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By Yvonne Greenberg
 SAN DIEGO—The esteemed Rabbi Harold Kushner, who is best-known for his critically acclaimed book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People, has also written 12 other books, including his latest, Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World
Just like When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Conquering Fear empowers people to deal with difficult times in their lives, only this time the fears many of us experience are assuaged or disappear with Rabbi Kushner's advice for workable courage.
Rabbi Kushner will appear for the Opening Evening Author Lecture at The San Diego Jewish Book Fair on Monday, October 19, at 7:30 P.M. at Temple Solel, 3575 Manchester Avenue, Cardiff by the Sea, California to discuss Conquering Fear.
In a phone interview with sdjewishworld three days after that book was released to the general public for purchase, he provided some valuable insights into the kinds of fear experienced by many in these uncertain times and effective coping mechanisms in dealing with such fear.
1. How do you go about alleviating and appeasing fears with your comforting ideas?
"What I tell people is, generally, a couple of things that work. If something frightens you, think about another time in your life when you faced something like that and it turned out OK. And let that give you the confidence. Secondly, I find that prayer helps, not by persuading God to make things work out for you, but by relaxing you and giving you the confidence that God is on your side and that you are not facing this problem alone. Third, sometimes what you need is a litle bit more information. If you are going to be undergoing a medical procedure and you are frightened, the more you can find about it, just what happens, what the chances are, how effective it is, the more information you have, the less frightening things can be."
2. How did your presence at 9/11 help people with their ongoing fears?
"You mean the experience of having been on an airliner there?" Yes. "Well, nothing really scary happened to me. The one thing that maybe helps people, if you remember on September of 2001, the United States as a whole did something very interesting. After 9/11, we said Shiva. The country closed down for a week and we slowly, over the course of a month or so, got back to a normal lifescale. It is exactly what Jews do when they suffer a loss, you sit shivah and don't do anything for the first week and then slowly, until at the end of a month, you are back to your normal life. I think America's instinctive response was a roundabout way of saying the Jews have the right psychology about coping with grief and mourning. But what I did is, after the week of sitting Shiva for the 3000 who died, I got on airplanes again, I travelled to 10 or 11 cities promoting the book I just had written. I didn't hesitate to fly down to Florida where our daughter and grandchildren live. So, I think the example of saying, yeah, I know terrible things happen if you get on an airplane, from hijacking to motor trouble to crashes, but I am not going to let that scare me out of doing what I do for a living, or doing things I want to do for my family, and I think that role modelling of, I am concerned, I know what the dangers are, but I am not going to let them scare me out of doing what I want to do. That was maybe the most effective message I could give to people after 9/11."
3. Did the process of doing the book help you better deal with your own fears?
"It did in a couple of ways. That is a very interesting question. First of all, it help me understand my own fears better. When I first started writing the book I assumed the most frightening things people ever had to deal with would be serious illness and imminent death, mortality. The more I researched and the more I thought about it and read about it, the more I realized that there is something that is more scary than being sick or almost dying, and that is rejection. So I wrote a chapter about being rejected in personal relationships, the woman whose husband suddenly leaves her for another woman, the man who breaks off a relationship saying it is just not working, or the woman who does it. And then last year I finished the book when the economic meltdown hit and I was going to add a chapter on unemployment, and I realized it was the same chapter as rejection in personal relationships, so I combined the two into one, loss of job, loss of love, they are the same problem, they give you the sense that nobody need you, and as a cure for the both of them, the cure for the man who has been kicked out of his job, the cure for the man or woman who has just had love relationship go sour, the cure is the same thing.
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Find people who reflect back to you the message that you are special, we need you, we cherish you, we want you around. Because we need to know that not everyone frightens us off ."
4. I was very impressed with your inspirational biblical and/or literary introductory lines to every chapter. Was that hard to do?
"It was a little bit of an exercise. I had the perfect quote for two or three chapters, then I had to find something for every one. Because, if you do it half the time you have to do it rest of the time. That Kipling quote about growing old, I just happened to run across it. And I said that's perfect, that's exactly what I wanted to say."
5. You spoke to many victims of terrorism about fear. Which interviews helped you better understand fear?
"Actually the interviews helped me better deal with it, not just understand it. There was a man in Israel whose daughter had been badly burned, the one who said there are worse things in life than dying, and one of them is to live every hour of every day of your life in fear, and we're not going to do that. I thought that was such a wonderful expression. The businessman I knew in Colombia, who went to all these great lengths to try and avoid the kidnappers when he went to the office, and I said to him, you've got enough money to retire and move to Florida, why do you keep going to work? And he said, well, my company is my business, it is my life, I've invested my whole life in that business. If I let the criminals take it away from me, it is like letting them taking my life. I think that helped me understand what kind of courage it takes to stand up to the fear of terrorism, but how utterly important it is to be be able to do it."
6. Besides recommending your book to people with personal fears, what professionals should read it, and which institutions should be made aware of it? Where would you like to introduce it?
"I want everyone to buy it. I think it is a book for churches and synagogues. It is a little-known fact that, "Don't be afraid" is a sentence that God speaks more often than anything else. I just finished reading a wonderful book by Bruce Filer about Moses, called America's Prophet, and in the last chapter of the book he says 38 times the bible says in God's name to reach out to help the poor, and I said yes, but 85 times the bible has God saying, "Don't be afraid." So I think churches and synagogues will find a message there. I think newspaper columnists will find a perspective about how to help people cope with this, I think it is very useful for educators, schoolteachers, high school teachers, college professors, and college students. I think of college students being a high school student, you are so vulnerable, so easy for you to despair and to worry that you are not going to make it, and I think adolescents and college students and young people need ways of summoning up the courage to deal with fear.
7. Are there plans to promote the book in other countries, translate it into other languages?
¨ If any other country wants to buy the rights and translate it. I would be thrilled. My agent deals with that sort of thing and, generally, I have been very popular in a number of countries The Dutch, South America, they've grabbed a hold of my books and translated them, And I am hoping they will grab this one as well, because I don' think the problem of fear is limited to the United States, whether it is a fear of terrorism, or fear of rejection, or fear of growing old. There may be a difference in other countries in that they don't quite worship youth the way Americans do, so maybe the chapter about the fear of growing old won't speak to other cultures the way it does to Americans, but everything else, fear of death, fear of rejection, fear of natural disasters, certainly, I think that has a message for people all over the world."
"Also, I can hardly wait to be in San Diego for the book fair."
Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Harold S. Kushner was educated at Columbia University and later received his rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1960. He was awarded a doctoral degree in bible from the same institution in 1972. He has taught at Clark University and the Rabbinical School of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
He is rabbi laureate of Temple Israel in the Boston suburb of Natick, Massachusetts, where he lives. His classic work, When Bad Things Happen To Good People, was an international best seller. He was honored by the Christophers, a Roman Catholic organization, as one of the fifty people who have made the world a better place in the last half century, and by the national organization, Religion in American Life, as clergyman of the year in 1999.
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