much more important) part of the message -- that God intervenes in our world by giving us each other -- has helped me live each day since, appreciating life and the gifts I've been given in my family, friends, colleagues and sometimes even strangers. I HIGHLY recommend this book, not only to those who are grieving, but to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: A stunning book
Review: I don't even know where to begin in my praise for this book. Perhaps I am so bowled over by this book's insights because many of the philosophical questions the author raises are, verbatim, the EXACT questions I was turning over and over in my mind for the past few months.
What good is prayer if God already "has a plan" as so many insist? How can there be a moral reason for natural distaster (e.g., the tsunami) when all the disaster is a action/reaction of nature? When the roof blows off a church in a tornado and the people hiding inside are safe and they say God was looking out for them, does that mean God was NOT lookng out for the people down the street, probably equally as devout, whose roof collapsed on them?
This book is helpful because it suggests that some of the ideas we have about God might be innacurate - that we are looking at God in such a way that is more self serving to US, instead of recognizing the reality of what God IS. (For those "blue staters" who think that Christianity and Judeaism is all about punishment and rigidity, you might do well to read this book - then find out what religion is REALLY all about, not what you FEAR it is all about.)
About 3/4 of the way through this book I burst into tears of relief, because this book provided the very answers I was searching for, and was reluctant to discuss with my friends who practice what I consider a contemporary, rock-musiced, chirpy McReligion, popular but deeply unsatisfing. (They could probably benefit from this book too!)
If you are looking for some very thoughtful answers to difficult philosophical questions about the nature of God, I don't think you'll be disappointed by this simple, easy-to-read little book.
Rating:
Summary: Theology I can accept
Review: I have had many of the same objections that Kushner brings up to traditional answers to the question of theodicy. Kushner provides a well-reasoned, realistic, and yet still comforting answer. I'll let Kushner explain his theory, because in summary it doesn't sound as compelling as it does in detail, but suffice it to say that while many of the reviews here do provide a good summary, you're still not going to understand Kushner's argument unless you read the book in full.
I'm going to respond to the review entitled "There are better choices to understand the mind of God..." and hopefully, in the process, provide a better picture of what the book is and isn't:
First of all, I'm not sure that the analogy the reviewer makes about Christ being both God and human (therefore God can be both completely powerful and completely loving) makes sense in this context. Kushner is Jewish, and while his book is pretty universal (he is writing for a mixed audience and so assumes little about his readers' beliefs beyond their belief in God), the fact remains that he is writing from within the Jewish tradition, and he makes no attempt to disguise the fact. Jesus is more or less irrelevant to him. Judaism presupposes an absolute cleavage between man and God: man cannot become God (ala Hercules) and God does not become man (ala Jesus or Dionysus). Both are originally pagan concepts. So I think the argument is a little out of place in a review of this book.
Second, your assertion that God is both all-powerful and all-loving is addressed in the book, and found wanting. Simply saying, in essence, "Kushner is wrong, God can be both," does not explain why one should accept your unsupported assertion over his argument.
Third, the book you recommend does not address the same issues as this one and is therefore not a good suggestion for substitution. It may be a perfectly good book for Christian readers, but suggesting it here is like suggesting a book on yoga to someone who's looking for information on nutrition. There's a little overlap, but it's not going to answer most of the person's questions.
Finally, perhaps some of the reason for your disappointment is suggested in the title of your review. Kushner isn't out to "understand the mind of God," (chas v'shalom). He quotes Job to point out that the mind of God is essentially unknowable. Kushner's purpose is to come up with a humanly acceptable answer to how a loving God can allow terrible things to happen to good people.
Rating: 
Summary: Left me wanting too much more info!!!
Review: I liked what was being said but.....This has to be the shortest (total playing time)book on tape I have ever purchased! I think more info. could have been recorded. I feel there must be alot that I missed from the book and I have never had that feeling before after listening to a book on tape. I do not expect to get the entire book via spoken word, but from such a well received /critically acclaimed book and based on such a moving &important topic more info should have been there.
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