Rabbi, tell me why I should go on living.

In a previous blog I shared some quotes from Rabbi Harold Kushner’s latest book, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life. It is a book I recommend highly because it is full of stories that reflect TOV values and principles. Today I want to share another very interesting story from the book, which may be read in its entirety on pages 131- 140. It is a conversation Rabbi Kushner had with a woman and her husband who came to him for counseling. Below is how the meeting began.

“Rabbi, tell me why I should go on living.” The woman who sat across from me and spoke those words was a member of my congregation, though I did not know her well. I had officiated at the bar mitzvah services of her two sons some twenty years earlier and had had no meaningful contact with the family since then. I would estimate her age to have been in the mid-to late fifties. There was nothing striking about her appearance or the way she was dressed. Her voice was flat, with little emotion apart from a pervasive sadness. Her husband sat with her, not close enough to reach out and take her hand. He seemed equally discouraged and did not say a word during our time together.

She went on: “There are no medical issues; my health is good. There are no financial problems. We put our boys through college at a state school and we can pay our bills. I had a job until a couple of years ago when I was laid off. It’s just that I feel that most of the nice things that will ever happen to me have already happened and I have nothing to look forward to. I’m getting older. Neither of my boys has a serious girlfriend, but even if they did, and even if I approved of the girl and her family, I like to think I would enjoy going to their wedding, but then what? Two nice days in the next thirty years? And if I didn’t get along with the girl’s family, I wouldn’t even have that.”

What did you think as you read her words? Rabbi Kushner shares thoughts that went through his mind.

I wasn’t sure how to respond. My initial impression was that she was bored with her life, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to tell her that. I have had conversations with people who had been seriously injured in automobile accidents and would never walk normally again. I have sat at the bedsides of people diagnosed with a degenerative disease that would only get worse. I have dried the tears of men and women (mostly women) whose mates had left them, their parting words being the prediction that no one would ever love them. And I tried to give them all reasons to wake up the next morning and look forward to the new day. But I had never before been asked to counsel someone who didn’t want to go on living because she found life boring.

I found it very interesting that in all of the years he had been a rabbi, he “had never before been asked to counsel someone who didn’t want to go on living because she found life boring.” This is the advice he gave her.

“I can’t believe you came here expecting me to tell you that I agreed with you, that life was pointless, so let me try to help you.” I pointed out that if her life was lacking in drama, it might be because she was operating with a limited cast of characters: herself, a husband, and two children. She had spoken about her husband and two sons, but were there no other family members, no friends, no organizations she belonged to?

I thought she might consider reaching out to include a few more people in her life, and if she wasn’t comfortable taking the first step to do that (I suspected she wasn’t), there were all sorts of ready-made groups she could join. “I hope you realize,” I told her, “that the synagogue isn’t only a place where one comes to pray to God. There are a lot of activities — book groups, social groups, ways of being of service to the community — that don’t involve a religious commitment, and they are always looking for new members.”

“The other thing that concerned me about what you   said to me was that it was all about what other people were or were not doing tor you, and that is something you don’t have a lot of control over. I didn’t hear anything about what you were doing with or for others, yet that might be the exact thing to start changing, the easiest way to feel better about your life. I’ve been a rabbi for a long time and I’ve dealt with a lot of people who were hurting — women whose husbands had died or had left the marriage, people grieving the death of a child or the loss of a job, people whose deteriorating health left them unable to do the things they once enjoyed. In every case, I gave them one rule and it almost always worked: the best way to feel better about yourself is to find someone to help. The widow, the parent whose child has died or is critically ill, those people not only have the right, they have the almost magical power to say to someone else who is hurting something that doctors and clergy aren’t in a position to say: `I know what you’re going through because I’ve been there. Let’s talk about it.’”

After that he shared several stories from the Bible that related to her situation. He closed the session with these words.

“You came here asking why you should go on living. I can’t give you a compelling answer. I can only give you advice born of my own experience, which has probably been very different from yours. But I can tell you this with one hundred percent confidence:

Stick with life, let more people into your life, learn to care about them. Leave them grateful for having known you. Cleave to your family; go to your sons’ weddings. One day down the road, probably more than one, you will pause and remember this conversation and you will say to yourself, I’m glad I lived to see this. How could I ever have thought about missing out on this?”

I hope you enjoyed and appreciated the TOV wisdom woven throughout Rabbi Kushner’s account. His book is Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life. It is a very good read and would be a great gift.

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