Conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute’s Guttman Center for Surveys and the Avi Chai Foundation, the survey, which analyzed the responses of 2,800 Israelis, confirmed the truths I held to be self-evident when I grew up in Israel not too long ago. (Avi Chai is affiliated with the Keren Keshet Foundation, which created Nextbook Inc., Tablet Magazine’s publisher.) Back then—after the arrival of McDonald’s but before the second Intifada—it felt like a given that if you were Jewish you most likely had some sort of relationship with God, regardless of your level of observance. Except for a few pesky atheists, my friends and I all defined ourselves as secular even as we fasted on Yom Kippur, took much pleasure in the way the streets cleared up on Friday afternoons, and directed our prayers—about girls we wished would notice us or older brothers we wished would make it home safely from the front—to God.

Not much has changed, according to this new survey. Yet when the findings were released, many of my colleagues on the Israeli left took to the op-ed pages to register their shock and lament the demise of modern Israel. The survey, went the common cri de coeur, was a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, which would finally turn the Jewish state into an intolerant theocracy.

Writing in Haaretz, journalist Uri Misgav argued that the findings reflected a “depressing ideological situation.” The disturbing thing “about those who believe in the theory of the Chosen People,” he wrote, “is the fear that they are not particularly smart,” perceiving the world on “an infantile theological level” that surely should have been vanquished by reason and modernity.

In the same paper, columnist Gideon Levy sounded even grimmer. “You have to give it to the pollsters,” he wrote. “They let the cat out of the bag. … Israeli society isn’t secular, it isn’t liberal, and it isn’t enlightened.”

It’s easy for me to understand Misgav and Levy. Like them, I consider myself a proud member of the battered and decimated tribe known as the Israeli left. Like them, I look with horror as brutes of all stripes—from hill-dwelling Jewish terrorists to Avigdor Lieberman and his comrades in Knesset—trample democracy’s core values. But in their disdain for and fear of religion, Misgav, Levy, and the lion’s share of the Israeli left fail to understand not only their past but also, more troubling, their future. Unless the Israeli left learns how to stop fearing and start loving—or at least understanding—religion, its chances of advancing a popular agenda are slim.

***

It’s tempting for secular, educated adults to see religion as the flickering remnant of a primitive fire that once guided mankind—a fire no longer necessary now that we have the quiet heat of science, technology, and rational thought. And it’s easy to look at an idea like divine election as nothing more than pure chauvinism. I used to entertain these notions. But two years ago, together with my friend and teacher Todd Gitlin, I decided to grapple with these ideas by writing a book.

What I learned startled me. Far from a simple call to exceptionalism, chosenness is a devilishly complex idea. At the height of the biblical drama, at the moment a collection of disparate tribes are made into a solid nation, God appears to the Israelites at Mount Sinai and bequeaths to them their status as his chosen sons and daughters. “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests,” God says, “and a holy nation.” Why the Israelites? What does it mean to be chosen? Are the children of the chosen also chosen in perpetuity? God never tells.

The result is a never-ending quest, over the course of millennia, to solve this divine riddle. To have been chosen means spending a lifetime wondering about what it means to have been chosen. Some possible answers to this question align neatly with the Israeli left’s worst fears: Much of the settler movement is powered by an understanding of chosenness as a divine mandate to occupy land, even when others are living on it.

Continue reading: Chosenness as a challenge

God.

God murders, God kills, God takes revenge, God, by his own admission, is a jealous God. God turns his head. But God doesn’t apologize. Not for war, not for disease, not for Ashton Kutcher, not for anything. We’ve been apologizing to him for years, and—nothing. Not a peep. Not a whoops, not a sorry, not a “My Bad on the whole Hitler thing.” So, seriously: No more apologies. I’m not apologizing for anything (and I say this over a breakfast of a bacon-and-egg sandwich), not for one more goddamn thing until he does, and I think all Jews, all over the world, ought to unite at last and join me: No apologies. No sorrows. Not this year.

It’s God’s turn:

O Mankind, son of your fathers and your fathers’ fathers, let My prayers come before you, and do not hide yourself from My supplication. O Mankind, I am not so arrogant nor so hardened to say, “I am righteous and have not sinned.” For truly I have sinned. I have turned away from you, and I have done evil in your sight.

(God should bend forward at the waist here and upon reciting each sin pound his chest with his fist.)

For the sins I committed against you with diseases of the body, and for the sins I committed against you with diseases of the mind.

For the sins committed by murdering your parents, and for the sins I committed by murdering your children.

For cancer and for AIDS and for heart disease and for emphysema and for Alzheimer’s and for Parkinson’s. For regular leukemia, and for childhood leukemia.

For the commandments I gave you that I don’t even adhere to myself.

For hangovers.

For erectile dysfunction.

For premenstrual syndrome.

For aging, for time, for mortality.

For Miley Cyrus.

For all the Cyruses.

For all the Kardashians, and all the Olsens and all the Duffs and all the Hiltons and all the Afflecks and all the Baldwins and all the Palins and all the Palins-in-law.

For YA vampire novels.

For lynchings and gassings and mass graves and medical experiments and being burned alive.

For broken hearts. For loneliness. For divorce and for dysfunction.

For making it so damned hard.

For judging you, damning you, condemning you, without ever having been for even a brief moment in your soiled, mortal shoes.

For the whole circumcision thing.

For turning my head.

For calling homosexuality an abomination. (I’d just been dumped by my boyfriend.)

For the enduring lies and the broken promises.

For the unanswered prayers and the unanswered questions.

For all those notes in the wall I never read.

For Facebook and for MySpace.

And for Ashton fucking Kutcher.

For all these things, Mankind,

pardon me,

forgive me,

atone me.

(Perfect. Now go swing a cock around your head.)

First we learn that, like the Karp family in The Frozen Rabbi, Paltrow’s recently renovated London home has a rumpus room (stars, they’re just like us!). But the item that really caught our eye was number six, the Juxtaposed: Religion shelf. The wooden shelf has seven notches carved out: as Gwyneth explains, “Built-in slots hold holy books—including the Qur’an, Bible, and Tao Te Ching—all at the same level (which is how I like to think about religion).”

Also reserved on the shelf are spots for the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects, and, of course, the Torah.

Shortlist: Gwyneth Paltrow [Elle Decor]
Earlier: The Paltrow Children Will Be Raised Jewish

But these questions are secondary. What really matters is: Where does the Jewish vote, a traditional bellwether and strong supporter of it, stand? And where will it stand in November 2012? Certainly God will be in big trouble if only 52 percent of Jews end up backing it. “Its policies on Israel, America’s Jewish community, and not permitting Moses to enter the Promised Land have endangered God’s standing with the all-important Jewish constituency,” said one group. “Off-year approval ratings are no measure for what will happen on Election Day,” said the other group. “Once American Jews are aware of the concrete alternative to it, they will respond with their usual robust support.”

Prayers for comment went unanswered.

Only 52% of Americans Approve of God’s Job Performance [Atlantic Wire]

Jonathon Rosen

Bad news, folks. I’m afraid John Calvin may have been right: Things suck, and they’re not going to get better, because you suck, too.

I’m paraphrasing.

Slightly.

Of all the religious nutters to have been right about the nature of God and existence, Judgin’ Johnny C. is the worst one. Mohammed I can deal with (what happened between Isaac and Ishmael is their own shit, Mo; leave me out of it). Buddha would be great, of course, a hell of a lot better than the God of either Testament, Old or New. But if Calvin and Sobs was right, we’re all fucked.

My conversion began back in January, when my son downloaded Pocket God, a popular iPod app. “Infrequent/Mild Violence” warned the iTunes store, which was significantly better, I figured, than he was going to get with the non-pocket God. I sat beside my son on the couch, my dog Duke in turn beside me, and watched the boy play. Here’s the game: You play God, and you either torture or feed a group of endlessly hopeful Islanders. You are neither rewarded nor punished for your rewards or punishments, and there’s an endless supply of Islanders. I’m not sure, to this day, what the point of the game is. Good God, bad God, let’s call the whole thing off. It was snowing outside, though, again, as it seemed to have been doing every day since August, and watching the little tan-skinned Islanders on the iPod screen gave me an idea.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to my wife.

