Used very good.
…A WORD TO THE READER
IT MAY SEEM strange for a man to write a book about peace
of mind in this age of fierce turmoil and harrowing doubts.
It may seem doubly strange for a rabbi, a representative of
a people that has known so little peace, to engage in such an
enterprise. However, I make no apologies for this attempt to
find new answers to the basic problems of human nature: its
needs, motives, fears, and dreams. I have written this book
in the conviction that social peace can never be permanently
achieved so long as individuals engage in civil war with hem-
slves. I maintain that a co-operative world can never be fash-
ioned by men and women who are corroded by the acids of
inner hate, and I believe that our much-heralded "society of
security" will remain a Utopian vision so long as the indi-
viduals composing that society are desperately insecure, not
only economically but emotionally and spiritually.
In this bouk I try to present some answers that have proved
helpful to me about the universal human dilemmas of con-
science, love, fear, grief, and God-crucial problems that
present themselves in every kind of society, and, I believe,
will present themselves as long as man is man.
Now it is undoubtedly true that social circumstances do
profoundly modify our human responses, and that uniust
economic conditions do create neuroses and maladiustments
in countless personalities. Social reformers and revolutiona-
ries are right when they insist that multitudes of human
beings can never experience true peace of mind so long as …….