Synopsis
The author, a Conservative Jewish rabbi from Massachusetts, shares histhoughts on religion as a source of meaning and inspiration in the modern world.

From the Publisher
If you have lost faith or have never known it, or if you have ever wondered "what can religion offer?" here are wise and thoughtful answers. With the warmth, insight, and understanding that distinguished his phenomenal bestsellers When Bad Things Happen to Good People and How Good Do We Have to Be?, Harold Kushner addresses a critical issue in the lives of many: a spiritual hunger that no personal success can feed. Rabbi Kushner shows how religious commitment does have a place in our daily lives, filling a need for connection, joy, and community.

For anyone who has ever wanted a more fulfilling life, or wished to make a difference in the lives of others...for anyone who has ever felt guilty, afraid, or aloneŠRabbi Kushner shares a path to faith that offers new sources of comfort and strength for all of us. Powerful, provocative, and persuasive, Who Needs God is a message of universal appeal.

Chapter One: Does God Really Make a Difference?

"I Don't Believe In Organized Religion."

Paul was a child of the sixties, with his long hair and casual dress. It was one morning in the early 1970s that he sat opposite me in my study. He had called to ask to see me during his college vacation, more as a favor to his father, an active member of my synagogue, than out of any expectation that I would change his mind.

He told me, "I believe in God. I believe in being kind to people, treating them right, not hurting them. I believe in trying to make the world a better place. But I don't see why you need churches and synagogues, fancy buildings that are always looking for money. I don't see why you need professional clergy (nothing personal, Rabbi), prayer books, organized services, rules and rituals that nobody understands. I don't see why you need so many different religions, all arguing with each other. Why isn't it enough just to tell everybody to be nice to each other?"

He and I spoke for about an hour. I told him that some people can create lives of holiness all by themselves, the way Mozart could create immortal music without taking piano lessons, but that most of us need a structure and the company of other people to do it. I spoke to him of the need for community, that even if he didn't need organized religion, he should feel the obligation to maintain it for the people who did. (I restrained myself from telling him that if he didn't like organized religion, he had come to the right place; our synagogue was so disorganized it didn't deserve that description.) I spoke of the time-tested wisdom of a tradition thousands of years old, and urged him to accept what it had learned rather than dwell on its mistakes. Paul spoke of how boring his religious education had been when he was a child, how meaningless he found the services he attended with his parents whenever he was home, and how his science and psychology courses at school had helped him to understand why people living in less enlightened times might have needed religion, and why we no longer need it today.

After an hour, we parted cordially. Paul went back to school. Ultimately, he got married, got a haircut, moved to another state, and has become moderately active in a synagogue there, more, I suspect, as a return to his father's example than as a result of anything I told him that morning. I don't know if he ever thinks about the conversation we had that day. I think of it often.

This book is written for Paul, the bright, idealistic young man who asked why we need more than the commandment to be nice to each other. It is written for the young woman from a religiously committed home who went off to college and wrote a paper for her freshman English class on why religion harms more people than it helps. It is written for the man and woman from different religious backgrounds who fall in love and can't understand why religion is a source of conflict in their lives rather than a source of joy and inspiration. And it is written for all the intelligent, thoughtful people I have met in my travels — journalists, radio talk-show hosts, strangers who struck up a conversation with me on a plane — who had trouble believing that religion could be important to somebody in the twentieth century. This book is written for all the people who don't know that they are religious — good, honest, caring people who dismiss their local church or synagogue as irrelevant to their lives or find their way to it only at times of emergency or family celebration. (A neighbor once told me, "I think of your synagogue the way I think of Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm glad my life is stable enough that I don't need it often, but when I need it, I'm glad there is a good one around.") Should these same good people feel vaguely lonely, disconnected, unfulfilled, confused by the hard choices they are called on to make in today's world, they will probably never understand the connection between that vague sense of unease and the absence of religion in their lives.