Category: Judaism

We drove Cousin Leon home from a bar mitzvah a few years ago. He’s eighty, he’s been at that shul longer than the rabbi, and he spent the ride expounding on the ways of the world from the back seat. He wanted to tell me about August Belmont. Belmont, he said, was a self-hating Jew. Made his fortune, raised his children Episcopalian, changed his name from Schönberg so nobody would know. He said it the way people say things they’ve known for sixty years.

I remembered this story when I was reading Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. Let’s unpack that title. Horn’s argument is that the world enjoys appropriating Jewish suffering once it’s over and they can make it instructive, and has considerably less patience for Jews who are still around and have opinions, or politics, or a yarmulke. Dead Jews teach lessons about tolerance. Living Jews complicate them. In 2017 the Anne Frank House told a young Orthodox employee to cover his kippah with a museum baseball cap, and took four months of board deliberation to decide he could take it off. Horn wonders why it takes four months to let a Jew out of hiding.

Last week was Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. At the center of the day is when we confess our sins and try to make good in front of God.

The sin I kept coming back to this year is taking people for granted. I don’t spend enough time with my friends and family, and I don’t see them or call them enough. Someone crosses my mind, I realize how long it’s been, and I feel a small drop in my stomach. For years my move was to get rid of that feeling as fast as I could, either by promising myself I’d reach out soon or by feeling bad enough that the bad feeling counted as a kind of payment.

In the afternoon we read the Book of Jonah, which is about exactly that kind of running. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and warn the city to change its ways, and Jonah runs the other way, onto a ship headed for Tarshish. A storm comes up, the sailors throw him overboard, and a great fish swallows him. He spends three days in its belly, and then the fish spits him out onto dry land and the word of God comes to him a second time. There are three ways to read it that line up with three ways of thinking about sin and forgiveness.

I’m writing this for one particular friend, but thought the rest of you might enjoy it.

As an atheist, you probably think of religion like Richard Dawkins. He talks about religion this way. Imagine someone tells you there’s something incredibly important hidden in your backyard. You start digging. When you don’t find anything, they say you’re not digging deep enough. You keep digging. Still nothing appears. Eventually, the hole gets so big and destructive that you’ve ruined the entire yard. Yet you’ve convinced yourself that digging is virtuous.

The problem is that Dawkins views religion in a particular way. He sees it as an end in goal—a claim about what’s literally true about the universe. And a lot of people think of religion that way. But that’s not what religion is, at least not for me.

Here’s my short answer: Religion is a means to an end. What end? The end of being a better person. It’s a framework for asking the right questions about how to live, a way of making the ordinary sacred, and a path toward holiness that neither science nor art alone can provide.

Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.

This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Rabbi Harold Kushner says in his book To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

This is a story about an experiment in giving.

I’m used to walking down the street and seeing someone sitting on the sidewalk with a sign:

“Homeless. Please Help.”

And I feel it—that tension. That deep, emotional tug to help.

But then the mental calculus starts. There are so many great causes I could be supporting with that dollar. I could give to a food pantry. Or support addiction recovery. Or donate to a shelter with wraparound services. Or contribute to an organization that tackles root causes like housing policy or mental health care.