Duke looked up at me, thinking we were going for a hike.

“H word,” said my son without looking up from his screen.

“Where to?” asked my wife.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Somewhere warm.”

And so began the long wait for the beginning of March and our trip to a small island in the Caribbean. We watched as the snow piled up outside, as one storm passed and another arrived; icicles formed along the roofline so quickly that I couldn’t keep up; one grew so large that when at last it fell to the ground, it took out a section of our fence with it.

“Crap,” I said, looking out the window.

“C word,” said my son without looking up from his screen. I could hear the poor Islanders screaming in agony.

“Why are you being so mean to them?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It’s more fun,” he said.

The week before we left another series of storms blew across the Northeast, cancelling flights and shutting down highways. But when the day came for our trip, the skies were finally clear, the roads finally passable.

We arrived a few hours later in paradise, in Eden. The beaches were pristine and empty, the people friendly and helpful.

“Hello!” said the beaming taxi driver.

“Welcome!” said the sparkling hotel receptionist.

“Aye, Mon!” called Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer.

We had a wonderful few days. The trip was half over. This is where Calvin comes in.

I like Calvin because he didn’t mess around. Calvin was cold. He’s pure, unvarnished, unapologetic, religious extremism. He’s theological Jägermeister—not a little depravity, but total depravity. Unconditional election. Irresistible grace. Hardcore. His theology, basically, comes down to this: You suck. Totally. And there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t pray to make things better, you can’t repent to make things better, you can’t do shit. It’s predetermined, and this is the predetermination: Frequent/non-mild violence, pervasive misery. utter disappointment. Rated 18+, if you live that long. If life seems to get momentarily better, it will soon get monumentally worse, because all your sins are belong to us. Homeostasis is a bitch, Mankind, but get used to it; the game started before you got here, and we’re not changing the rules now.

I admire that kind of honesty.

I bought a shitty little car a while back. “It is what it is,” the salesman said.

“A shitty little car,” I said.

He shrugged. “I ain’t gonna bullshit you,” he said. Paraphrasing Calvin. Slightly.

I was standing in the hotel bar when the first voicemail message came through.

“Duke,” said Suzanna, “is vomiting.”

Duke is 12-year old, pretty old for a Rhodesian Ridgeback. We buried his older sister a few months ago, and Duke hadn’t been all that interested in life lately. The best part of the movie was over, it seemed, and Duke didn’t want to stick around for the damned credits.

Suzanna is a tech for our vet, and she has been our dog-sitter ever since Duke was a pup. I phoned her back and left a message.

On the television above the hotel bar, I saw the word “Flood.” More storms were pounding the Northeast—snow, rain, the usual, just a lot more of it.

The following morning, Suzanna left another message. Duke’s eyes were yellow, as were his gums; she was worried about his liver, and wanted to know if she could bring him in for a few tests.

Sure, I said.

Later that morning, my neighbor emailed to tell me that our road had been washed away in the floods.

Away? I asked.

Away away, he replied.

Why are you being so mean to them?

It’s more fun.

The last day of our vacation, it rained. I spent the afternoon in the hotel bar, trying to write. Roger, the delighted beachside pot-dealer, joined me at my table with some of his local buddies; he had become something of a friend over the past week or so. I told him about Duke, and about the road that had washed away, and about our trip being over, and how I was dreading the flight home: TSA always stops me, I explained, because they think my name is Islamic, when I’m actually Jewish.

“That’s why they stop you,” he said.

“Because I’m Jewish?”

“Who do you think,” my jovial islander friend asked me, “was behind 9/11?”

“Me?” I asked.

They all nodded.

We arrived home at midnight. It was raining.

“Goddamn it,” I said.

“D-word,” said my son.

We parked at the bottom of the road, and I carried the bags, one by one, up the washed-away road to the empty house; Duke was at the animal hospital, being kept alive on an IV drip; his liver and pancreas, said the vet, “needed a rest.”

We buried Duke two days later. The excavator trying to repair our road was kind enough to dig a grave for him, in the frozen winter woods behind our house, beside the grave of his older sister.

“Build a man a fire,” said Calvin, “and he will be warm for a day; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.”

Fuck you, John, I thought.

The following day, my son asked me if he could download a new game called Plants Versus Zombies.

“What happened to playing God?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “It got boring,” he said.

Well, I thought, there’s always that. Even if Calvin was right, and it sure seems like he might have been, there’s always the chance, slight as it is, that God will just get bored and leave us alone.

And the Islanders rejoiced, and they sang, and they danced, and there was much happiness in the land, for God had logged off, and didn’t even want the free update.

Yes. There is always that.

• God had a wife. Yes, that God. [Discovery News]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Eddy Portnoy has a children’s treasury of Yiddish fight terms. [Shtetl Montreal]

• Technion-Israel Institute of Technology is interested in a New York City satellite campus. [NYT]

• iGrogger [iTunes]

• Contributing editor Vanessa Davis’s workspace is at least as wonderful as you’d suspect. [From the desk of …]

• The doll that got a bar mitzvah. [The Daily]

According to contributor Jody Rosen, 100 years ago today Irving Berlin—one of the heroes of David Lehman’s A Fine Romance—received a copyright for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

In conversation with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry, Hazony warns against dismissing these ancient pronouncements as simple or obvious. Rather, he says, they are worthy of study, and of being followed—even the one about not coveting our neighbor’s ox. [Running time: 20:26.]

Even in the 1940s, my mother said, Helen was still a griner, a newcomer. She came green, stayed green, and died green, when green was still uncool. My mother’s favorite Green Helen story is about movie-going: At the RKO Keith’s, in Flushing, the two roommates would buy tickets and a box of nonpareils, watch a newsreel or two about the war, then take in a double feature. Later, over dinner, Helen would retell the newsreels in Yiddish for Sadye and Morris, who had stood all afternoon selling white blouses and black slips. But when it came to the features, her retellings were all her own. It was all one story, the break between films merely another intermission. An afternoon split between Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mrs. Miniver would be told as a sweeping epic of a tummler who grows up to be summoned to the White House, where he meets with Roosevelt while bombs are falling over the Minivers huddled in their shelter, who emerge to daven in their ruined church and potchke with their roses. Jimmy Cagney dissolved into Greer Garson; wisecracking hoofers wore stiff upper lips. To Helen, the movies were chaotic and unpredictable, no more or less, say, than getting on a train at Sochoczew and off a steamer at Castle Garden, or moving from Abie’s to Reizl’s to Sadye’s. Life was like that.

Perhaps for Jews life has always been like that, fractured and disrupted. We tell ourselves that Jewish life comes in cycles: from sunset to noon to nightfall; from harvest to frost to spring lambs; from birth to brit to bar mitzvah to marriage to (your middle-aged milestone here) to death. But most of the time life doesn’t feel cyclical. It’s rent by gap years, layoffs, and divorces. The pale, freckled faces that depart bear no resemblance to the bald, pink-mouthed strangers who arrive.

Take Simchat Torah morning, when Jews everywhere run circles around the Torah, rejoicing that ends turn into beginnings. We’re here for the double bill, and it’s all one story, this triumphant story of ours. V’zot habracha, we chant, this is the blessing of God’s man, Moses, bidding farewell; bereishit, we continue, in the beginning. Our technicolor Torah is an epic of blessings, a feature fit for God to watch in his heavenly balcony, over and over again.

I think about Helen, and I think, life isn’t like that. Torah’s not like that. It’s more like this:

God’s news for Moses has not gone down well: You will die on the mountain, and you will not enter. It must be a pretext, thinks Moses, it’s outrageous. He implores the earth and the heavens, the sun and the moon, the stars and the planets, to take up his cause, but for naught. The earth turns over; stars twinkle and blink. Surely the sea will plead for me, O Sea!, Moses thinks, but his roar is lost in the crashing waves. When Israel supplicates for Moses’ life, the angels Zakun and Lahash, in latex gloves, snatch up their words.

