Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a best-selling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. I recently read a story about a psychologist who was trying to write a similar book at the same time. Kushner's book came out first, and it got the praise. It sold a whole lot more than the other fellow's book, and people kept talking about it all the time.

The psychologist had to go to another psychologist for some psychotherapy. They talked about his envy of Kushner. Every time Kushner was on a television interview, the other fellow went mad with jealousy. He couldn't stand it. Why should Kushner be praised and not him? Why should Kushner's book sell so well and his so poorly? The counselor tried to help him get it sorted out, to get it in perspective, to bring things back in line.

Here's what they discovered: Kushner's book was better than his. Why? Harold Kushner spoke from experience. He and his wife had a son with a disease that causes a person to age rapidly. At the age of nine, a child looks as if he's fifty. His skin is wrinkled; his hair is falling out, his bones are brittle; he dies in his early teen years.

Parents don't know what to do, how to feel, how to cope. How much suffering can a family stand? How much suffering can parents watch in their children and not go mad? What's the meaning of it all?

Rabbi Kushner sits down at his desk and starts writing. He writes with the tears in his eyes and a knife in his heart. He writes with stones of heaviness in his soul. He writes about suffering, and his tears blot the ink on the pages. He writes about suffering as a sufferer. People know he's not a doctor reading some medical chart. He's a hurt, bruised, and tormented man. When he writes about suffering, they listen because he knows suffering in his own soul.

But what of the psychologist? He wrote a great book about suffering without having to suffer. He wanted to tell people what it was like and how to cope with it without feeling the aching in his own heart. When people turned away and went to Kushner, envy sank its fangs into the other writer's soul. Envy lurks in every short cut we make in life; we want to get what someone else is getting without doing the things they've had to do in order to get it.