An unconventional reading of the Garden of Eden story, offering the best-selling rabbi's suggestions about its psychological implications for the children of Adam and Eve. Rabbi Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People, 1981; To Life: A Celebration of Jewish Being and Thinking, 1993; etc.) contends that we demand too much of ourselves and forgive too little. The traditional reading of the Adam and Eve saga as a paradigm of disobedience and divine punishment is responsible, he feels, for much of the unnecessary guilt that we heap on ourselves. We must free ourselves of the notion that God demands perfection of us. ``It is the notion that we were supposed to be perfect, and that we could expect others to be perfect . . . that leaves us feeling constantly guilty and perpetually disappointed.'' The purpose of religion, contends Kushner, is to ease our troubled souls and not to exacerbate our doubts and conflicts. Religion ideally teaches us that not only does God forgive our mistakes, but that our mistakes have a divine purpose, as experiences from which we can grow. ``Religion properly understood is the cure for feelings of guilt and shame, not their cause.'' And just as we must learn to forgive ourselves, we must be more forgiving of others. The alternative is to turn ourselves into victims and others into victimizers. Sin and punishment are not our inheritance from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve's legacies of work, love, and the awareness of mortality make up the ``burden and challenges of being truly human.'' Nowhere, however, does Kushner consider more complex questions, such as how society should handle those who suffer not from an excess of guilt, but from its absence. Replete with personal anecdotes and references to contemporary literature, this is an appealing but ultimately shallow piece of feel-good pop theology. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-50741-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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