It’s not life he’s jealous of; it’s the land. Moses tells God he’ll go as a nobody. “No way,” says God. “You’re royalty.” I’ll dig a cave under the Jordan, Moses says; “No way,” says God. “A crossing’s a crossing.” At least let my bones go up, like Joseph’s, Moses says. “At least Joseph called himself a Hebrew,” says God. “But you? When the daughters of Jethro called you Egyptian, not a peep. No way. I’m putting my money on Joshua.”

God’s made up his mind; the countdown begins. “Six hours to live!” says God. I’ll live as a beast, says Moses; I’ll prey and scrounge. “Forget it,” says God; “that’s five.” Then as a bird, picking at rags and sipping at puddles, says Moses; silence, except for the angel Michael, weeping. I’ll defer to Joshua, I’ll be taught by him, says Moses. “Make me believe it,” says God. “That’s three.” Not even a hand or a foot? asks Moses, incredulous. “Don’t be ridiculous; that’s two,” says God.

He’ll try what always worked before; quote God back to himself. You have said, says Moses, I singled you out by name, and you have, indeed, gained My favor–but God cuts him off. “Been there, done that,” says God. “One more.” In the hour of his death, Moses’ soul wails brokenly, as only souls can. His thirsty soul, which marched through the desert when other souls soaked in the hot tubs of Gan Eden, his faithful soul that never grumbled and never looked back. “No,” cries his soul, “I won’t go, I can’t,” but Moses can’t stand the crying. As soon as he says, “There there, go rest, dear soul,” she’s in a kimono, flitting to heaven.

Then God knows: Never again would there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses. Never again, face to face. Never again, the bargaining and bullying, the wrath and forgiveness, the turning away and turning back. Never again, to be held in the cleft of pleasure, in Moses’ eye, showing far more than God had intended, than God thought he should.

Then it comes to God: He will sit on a rock and grieve for seven days.

And while he grieves it returns to him, the radiant face, in darkness and wind, in a welter of soot, in whelming waves. “Let there be light,” he says, and there is light. He tastes it now, the bitter water Moses turned sweet, and he gathers the waters into a sea. In each eye of the shepherd, a burning bush, “a great light for day and a lesser for night.” A tiny ark adrift in the Nile, “let the waters swarm.” Moses, a father of sons, and he brings out trees and fruit and seed.

In his ear, the plague of buzzing and bleating—gnats and goats, frogs and cows, oxen and sheep—so he makes them all, those who crawl and those who creep.

Through his mind flows a river of blood; he makes hydras and krakens.

From a leprous hand, drawn out of a cloak, from scabs and boils, he fashions flesh, smooth and firm, a shoulder, a calf, a buttock, a breast, and makes them one and one.

Six days, and the heaven and earth were completed, and all their array. He sits for one more day, and holds the new world close and still, as if Moses, too, had made it.

This is what I once told a congregation, at a festive Simchat Torah dinner, that the creation of the world was God’s shiva for Moses. It was not what they came for, and out of step with the klezmer and the schnapps and the candy apples. But they’d gone on to decaf, and they sipped and considered. Afterward, one polite man said I was “idiosyncratic.” Well, my middle name is Helen. Let’s say I’m Helen, my grandmother, in the middle, which is just where the endings are, though Helen never seemed to notice.

Esther Schor is a poet and professor of English at Princeton University. She is the author of Emma Lazarus, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters Series.

Without giving away too much of the new film’s plot, it’s safe to say that it explores the same major theme as before, namely the devastating moment in which a toy realizes its owner has matured and is no longer interested in child’s play. It’s a moment burdened with more than the cheap sentimentality of mass-produced pop culture; watching the toys have their moment of reckoning, we are forced to have one of our own.

Everything is at stake. One of the Toy Story franchise’s most profound achievements is its ability to remind us how pure our vision was when we were children, when the objects laid at our feet weren’t merely 5-inch figures of polyethylene and fabric but fearless cowboys and daring space rangers.

Had he been around to visit the local multiplex, Walter Benjamin would have likely enjoyed Pixar’s creation. In a short essay, unpublished in his lifetime, Benjamin discussed the difference between the adult’s vision and the child’s. “Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerted, [their sight] is something spiritual,” he wrote. “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see.” This, he argued, was the reason children’s drawings cancel out “the intellectual cross-references of the soul,” creating instead “a pure mood, without thereby sacrificing the world.”

Pure mood is what Toy Story 3 is all about. It’s also the theme of this week’s haftorah. Like Buzz and Woody, the prophet Micah strikes an existential tone. Like the animated toys, he, too, is distraught by the notion that one day the being in whose grace we all live might lose interest in us and move on.

But unlike Andy, the toys’ owner, God himself doesn’t merely mature and abandon his knickknacks of old. Instead, Micah informs us, the Creator pursues a grim course of action: First he empowers his people—“all your enemies shall be destroyed”—and then he punishes them. “I will destroy the cities of your land,” God promises Israel, “and I will break down all your fortresses.”

It’s a bleak sequence of events. First comes redemption, then destruction. Why not the other way around? Why not suffering followed by salvation? To answer the question, we need not a prophet but a puppet, a toy truck, or an action figure. We need to look at the objects we’ve abandoned and recall how they could once conjure entire worlds writhing with thrills and promises. We need to think of the carefree lives we’d had when we toddled and realize that with each skill we’ve acquired, with each spurt of growth and drizzle of maturity, we’ve lost the most magical of all human capacities, the gift of being able not to reflect but just to see.

Unlike many other Hollywood blockbusters, the Toy Story movies do not require us to suspend our disbelief, nor do they pretend that a return to innocence could ever be possible. Impermanence is their point of departure, acceptance their goal. But not in the Buddhist way, not by Nirvana, not through transcending suffering or outgrowing the boundaries of our own consciousness. Instead, Woody, Buzz, and their friends are, I believe, good, observant Jews. They know, like Rabbi Akiva, that all is foreseen and permission is granted. They have no doubt that they are destined for abandonment by their master, and yet, in their earthly toy world, they depend on each other and love one another and strive for a better life. They worry about fate, but not enough to stop playing.

We may never be able to again see the world with the child’s untainted gaze, but if we listen to Buzz and Woody we may still be able to go—say it with me now!—to infinity and beyond.

You know, the little questions.

These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

The 84-year-old poet (who is also the founder of the non-profit Sheep Meadow Press, which has published Yehuda Amichai, Peter Cole, and many other renowned poets) takes on God in a number of ways and in a number of moods, quite frequently in the same poem. In the middle of “Bad Joke,” Moss talks about God’s responsibility for the disasters of history:

War is the hair on His head,
The beard He strokes when he sits in judgment.
He would never have a little fat belly like Buddha.
Looking around to the world, I say to God,
“Careful, you may just fall on your face.”
And so I move to farce.

Moss depicts the Lord of Hosts as a bloodthirsty despot whose impartiality plays out as destruction.The Almighty sits on a throne of majesty but not necessarily one of justice:

He downed all history and our yesterday’s dead.
Are His eyes on fire without tears.
Does He evacuate?

God devours His children with neither pleasure nor regret.

With the jarring question about divine hygiene (“Does He evacuate?”) the poem takes up a new problem. Moss is concerned with the way his poetry can—and cannot—talk about God. He comes by his scruples honestly; Maimonides reminds us that the Torah speaks in the language of men, and the trouble with that language is that it attempts to recreate God in our image. We make a fundamental blunder when we try to imagine God in human terms, because the very essence of God (for Jews at least) is that He transcends the human completely. This injunction against the seductions of everyday language affects the poet most of all; if you push your luck far enough, you press against the absurdities of analogy. If God eats, does He also shit?

