Harold S. Kushner, a rabbi who became a spiritual counselor to millions as the author of the book “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” a best-selling work about the search for solace amid unspeakable suffering, died April 28 in Canton, Mass. He was 88.
Rabbi Kushner was a young father, still new to his ministry, when he learned in 1966 that his 3-year-old son, Aaron Zev Kushner, had a rare genetic condition known as progeria. The illness, which affects an estimated 1 in 4 million children, causes rapid aging and is invariably fatal.
Rabbi Kushner channeled his pain into the drafting of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Several publishing houses turned it down before Schocken Books, a small Jewish press, agreed to publish the volume in 1981. It quickly lodged on bestseller lists.Rabbi Kushner rejected traditional explanations for tragedy — the notion, for example, that God employs suffering to teach a lesson, or that God has a plan unknowable to mortals.
Such was the demand for Rabbi Kushner’s counsel that he eventually stepped down from his formal ministry at his synagogue in Natick, Mass., to become a full-time writer and lecturer. During his studies at Columbia, Rabbi Kushner enrolled at the evening program of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was a college junior when he decided to pursue the rabbinate.
“We learned that our happy, outgoing son would look like a little old man while he was still a child,” Rabbi Kushner told The Washington Post in 1982. “He would never grow beyond three feet in height and he would die in his early teens.” By the time Aaron turned 10, he was physiologically in his 60s.
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