There, there now, chin up; it’s not so bad, he writes

PICTURE Moses: He’s just come down after 40 days on Mt. Sinai and is carrying two stone tablets ready to present to his followers, the Israelites. He’s entered into a covenant with God, and he can’t wait to show them the tablets that God inscribed for his beloved people. Instead of finding his followers eagerly awaiting his return, Moses discovers them busy worshiping a golden calf, betraying all he had taught them and the God who’d led them out of slavery. In frustration and bitterness, Moses hurls the tablets, breaking them to smithereens.

“When we think of Moses, we think of his triumphs: leading the Israelites out of slavery, splitting the Red Sea, ascending Mount Sinai.... But Moses was a man who knew frustration and failure in his public and personal life at least as often and as deeply as he knew fulfillment,” writes Harold S. Kushner, the author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” In his newest offering, “Overcoming Life’s Disappointments,” he uses Moses’ life as a lens through which to view the all-too-human emotion of disillusionment and to explore how we might triumph over its tyrannical weight.

In recounting Moses’ successes and failures -- even when, after leading his people through 40 years of wandering in the desert to the promised land, he was not able to enter that new land -- and pulling together insights from different faith traditions, Kushner sets out to show readers that we too can overcome the disappointments that might otherwise crush us.

Kushner uses one particular interpretation as a touchstone. He imagines Moses, who has been given replacement tablets on Mt. Sinai, freighted with disillusionment as he lovingly picks up the pieces of the shattered tablets and places them in alongside the intact replacements.

Though his dreams for his people and their lives were destroyed in that moment of betrayal -- not unlike the betrayal of an unfaithful spouse, for example, or the disloyalty of friends or employers, Kushner explains -- Moses keeps the rubble as a reminder of the lessons he’s learned and the optimism he’d once harbored. “Those shattered fragments of what he once yearned to accomplish [were] not millstones weighing him down,” Kushner writes. “They [were] stepping-stones, forming the foundation of future success.”

If this narrative feels obvious, that’s because it is. The word “pabulum” -- an easily absorbed source of nourishment, or intellectual content that is unsatisfying -- comes to mind. The insights Kushner offers do provide emotional nourishment, but it’s a thin, bland kind. If readers are looking for intellectual substance or theological rigor, it’s a bit like hungering for a steak and getting a doughnut. The stories and morals seem overly familiar -- and more than a little vague: Don’t hold resentments. Don’t let your failures define you. See the good and overlook the bad. All true, but we’ve heard them a thousand times. Adding the Moses perspective dresses up the insights, but only a bit.

Still, someone in the midst of a devastating situation may crave this kind of emotional comfort food, something more sustaining and uplifting than it is genuinely enlightening.

No human relationship is without betrayal, irritation and annoyance, but Kushner makes clear that it’s what we do about such obstacles that matter. Many marriages heading toward divorce might be salvaged if the parties could pick up the broken remains of their vows and form a new bond, one that doesn’t deny the past but is ready to build on what remains of the marriage’s foundation, he posits.

The narrative also contains a few moments of grace, the most poignant of which is the observation that it is the brokenness of the human condition that connects us to others. “[W]hen humility leads us to see our pain and misfortune not as something that separates us from a world of lucky people but as something that connects us to a world of suffering people, it hurts less.” And it is in our brokenness, Kushner capably reminds readers, that we come to see how we belong to the human race.

Bernadette Murphy is co-author of “The Tao Gals’ Guide to Real Estate.”