Of course not. The Almighty doesn’t really eat, nor, for all our hopeful metaphors, does He really have a face that he can turn towards us. The attempt to lend our attributes to God leads us to both bad theology and bad jokes. The Lord does not slip on celestial banana peels. Any poem that tries to imagine divine slapstick is not a call for redemption but a farce.

You might complain here that “Bad Joke” doesn’t so much come to an end as evaporate, sacrificing its solidarity with the victims of history for a clever bit of irony. But Moss’s brief against catastrophe still stands. Its flight into metaphor might be suspect, but its protest remains the same.

Rather, Moss tempers the ferocity of “Bad Joke,” with a witty bit of self-deflation. This is typical of his worldliness, the indulgent cosmopolitanism of a man who has traveled widely and who sells paintings by the Old Masters for a living. Moss loves the excesses of ancient mythologies and admires the opulence of art. Furthermore, he does not have the sublime certainty of the believer. He is not, he tells us, a particularly religious man. But he takes pains to show us that he is a particularly Jewish poet.

In “Work Song,” Moss describes his distance from Hebrew and from ritual:

I am surprised, when close friends
Speak Hebrew, that I understand nothing.
Something in me expects to understand them
Without the least effort
As a bird knows song.
There is a language of prayers unsaid
I cannot speak.

As a poet, he wants to get it right. But to get it too right, to make the work perfect, is to butt up against the Second Commandment. So the Jewish artist has to try to get it wrong:

Unsynagogued, unschooled, but lettered,
I drag a block of uncut marble—
I have seen prayers pushed
Into the crevices of the West Wall,
Books stacked against boulders,
Ordinary men standing beside prophets and scoundrels.
I know the great stoneworkers can show the wind in marble,
Ecstasy, blood, a button left undone.

Again, the metaphoric nature of language gets the artist into trouble. How do you move from figures of speech back to the concrete practices of the Jewish world without being conned by the images you have created? Moss suggests that we imitate the ancient Jewish stonemasons who would willfully mar their work in some way. In Moss’s case, this means that the writer of “Bad Joke” has to turn his anger into vaudeville by showing how limited his poetic means truly are.

Moss therefore demonstrates his conviction that the Law requires art to turn against itself, to invest in its flaws and own up to its limitations. Moss is a master of this double play—of the phrase or a figure of speech that cuts two ways, of the joke that isn’t kidding.

Moss loves to pit his impulses against each other and for that reason (but not only for that reason), you cannot do his work justice by reading it in wisps and scraps of quotation. Here, in its entirety, is “Psalm:”

God of paper and writing, God of first and last drafts,
God of dislikes, god of everyday occasions—
He is not my servant, does not work for tips.
Under the dome of the roman Pantheon,
God in three persons carries a cross on his back
as an aging centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros.
Chinese God of examinations: bloodwork, biopsy,
urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair in the study of dark holes,
fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vaginal.
Like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel.
May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it,
swallow its meaning. My Shepherd, let me continue to just pass
in the army of the living,
keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead.
It’s true I worshiped Aphrodite
who has driven me off with her slipper
after my worst ways pleased her.
I make noise for the Lord.
My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.

In Moss’s remarkably carnal prayer, the idolatrous can stand next to the monotheistic, because “Psalm” transfuses the divine with the physical. Moss has no trouble placing pagan lust at the dead center of the poem because his great hunger for the book is no different from his appetite for sex. The “leaves of the vaginal” segue very easily into the leaves of Ezekiel’s book and for good reason. Moss does not want the fire of prophecy. He just wants to keep on wanting.

Rejoicing is an argument about pleasure, a meditation on both appetite and spiritual aspiration. In the end, Moss is a spectacularly pagan Jew. He is profane as only those who take their religion seriously can be.

Creating God in One’s Own Image [Not Exactly Rocket Science]

God in the Quad [New Yorker; subscription only]

But what if the governor, a busy man, can’t make the trip? No problem, said Crist: last year, he sent Florida State Senator Nan Rich on his behalf, giving her, he added, not only his note but also specific instructions on how to place it in the wall. Crist was even kind enough to share the exact wording of his notes to heaven. “Dear God,” they read, “please protect our Florida from storms and other difficulties. Charlie.” Amen.

Is God Protecting Fla. at Gov. Crist’s Request? [AP/Miami Herald]

At 7, Josie has a more complex image of God. “I believe in God except for when I’m angry,” She recently told me. Then she reconsidered. “Well, actually I do believe in God when I’m angry, but I want to be all, ‘I’m ignoring you!’” She’s interested in the idea of the yetzer hatov and the yetzer harah, the good and evil impulses that duel within us. “I think God is a force that tries to persuade us to do something good and tells us not to do something bad, but sometimes we don’t listen,” she said.

I thought about my kids’ different views about God when I read about research into the correlation between spirituality and happiness in children. The study, conducted by Mark Holder and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, looked at 320 children aged 8 to12 in both public and parochial schools. It used a standard measure called the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire to assess kids’ spirituality in four components: Personal (finding meaning and value in one’s life); communal (the quality of interpersonal relationships); environmental (the sense of awe in nature); and transcendental (the relationship one has with something beyond the human level).

The researchers found that children who felt that their lives had meaning and value and who had strong relationships with others (the personal and communal aspects of spirituality) were happier than children who did not feel that way or have those connections.

But religious practices—defined as attending services, praying and meditating—didn’t have a statistically significant impact on the happiness levels.

I’m not so sure you can tease apart spirituality and religion. To Jews, at least, religious practices aren’t limited to prayer and being droned at in shul. A lot of what we do is home-based, tied to food (challah back!), costumes (Purim, anyone?), even camping (building and hanging out in a sukkah). For us, and for people of other faiths, religion is social. Through day schools, synagogue schools, and camps, we build connections and support systems. Holder and his colleagues view such social networks as spirituality-building, not religion-enhancing, but that clean division doesn’t work for me. Judaism emphasizes tikkun olam, healing the world— wouldn’t that fall under the researchers’ definition of the personal and communal aspects of spirituality?

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that spirituality without religion is good for happiness. I used to live in San Francisco, surrounded by nebulous woo-woo performance-art spirituality, which frequently existed in the absence of real community (other than Burning Man) and without any social-justice aspect. Spirituality, for a lot of folks I used to know, consisted of trying to “manifest” what they personally wanted, a la The Secret, a book that makes me want to hurl. (Not that I’m judgy.) And when you’re manifesting doesn’t work, don’t you then feel powerless as well as unmoored to something bigger than yourself?

I’m no researcher, and I’m no rabbi. But one thing is clear to me: Maxine’s view of religion isn’t very nuanced. (Most things are not when you’re a preschooler.) If she were an adult, I could see how her version of God—the celestial big meanie— would have zero correlation with happiness. (And it could drive anyone to God-free no-pressure Bay Area hippie spirituality.) Indeed, in The How of Happiness, an overview of positive psychology and happiness research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the downside of seeing God as a punitive, controlling force seems clear: several studies have found that people who believe that negative events are God’s punishment for their sins have more depression and poorer health than those without such beliefs.

I hope Maxie will grow into a sense of faith, spirituality, and religion that’s more like her big sister’s. Last year on the Fourth of July, Josie watched the fireworks over the East River while alternately screaming with joy and watching silently with her mouth hanging open. “Your mind is bigger than your head, because your mind can go anywhere,” she told me afterward. Transcendental. And Josie, like all self-righteous seven-year-olds, loves the notion of assisting the downtrodden and saving the planet. That’s communal, environmental, and personal. In short, she gets, and I hope Maxine is starting to get, the notion that helping other people and searching for meaning are both essential parts of our religious tradition.

There’s a project called The Happiness Study, funded by the Steinhardt foundation, that explores how Jewish institutions contribute to four “quality of life outcomes.” These are connectedness to others, having problem-solving skills, having social and emotional competence, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. The theory is that these qualities are malleable in childhood and can increase one’s happiness as an adult. The hope, of course, is that they will make Jews feel more connected to the Jewish community.

