1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator. The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Schocken Books. “Like a lot of children who feel they’re going to die soon, he was afraid he would be forgotten because he didn’t live long enough, not knowing parents never forget,” Rabbi Kushner told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 2008. He weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as a three-year-old when he died in 1977 two days after his 14th birthday. When Aaron was 10 years old, he was in his 60s physiologically. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushners’ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly. Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron.

One reviewer called his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” a “useful spiritual survival manual.” Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber. Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Friday in Canton, Mass.

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