Editor’s Note: Dealing with VHL, we deal with a number of disappointments, beginning with the realization that we are not in control. Kushner offers some insights for how people learn to meet them with faith in ourselves and in the future.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
-- Langston Hughes, “Harlem”

In these lines, the poet Langston Hughes wonders what happens to dreams that don’t come true. I wonder what happens to the dreamer: How do people cope with the realization that important dimensions of their lives will not turn out as they hoped they would? A person’s marriage isn’t all he or she anticipated. Someone doesn’t get the promotion or the recognition he had set his heart on. Many of us look at the world and see two groups of people: winners and losers: those who get what they want out of life and those who don’t. But in reality life is more complicated than that. Nobody gets everything he or she yearns for. I look at the world and see three sorts of people: those who dream boldly even as they realize that a lot of their dreams will not come true; those who dream more modestly and fear that even their modest dreams may not be realized; and those who are afraid to dream at all lest they be disappointed. I would wish for more people who dreamed boldly and trust their powers of resilience to see them through the inevitable disappointments.

History is written by winners, so most history books are about people who win. Most biographies, excluding works of pure scholarship, are meant to inspire as much as to inform, so they focus on a person’s successes. But in real life, even the most successful people see some of their efforts fail and even the greatest of people learn to deal with failure, rejection, bereavement, and serious illness.

The lessons of this book will come in large part from examining the life of one of the most influential people who ever lived, Moses, the hero of the Bible, the man who brought God’s word down to earth from the mountaintop. When we think of Moses, we think of his triumphs: leading the Israelites out of slavery, splitting the Red Sea, ascending Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the law. But Moses was a man who knew frustration and failure in his public and personal life at least as often and as deeply as he knew fulfillment, and we, whose lives are also a mix of fulfillment and disappointment, can learn from his experiences. If he could overcome his monumental disappointments, we can learn to overcome ours.

What if, without aspiring to be another Moses, we could be like Moses in our ability to overcome disappointments, frustration, and the denial of our dreams? What if we could learn from Moses how to respond to disappointment with faith in ourselves and in our future and to respond to heartbreak with wisdom instead of bitterness and depression? Can Moses teach us not how to be another Moses, but how to be ourselves, our best selves, even when life doesn’t turn out as we hoped it would? The answer is Yes.

As a rabbi, I spent much of my time trying to comfort people for whom life had been harsh, men fired from jobs to which they had faithfully devoted themselves, women whose husbands had left them for no reason other than a flight from middle age, parents of a child killed by a drunk driver. Much of the time, I felt helpless, unable to think of anything to do or say that would heal them. And much of the time, they astonished me with their resilience. It was not that they didn’t hurt. It was not that they denied the reality of what had happened to them. They understood that pain and rejection are part of life, and they responded to the shattering of their dreams by saying, I’ve learned how painful life can be and I want more of it because there is so much in life that is good and I don’t want to miss out on it. They came to see the scars on their souls and sometimes the actual scars on their bodies, not as disfiguring, not as testifying to their being victims, but as battle scars earned in the struggle against the unfairness of life, a struggle in which they were determined to prevail.

Perhaps the enduring lesson of our failures is the one I learned from reading one of the great books of the twentieth century, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was a prominent psychiatrist living in Vienna when Nazi Germany absorbed Austria in March 1938. Because he was a Jew, he was interned in Auschwitz but was fortunate enough to survive. Looking back on his Auschwitz experience, he wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but the last of human freedoms, the right to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” In other words, what happens to you, no matter how hurtful or unfair, is ultimately less important than what you do about what happens to you.

Robert Frost once wrote,

The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good
But just to ask us who we think we are.

When life has dealt you a painful blow, let it hurt but trust yourself to get over it. Even as God blessed our physical bodies with recuperative powers, so that most of the time, most people recover from illness and injury, it would seem that God has blessed our souls with the miracle of resilience, so that most people, most of the time, survive their pain, bear their scars nobly, and manage to go on living, surprising themselves and those around them in the process.

