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 Thursday in Canton, Mass.
His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.
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.
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.
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.