Jeffrey Kress, a member of the project team for The Happiness Study and a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, agrees that religion as well as spirituality can contribute to happiness. “When you have a sense of connection and feelings of belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you have both social support and perhaps the strength to persevere when there are bumps in the road of life,” he says.

In the future, Kress says, he and his colleagues hope to offer insight into the very different takes on spirituality and meaning that people find within Judaism. Is spirituality something that’s really self-directed? Is it more externally related, like tikkun olam? Is it a peak experience—a sort of religious runner’s high we experience only rarely—or a habit, part of the daily fabric of our lives? To me, these are more interesting questions than wondering whether it’s spirituality or religion that makes children—and adults—happy.

I’m surprised this hadn’t happened before. Writing a weekly Torah column, one gradually learns how to suspend all the machinations of modernity and indulge in the stark rules of simpler times. Smiting seems like a perfectly normal reaction, the plague like a plausible occurrence, and God is everywhere present and involved. In a world burdened by economic uncertainty, geopolitical unrest, and celebrity memorial services, this ancient mindset is not without its charms.

Usually, it is the humans that capture my attention: what, I occasionally found myself thinking, would I have done in Moses’ place? How would I have suffered Joseph’s tribulations? Abraham’s trials? But this week, it was the Supreme Being that was foremost on my mind.

It began with the parasha. In it, the five daughters of the deceased—and deliciously named—Zelophehad petition Moses, arguing that as Jewish tradition allows only males to inherit their fathers’ property, a clan such as their own, consisting only of women, is doomed. Why, they plea, must the name of Zelophehad perish? Why couldn’t his daughters enjoy his fortune and continue his lineage?

Moses brings this before God, and the Almighty doesn’t skip a beat: “Zelophehad’s daughters speak justly,” he says. “You shall certainly give them a portion of inheritance along with their father’s brothers, and you shall transfer their father’s inheritance to them.”

A lesser deity might have scoffed, resenting the insolent humans questioning His commands. A more apathetic creator might have shrugged His heavenly shoulders, leaving the matter for His wretched creatures on earth to resolve. But not our God; He is never beyond hearing the pleas of his people, never averse to conversing with commoners. He listened, and He acted accordingly.

This, I thought, was a particularly moving moment, and after dwelling on it for a long while I felt some mindless distraction was well-deserved. I whisked out my iPhone, and turned to one of the new applications I had recently downloaded, a game called “Pocket God.”

The premise is simple: the player is the invisible Lord of a small Pacific island, on which pudgy pygmies live happily. That is, if one lets them: the game’s greatest pleasure, which helped propel it to great heights on Apple’s iTunes sales chart, is inflicting all manner of otherworldly calamities on the unsuspecting creatures. Tilt the phone, and they slide off the island into shark-infested waters. Twirl your thumbs, and a storm gathers, complete with deadly lighting bolts. Each tap or flip brings with it endless possibilities for sadistic fun. Soon, I was deeply immersed in dispensing biblical doses of random retribution.

As satisfying as this digital slaughtering had been, however, guilt soon took over. Why, I asked myself, was I so ready to resort to violence? The game, after all, offered another path altogether, allowing players to supply their pygmies with fishing rods, for example, and watch with satisfaction as the little guys learn how to find their own food and fend for themselves. Why, then, was I waiting for my creations to fall asleep before punishing them with a menacing vampire bat? Why the lava, the fire, the sharks? Why couldn’t I be a merciful God? If Moses had asked for my opinion, I thought, ashamed, I would have probably advised him to pelt Zelophehad’s daughters with coconuts; it’s what you do with pesky subjects in the handheld, animated universe of which I am the scrupulous sovereign.

Sighing, I had to concede that I was not fit to be a deity, not even for pixelated pygmies, not even for a few minutes each day. In my playful mind, omnipotence left no room for hesitance and had little regard for consequence. Having power meant using it, each and every time, joyously and incuriously. Even if the game’s programmers had allowed it, I can’t imagine listening to my virtual subjects argue against a flaw in my design, let alone conceding the point.

I put down the iPhone and resumed reading the Book of Numbers, which recounted God’s announcement to Moses that the Israelites’ fearless leader will never enter the Promised Land, as he had to be punished for disobeying God in the desert. Sometimes merciful, sometimes stern, intermittently reasonable and erratic, and eternally unknowable: it was impossible to understand God’s motives, let alone replicate them. As if I needed another reminder.

Far is Spektor’s fifth album, but only the third to be released on a major label. After emigrating from the USSR with her parents in 1989 (reluctant to leave behind Regina’s piano and her music teacher, they escaped only when it became necessary), Spektor went to Jewish day school in the Bronx. Earlier this year, the singer, (who has her own entry on the blog Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like) wrote an impassioned blog post in support of Israel, in which she wrote that although she is in many ways a liberal, she believes the media’s portrayal of Israel is heavily biased. “Many of us try to un-Jew ourselves all the time,” she wrote. “It comes from a mixture of fear, guilt of surviving while others didn’t, and embarrassment. We are the root of our and the World’s problems, it seems…The instinct that drives them is the same instinct that drove them to blend in, and then be very surprised when they were put in the ghetto, too.”

This defiance of the areligious conventions of hipsterdom, from which many of her fans hail, reflects her commitment to unironic honesty. Spektor seemingly has the ability to see into loneliest corners of people’s minds, and transform their shame, fear, and angst into song. She has said that for the most part she doesn’t write songs about her own life—rather, it’s clear she writes with generous compassion toward the lives of others.

Like many artists, Spektor’s sound has grown less edgy and more polished over the course of her last few albums. But what makes Spektor a little bit punk rock has never been her music. It’s more about the candor of her lyrics, and the tough stubbornness she seems to exert in rebutting the mundane drudgery of life. Spektor maintains something of the Russian-Jewish refusenik to her style. She sings of bodies and cramped physical spaces and oppressive philosophical ideas, but also of imagination and triumphant weirdness and spiritual escapism. The song “Machine” captures the imagination of someone steeped in Soviet ideas about the West (“Everything’s provided, consummate consumer”), but who nonetheless thinks of it wistfully, and takes comfort in the thought of a sort of Marxist deity “who lacks my organics/and who covets my defects.”

Spektor turns words into sounds, which then somehow become more meaningful than the words, as in the song “Eet,” in which she animates that title syllable with all the power of her wide-ranging vocal prowess. Just when it seems like she might veer into Betty Boop cuteness, she drops an octave and slips instead into soulful crooning. And where her heartbreaking piano playing and devastating lyrics might weigh down another musician, her songs are shot through with the breezy air of her seductive voice.

Far is full of idiosyncratic wisdom. In “Laughing With,” she sings: “No one’s laughing at God in the hospital/No one’s laughing at God in a war…But God can be funny/when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket or Santa Claus/God can be so hilarious.” “One More Time With Feeling” is a whistling-in-the-dark song about mortality masquerading as a life-affirming ditty. I defy anyone to listen to it without thinking of the death of someone they knew. And if no one you know has died, consider yourself warned.

The themes in Far emerge through characters, mostly male, that make the songs feel as though they are non-denominational gospels on the topic of life, or musical chapters in the lives of unheralded prophets. Although it comes in the middle, the track “Human of the Year” is the album’s raison d’etre, the tale of one Karl Projectorinski who finds his fear of a higher power assuaged by the revelation that its realm is earthly. “Why are you so scared you stand there shaking in your pew/The icons are whispering to you/They’re just old men like on the benches in the park/except their balding spots are glistening with gold,” sings Spektor. “Outside the cars are beeping out a song just in your honor/and though they do not know it, all mankind are now your brothers.” When she chants “Hallelujah” at the songs climax, it feels like the one thing she’s been getting at throughout the album, like she is finally giving in to an exultant impulse.

The clunky moments in some of the album’s lighter songs seem designed to keep them out of iPod commercials, which they might otherwise suit. The dolphin noises (seriously) she makes in “Folding Chair” are forgivable because they’re a reminder that the song is offering respite in the form of no-holds-barred silliness and childlike logic with lines like “I’ve got a perfect body ‘cause my eyelashes catch my sweat.”