We were all deeply moved by the courage displayed by Christopher Reeve in the nine years following the accident that shattered his near-perfect life and left him paralyzed. We admired his refusal to sink into despair, his unyielding optimism, his commitment to arduous physical therapy. But the most remarkable thing about his story is not that he was able to do it. It is that you don’t have to be Superman to do it. Millions of people have been crippled, assaulted, betrayed, or diagnosed with incurable ailments and have responded as courageously as Christopher Reeve did, insisting on going on with their lives and reaching for as much fulfillment and happiness as was available to them.

n June 2004, I officiated at the wedding of a woman who spends her waking hours in a wheelchair, having lost the use of her legs to a degenerative disease. It robbed her of her mobility, but not of her sense of humor, her courage, or her readiness to enter into married life. Shortly after that, I read the latest book by Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who can barely move or speak but nonetheless continues to revolutionize the world of physics with his insights. I have autographed books for people who attended my lectures but lacked the physical dexterity to shake my hand or the verbal facility to tell me their names or what was wrong with them. But they were able to hold down jobs and form emotional attachments to others. They are not living the life they had looked forward to when they were young, but they are finding happiness and meaning even in the difficult circumstances they find themselves in.

Dance as if no one were watching.

Love as if you'd never been hurt.

-- Judy Collins, "The Rose"

I continue to find proof of the reality of God in the ability of ordinary people to do extraordinary things, and I include not only the afflicted men, women, and children who show such remarkable courage, but the friends, families, doctors and nurses who respond to them with love and compassion where there might easily be neglect and resentment. Human beings at their best and bravest continue to amaze me.

I don’t think I could have said to Christopher Reeve in the days after his accident “Don’t let this one thing define you.” What I might have said to him, what he apparently through of by himself was, Concentrate on what you have left, not just on what you have lost.

I remember reading many years ago that one of the secrets of living a long and healthy life was to have been seriously ill when you were young. The person who has known sickness early in life will be cured of the illusion of invulnerability, the myth that bad things happen only to other people. (Learning that our son had an incurable illness when he was three years old was that much harder for me to take because I had led a charmed life to that point.) Having known sickness and suffered from it, a person will learn to take care of himself to reduce the chance of it happening again. It may be equally true that the best way to immunize yourself against being crushed by failure and frustration is to experience it at an early age and learn that you can survive it. There is life after failure, and it can be a very satisfying life. Some people who fail early in life will learn to think of themselves as failures. But others will learn that a broken heart is like a broken bone – it hurts terribly but it heals, and, as has been suggested, it often heals stronger at the broken place.

A woman who wanted to tell me how helpful she found one of my books after her husband’s death in an automobile accident wrote: “Admitting that I had no choice but to accept what had happened to me was not a statement of defeat … I was giving up the illusion that the circumstances of my life were under my control, a cherished but dangerous notion I had held for a long time and which had at times laden me down with guilt when things didn’t go right and I blamed myself.” Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.

In her book, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Sister Joan Chitttister wrote: “There is no such thing as a life without struggle … There is no one who does not have to choose sometime, some way between giving up and growing stronger. There is no one who has not known what it is to lose in the game of life. … The essence of struggle is the decision to come out of struggle, out of suffering the same person they were when they went in. Some come out worse, soured on life. Others come out stronger and wiser.” As the composer Leonard Cohen puts it, “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”

The most valuable, most enduring lesson we can learn from Moses comes not from his successes but from his failures. It is not about standing up to rulers and demanding justice. It is not about being charitable to the poor or respecting our neighbor’s property. It is about facing our past with gratitude and our future with confidence, even as we carry with us the memories of dreams that never came true. There are other, more attainable dreams waiting for us.

As printed in the VHL Family Forum 15:1, January 2007. For permission to reprint, please contact VHL Family Alliance, editor@vhl.org. Further information is available from the VHL Family Alliance, info@vhl.org.