[Dennis Prager Speaking to Rabbi Harold Kushner] “How do you deal with that famous opening phrase in Ecclesiastes of, everything is vane or vanity or meaningless? Do you believe that?

[Harold Kushner’s Response]“No I don’t. Funny thing about the book of Ecclesiastes, I first discovered it as a teenager in Hebrew High School when I loved it because I saw [Solomon] as puncturing pomposity and just bringing a healthy cynicism to things, [and I] missed the whole point of the book. Ecclesiastes was written by an old man who is terrified of dying because he’s afraid that everything that he’s invested his energies in will disappear when he dies. I don’t believe that. I don’t know how many years I have to live, I’ve already lived longer than my mother did, I’m 72 and in good health, but who knows. I’m not worried about that. I think that some of what I’ve done will outlast me. I’ve had the advantage that not everybody has of writing ten books now, they’re published and to some degree they will continue to be in libraries and on people’s bookshelves. I’ve influenced people. I’ve shaped the thinking of I don’t know how many thousands of people. I have had an impact, I will leave a daughter, I will leave grandchildren behind. No, I don’t think that everything is vanity.”[1]

---

[1] Rabbi Harold Kushner on the Dennis Prager Show (7/30/07) – Rabbi Kushner “missed the whole point of the book” as a child, and he still doesn’t understand Ecclesiastes. How tragic.

“In that incident of the golden calf, you remember it’s in the book of Exodus…. As soon as he turns his back, the Israelites build this idol and they’re dancing around it. Moses is coming down the mountain with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments personally inscribed by God. He sees the Israelites dancing around the calf, days after they’ve sworn they’d never to worship idols, they’re worshiping an idol. He is so distraught; he takes the tablets, throws them to the ground and breaks them. That’s as far as the narrative in the Bible in the book of Exodus goes. There’s a Jewish legend… [saying that] he picked up the broken pieces and carried them with him for the rest of his life, not as a reminder of his failure, as a reminder of what he once dreamt of achieving: turning these people into a nation that would live in the presence of God. He never wants to forget that that was his dream. Then he goes back up the mountain and comes down with a second set of tablets, not fashioned solely by God, but the product of a human-divine collaboration. And those are the tablets which have lasted for the last three-thousand years.” The [broken] tablets were an ideal, they envisioned people being capable of perfection, of never blowing it, never making a serious mistake. Human beings could not live up to that, and so Moses has to shatter those original commandments [because] they ask too much of people, and come up with a divine-human collaboration: the original vision of God tempered by the recognition that people will not be perfect…. I don’t believe in a god who demands perfection from us. I don’t believe that life is a spelling bee where you get the first twenty-five words right and when you blow number twenty-six, you’re disqualified. I think we have to make room in our lives for imperfection. - Rabbi Harold Kushner[1]

---

[1] Rabbi Harold Kushner on the Dennis Prager Show (7/30/07) – this shows the fallacy of human tradition – “human-divine collaboration”…what kind of crap is that? The second part about “the ideal” of the original 10 commandments that were, apparently, different shows another trajedy of self righteousness, “I don’t believe in a god who demands perfection from us.” How sad. [The second portion of this quote occurred after the Ecclesiastes question, but it was a tie-in]