In the album’s closer, “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” Spektor sings of a character who could easily be God himself: “He begins his quiet ascension…To a place that no religion/has found a path to, or a likeness.” Maybe not, but Spektor provides as viable a path as any to enlightenment.

In the midst of tumultuous economic times, his people struggling with scarcity, uncertainty, and despair, he decides to build himself a new residence. You raise an eyebrow: that particular executive travels constantly, and seems to have little need for a fixed dwelling. But he insists, and construction is soon underway.

You hope that given his enterprise’s dire situation he’d go for something modest, something humble, something sober. You expect him to be practical and austere. You look to him to set an example. But he’s having none of that: he wants his house to be conspicuous and his might apparent.

For his living room, he commissions two statues of angels hammered out of pure gold. He builds the walls out of 48 upright beams, which, for good measure, he has overlaid with gold and held in place by silver foundation sockets. He tosses animal skins and ornate tapestries around, and sprinkles the tables with precious gems.

Oh, and the constant traveling? He’s well aware of that: he has the whole place designed so he could pack it up on a moment’s notice and have it shipped to follow him around as he gallops across the globe. Nowadays, he argues, even a permanent address has to be mobile.

Incensed? Don’t be. We’re not talking John Thain here, the former Merrill Lynch captain with the penchant for costly commodes, or even Frederick H. Waddell, the head of Northern Trust, who accepted $1.5 billion in federal bailout money and fired 450 employees shortly before splurging happily on a corporate retreat that included performances by Chicago, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Sheryl Crow.

No, the executive in question is the Celestial Chairman of the Board, CEO of all that is in heaven and on earth. And in this week’s parasha, he’s in a domestic kind of mood. Gather up 15 fine materials, he tells the Israelites—gold and silver and copper and wood and gems and animal skins and goat hair—and build Me a sanctuary, as I am going to dwell amidst you. And since you’re sort of nomadish these days, make it portable.

Hearing this, I imagine some of the Israelites reacting much like Americans nowadays react when they hear of another bout of executive greed, another corporate jet purchased with federal funds or another bumbling banker piggishly awarding himself and his cabal a hefty bonus. After all, trudging in the desert, the Israelites hadn’t much by way of gems and goat hair lying around, and had immense financial responsibilities on the horizon, like building a homeland or skirmishing with the Jevusites. And I imagine some ancient ancestor of that most fiscally prudent of Jews, Suze Orman, shuffling somberly about the camp, pontificating: “Do not spendeth the money you don’t really haveth on this luxurious sanctuary! Saveth for your retirement! Investeth your gold!”

But to no avail: God, like most Russian oligarchs and American gangsta rappers, wants His to be the coolest crib in the hood. And as much as thrifty tongues might have clucked then as they cluck now, there’s some solid logic to the spending spree.

To understand this rationale, consider the case of two of Manhattan’s finest custom tailors, who, to protect the innocent, shall remain nameless. Both men are at the peak of their prowess, both are masters of cut and hem and pattern, and both are blessed with a discerning and affluent clientele. But their ateliers couldn’t have been more different: one is nestled in a sleek building just off Fifth Avenue, with leather sofas and Persian rugs and espresso machines at hand to sooth and pamper the customers, while the other set up shop in a nondescript office building on Madison Avenue, occupying most of his space with workstations and fabric and paying little attention to what has now come to be called the “retail experience.”

The differences, of course, reflect divergent philosophies: one tailor believes that externalities like plush furniture and hot beverages would just distract him from his demanding craft, while the other thinks less of himself and more of his clients, eager to attract and retain them by whatever means necessary.

Both approaches, of course, are perfectly legitimate, but when it comes to religion, only one tends to work in the long run. No one wants to come and worship at a nondescript office building: we want an extravagant bit of real estate to go along with our spiritual well-being, some stunning surge of interior design to soothe our weary souls. We need our places of worship to be like Apple stores, awe-inspiring and gorgeous and a testament to the will and wonder of a Higher Power.

This is why God insists: the sanctuary is for us, not Him. He’s just bound to provide his people with the best retail experience possible given the inclement conditions.

Let us, then, be more merciful with Thain and Waddell and their looting ilk. Sure, they are greedy and ruthless, but in their vain extravagance they also embody a principle as old as the Exodus itself: when you set forth to build a religion—be it Judaism or capitalism—damn the hardships and the poverty. Build temples—be they sanctuaries or corner offices—and make them lavish. Spend extravagantly. It’s what we need to believe. Always has been.

Thus far, the targets of these anti-religious polemics have been, for the most part, American Bible-belt Protestant fundamentalism and militant Islamism—with Judaism left barely touched by the secularists’ wrath. But this season, Oxford University Press published Solomon Schimmel’s The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth, a post-9/11 polemic directed mainly against Jewish fundamentalism. The book has generated no small degree of public interest, including from many Islamic and Christian scholars and theologians.

Rembrandt’s Moses with the Ten Commandments, c. 1659

Unlike the other members of this cadre—Hitchens, Dawkins, et al.—Schimmel’s book had been fermenting long before 9/11. In the introduction, Schimmel explains that its genesis lies in a 1996 seminar he gave to colleagues on the faculty of Boston’s Hebrew College, in which he tried to account for the remarkable resilience among historically and scientifically educated Orthodox Jews of the rabbinic dogma that the Torah was given by God to Moses at Sinai. “Why,” he asks, “do so many modern Orthodox scientists, and modern Orthodox academics in fields of Jewish studies, continue to affirm the traditional doctrine that the Pentateuch was divinely revealed by God to Moses at Mount Sinai in the thirteenth century BCE, in the face of overwhelming evidence against it from the fields of modern biblical scholarship, comparative religious studies, psychology, anthropology and all the natural sciences?”

This was not simply a professional inquiry, but a profoundly personal one. And it is one that separates Schimmel from the absolute secularism, ideological scientism and personal alientation from religious life that marked critics like Hitchens, Dennett and Dawkins. Although Schimmel subscribes to the findings of modern biblical scholarship, geology, archeology and evolutionary theory—he is also, by his own admission, a member of an Orthodox synagogue and an observant Jew. But he remains an uneasy member of this club. Indeed, his book is quite obviously the result of years of agonizing about the resilience of scientifically untenable and primitive beliefs among otherwise educated and rational people—which is to say, among his “fellow” Orthodox Jews.

Schimmel approaches the problem in two ways: theological and psychological. For the first, Schimmel devotes three of the book’s first five chapters to an unforgiving polemic against both Haredi and Modern Orthodox Jews’ stubbornness in upholding the “unreasonable” foundational doctrine that the Bible was dictated directly to Moses by God. There is little here that is new, as there has been a lively debate about reconciling the sanctity of the Torah with modern scholarship, one that has filled Jewish scholarly journals, for the past century and a half. In fact, the only thing that is surprising here is what has been left out, given the events of our times, in which Jewish biblical fundamentalism has played such a destructive, central role. Schimmel fails to address the only group of contemporary Jews whose literal reading of the Torah has had practical consequences in reality: the extreme wing of the Israeli Settlers’ movement, Gush Emunim, and in particular the element of it known as the Hilltop Youth. Their belief that the inerrant and eternal will of God dictates that indigenous populations of Ancient Canaan be driven out, their homes and places of worship destroyed, has had grave consequences for the state of Israel. This glaring omission severely diminishes the contemporary relevance of Schimmel’s agenda to channel science and reason to curb religious enthusiasm.

Solomon Schimmel

Though delinquent in addressing this sort of radical element in Jewish life, Schimmel does offer something new in the final two chapters: an insightful psychological analysis of the deep reasons for the tenacity of religious beliefs among “otherwise intelligent people.” “For most Orthodox, halakhically committed Jews, raised as such from childhood, the ‘yoke of the law’ is not as burdensome as it appears to an outsider,” he writes. “For many or most such Jews it is actually experienced as a very positive experience. It is the vehicle for doing God’s will and becoming close to him. The…mitsvot are embedded into the very fabric of the religious life, which can be replete with family warmth, positive emotions and intellectual satisfactions.”

And so, many otherwise-enlightened Orthodox Jews marginalize, or simply ignore, the intellectual challenges posed to their faith in order to preserve their rich spiritual and family lives. In fact, as Schimmel explains, a significant number of Jews who—having weighed the costs of a total abandonment of the rewarding life offered by faithful adherence to tradition—engage in the simple survival tactic of compartmentalizing.

Here’s the problem with looking too closely at fundamentalism, a trap into which Schimmel himself occasionally falls: One can become so obsessed with its elements of irrationality that one becomes, in effect, a fundamentalist of a different sort. In arguing against those who choose to follow Torah as the literal word of God, Schimmel—though explicitly denying that he is himself an ideological secularist or an advocate of materialist scientism—refuses to grant any quarter to efforts at a moderate middle: creative attempts at theological compromise between total faith in revelation and an exclusive acceptance of the results of scientific inquiry. By positioning the issue of faith in stark Manichean terms, Schimmel drains the conversation of all hope. This is particularly sad, since his target here is Judaism—a tradition that has for many centuries benefitted from a rich history of debate around this dogma. But Schimmel is so intent on utterly demolishing the synthesis of reason and revelation that he dismisses all efforts at harmonizing faith and science—historical and contemporary.

For instance, Schimmel creates the impression that there has been one standard employed by all Orthodox rabbis from time immemorial: Maimonides’ formulation of the belief in literal revelation of every word and letter of the Torah in his Thirteen Principles of Faith. In and of itself, this is doubly misleading, both because it overlooks Maimonides’ complex, decidedly anti-literalist approach to understanding Scripture’s meaning, and exaggerates the degree to which his Thirteen Principles ever became a kind of Jewish catechism: they did not.

But a larger problem arises when Schimmel applies the alleged Maimonidean standard to the actual practice of Jewish law: “If the words of the Torah don’t necessarily mean what they seem to mean according to their plain, contextual sense, then we needn’t observe the mitsvot (commandments), if we can provide a symbolic, allegorical, or metaphorical understanding of what might appear to be a law but which needn’t be understood as one.” This is wrong. Jewish law has never been dependant on either a strictly construed insistence on the Torah’s textual immaculateness or a literal understanding of that text’s legislative meaning. Quite the contrary: rabbinic law is notable for its indifference to the legal relevance of the peshat, or literal meaning, of Scripture. The entire structure of Jewish law is founded on elaborate system of legal exegesis that so often results in radical departures from the overt literal meaning of the Torah’s text. Examples abound, but let’s point to just one of the most obvious among them: rabbinic tort legislation, while ostensibly based upon the Biblical Lex Talionis—“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a leg for a leg”—mandated pecuniary compensation, not the direct physical retribution suggested by a literal reading of Scripture.

Given his inability to see nuance in Jewish history, it comes as little surprise that Schimmel is equally myopic to contemporary efforts at reconciling faith and reason. In a particularly unwarranted attack, Schimmel waxes incredulous that British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks could say the following: “Religious belief requires faith. But faith is not a denial of the senses. It is trust in something beyond the senses…There was something beyond the human hand that first inscribed the words of the Mosaic book. That something…was God.” This almost poetic interpretation is far more nuanced than any simplistic, dogmatic endorsement of the inerrancy and literal truth of Scripture, but Schimmel dismisses Sacks as little more than a fancy-talking fundamentalist. “It seems to me that Rabbi Sacks’s beliefs and arguments are not as different in their underlying structure from Protestant fundamentalism as he thinks they are,” he writes.

Aside from his ungenerous reading of Sacks’s formulation, Schimmel fails to provide a piece of vital historical context: the still-bitter legacy, for British Jewry, of the notorious Louis Jacobs affair. During the 1960s, Jacobs’ nomination as principal of Jews’ College, England’s establishment Orthodox rabbinical School, was rescinded on account of his insistence on taking modern biblical scholarship into account in formulating his belief in the Torah’s revelation. Given this, it would almost be irresponsible for Sacks not to be circumspect in addressing this dogma, for the social peace of the community he shepherds.

But it is in his dismissal of one modern Orthodox scholar in particular that Schimmel most fully reveals his bias. In one section, Schimmel raises Israeli Orthodox feminist scholar Tamar Ross’s theology of “progressive revelation.” Ross argues against the fixed Orthodox understanding of Jewish law in favor of more plastic interpretations of Jewish law as an endlessly unfolding process that grows with and adapts to major historical and social progress—notably, for Ross, gender equality. Schimmel is unbowed by her theory, which she also refers to as “cumulative revelation”: “It seems to me that Ross is evading, rather than confronting, the challenges to Orthodoxy not only from feminism but, more fundamentally, from biblical scholarship,” he writes, “and that this evasion is motivated…by the fear of the collapse of halakhic authority were she to conclude that the whole notion of divine revelation of the Torah at Sinai is no longer tenable.” Ultimately for Schimmel, it seems any “confrontation” with the Orthodox theory of Divine Revelation is only genuine if it leads to its complete rejection.

Schimmel’s refusal to credit any efforts toward creative compromise between faith and science—of the type which, as Jewish intellectual history amply demonstrates, tend to give rise to great theological works and schools of thought—is unfortunate. Had the theological sections of his book displayed even a small measure of the explorative openness that characterizes the final chapters on the psychology of irrational beliefs, this book might have engendered a productive dialogue between the doubters and true believers. Sadly, its reductionist polemic, that dismisses any such openness as a cop-out, is likely only to stiffen the backs of the very people Schimmel seems so desperate to reach.

Danya Ruttenberg grew up in a mostly non-practicing Jewish family in suburban Chicago, immersed herself as a teenager in the vibrant subcultures of punk rock and political activism, studied religion in college from a detached scholarly distance, and spent much of her twenties flitting amongst bars, art parties, and an eccentric cast of characters in San Francisco. While living there, she became a freelance writer whose work (often about religion) was published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, and edited Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism (Seal Press, 2001), an anthology of essays by Jewish women in their twenties and thirties. In the midst of all this, Ruttenberg began a long and deeply personal process of grappling with God and religious observance. It was a path filled with resistance and uncertainty, punctuated by moments of inspiration that eventually led her to embrace the rigors of Jewish learning and practice. This past May, she was ordained as a rabbi.

Ruttenberg, now thirty-three, chronicles her spiritual awakening in her candid and engaging new memoir, Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion (Beacon, 2008). She spoke to Nextbook about overcoming religion’s bad reputation, the radical act of keeping Shabbat, and the potential for a more complicated understanding of God.

What was your motivation for writing this book?

When I was going through intense spiritual searching, I was reading a lot of stories of other people who had gone through this—St. Theresa and all these folks—and began to notice patterns. At the same time, living in commercialized American culture, religion is given a bad name. I think a lot of liberals see religion as this place you go if you’re too scared to think for yourself. “Spirituality” has become this huge product that’s all about self-gratification and feel-good experiences. What I was going through was not fun. It did not always feel good. It was hard work and sometimes really painful. I hadn’t seen a recent book out there that talked about the tough part of spiritual awakening. It’s part of the process that’s missing from our discourse today, because we’re so geared toward instant gratification and averse to pain. That seemed worth articulating in a clear way.

How do you think that religion came to have such a bad name? It’s almost as if “God” is a dirty word, especially among the liberal, intellectual class.

For a lot of us who came of age in the ‘80s, seeing the religious right ascend to power, it became easy to correlate being religious with censoring films and CDs, anti-abortion work, and all this sort of mind control. And for those of us who didn’t get anything more sophisticated in our lackluster religious upbringings, it seemed easy to think of God as this man up in the sky with a thunderbolt who’s going to zap you. Anybody with any power of critical thinking can say, “I’m more sophisticated than that. I don’t really need some pretend mommy or daddy to give me motivation.” If nobody ever told you that history’s understanding of divinity has been much more complex than that, I understand how religion got such a bad name.

Also, the commercialization of spirituality made it this self-indulgent thing that doesn’t have any substance, but is just something people can do to make themselves feel better about their own lives. If you put those two things together, the creepy fundamentalists on one side, and the insipid New Age people on the other, then two or three thousand years of nuanced religious discourse and sophisticated theology goes out the window. Which is a pity, because most of religious history was written by really smart people who ask really smart questions, like some of the same ones we ask: How can there be a God if horrible things happen? And, how do we understand justice?

What was your social experience like as you became more religious?

At the beginning, I had a lot of shame because I’d internalized this notion that sophisticated, intellectual people aren’t religious. After college, I was visiting the East Coast and wound up in Providence. I knocked on the door of one of my old religious studies professors and we went out to lunch. I mentioned that I’d been hanging out in synagogue a little bit, and in this very snide voice he said, “Oh, you’re going to become pious.” I remember feeling embarrassed. I’d been trained to be a good scholar, but you weren’t actually supposed to believe anything about the religion you were studying. For a little while, I tried to keep my practice on the down-low. I’d go out for sushi with friends and just wouldn’t have the shrimp, and wouldn’t say anything about it. Slowly, as I became more committed to my practice and began to understand that this was going to be the priority in my life, it seemed absurd that I would hang around people who didn’t respect what I was doing. Fortunately, my closest friends were always great and very understanding.

The book you edited, and to which I was a contributor—Yentl’s Revenge—had a sort of sassy Jewish rebel tone, filled with young women asserting unconventional Jewish identities. I wonder how that book figures into where you are now?

A lot of the impetus for doing Yentl’s Revenge was a sense that there were people like me who had similar questions and struggles, who were looking to make Judaism their home but hadn’t yet figured out what that home looked like. When I started to call up bookstores to set up gigs, everyone I talked to was a Jewish woman in her twenties who wanted to tell me her story, and was trying to figure out if she could be both Jewish and…whatever the “and” was. I edited the anthology because I was trying to figure out how to integrate all this stuff in my own life. The process of doing the book was the first moment of being able to stake out my own place in Jewish life. In the seven years since then, I’ve discovered that there is actually quite a bit of Jewish life that has a place for me in it. I guess some of it has really just been about perseverance and determination. I kept sticking around until Judaism and I could find the right wavelength.

I enjoyed a certain amount of nostalgia reading about your punk rock coming-of-age—it made me think that maybe we’re a whole hidden scene of former punk girls turned religious seekers. What part of punk have you carried with you, post-adolescence?

When I was hanging around the punk rock kids, there would be moments when the music would take over and the “small Danya” could let go and go into something bigger—maybe the music, maybe something more than that. There was a feeling of immolation and transcendence. As an adult who became interested in spirituality and prayer, that was, in some ways, the place I was trying to return to, that feeling of allowing the small self to fall away and become part of something bigger, which is a central part of spiritual practice.

Your descriptions of beginning to observe Shabbat were really insightful. Referencing a Talmudic idea, you write, “in the World to Come, I suppose, we are more fully ourselves than we are able to be in the current world, where all we seem to do is go and make and rush to achieve.”

In our day and age, asking someone to spend one day off the Blackberry, off email, off TV, off of money, and focusing rather on the fundamental aspects of being a human being—resting, singing, eating meals with friends, having long conversations, taking walks, prayer, doing things that nourish our deepest selves—is radical. It was no surprise to me when, five or six months ago, people—secular non-Jews—started talking about having one night a week that they were going to turn off their Blackberries and not check email. It speaks to this desperation people have gotten to, unable to just be anymore. Being in the present moment can be terrifying. If you’re running around, maybe you don’t notice that you’re angry or terrified. You manage to avoid whatever you’re trying to avoid very successfully. The minute you try to sit still for a whole day, you begin to notice where you are, and that can have frightening implications for the walls you build up. I think we resist that at all costs.

You wrote about hoping early on in your journey that you’d rid yourself of fear and uncertainty through religious illumination. What happened to that?

I was very engaged in this whole notion of enlightenment—the Buddhist tradition has a lot to say about there being one experience that changes everything. I did have one experience during meditation, in the spring of 2000, that changed a lot of things—I had a very visceral, palpable view of the way everything is interconnected. But it didn’t change everything. I was still me on the other side. I think spiritual practice helps me be kinder and gentler with myself, but the existential questions never totally go away. As long as we’re still people, we’re going to have moments of terror and we’re going to be afraid to be lonely. The question is, what context do we put those feelings in, and how do we work through them?

How does Jewish practice contextualize those feelings?

Jewish practice is, in essence, a series of gestures that help realign our focus toward service of the divine. When we pray, perform a mitzvah, say a blessing, or change our behavior in any way, we are remembering: “Oh yeah—God.” We’re remembering on some level, whether or not it’s conscious, that the point of all of this is service, not personal fulfillment. It’s not about me getting everything I want, but rather about me being part of a much bigger, interconnected plane of existence or organism. Call them mindfulness gestures. That’s why the daily practice piece is so important. You meditate, or pray, or keep Shabbat once and nothing changes. But do it often enough and you start to think about it when you’re not even doing the thing.

What do you think the future holds for deeper ideas about God and religion, especially Judaism?

I don’t know. Nobody really knows. Certainly the recent flurry of books on atheism speaks to the fact that a lot of people still haven’t gotten the memo that there is such thing as nuanced religious discourse and different ways of talking about God. There are a lot of people who still see the man up on the mountain with the thunderbolt. I do think that over the last ten years we’ve seen a renewed interest in God among a very specific Jewish set. There’s this passionate, engaged, creative minority of religious Jews our age who are doing independent minyanim, writing, thinking, and doing exciting work. And there’s a schism between them and the sort of next-level superficial Jewish culture expressed as clever T-shirt slogans or snarky comments about what it was like at camp. That’s where Jewish identity is still in its most shallow incarnation. I hope the depth wins out.

My rabbi was suspicious of me: a Jewish boy who had been taught very little about Judaism. I was equally suspicious of him. His Judaism, so different from the cultural variety I grew up with, was both a source of bafflement and wonder. Even his home was a mystery: the quiet wife I rarely saw, his children with their long and thick sidelocks. I knew I was ignorant about what he was there to teach me, but I was prepared to enter into the mystery of it. I longed to be shown a reality beyond the rational. But he always presented religious truth as logical, something that could be understood like one of my LEGO kit manuals.

As I fell asleep on the Saturday nights before my lessons, I would try and come up with questions to ask him. They weren’t trick questions. They were about the things I loved that I wanted to fit into the puzzle of religion we put together on his dining room table. One morning I queried, “What about dinosaurs?” To this the rabbi quoted Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days.” For a pre-adolescent raised on a steady diet of The Land That Time Forgot and Land of the Lost, this was a revelation: The Bible mentions dinosaurs! But more than that, it was a strait bridging two continents, my late night spiritual yearnings and the world of reason and logic. I took some slow unsteady steps across. I tried to imagine these “giants” were the giant reptiles that would slowly transform their way over time into birds; their scales turning into pinions, snouts into beaks, cartilage into hollow, weightless bone.

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the now famous 2005 case tried in Dover, Pennsylvania—in which school board members voted to include a statement about intelligent design in the biology curriculum of their local high school—U.S District Court Judge John E. Jones ruled against the school district on the grounds that intelligent design was poor science. But he also remarked, “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.” Intelligent design, Jones argued, was just creationism in disguise. Despite what the judge calls their hidden motives, the school board’s intelligent design proponents still likely believed in its fundamental claim: Life is too complex to have been a result of random processes or natural selection; an intelligent designer must have been involved.

Nevertheless, more than two years later there has been little to stem the tide of creationism and intelligent design theory. Last spring, the Creation Museum, founded by Ken Ham, opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Ham, who also runs the extremely popular Christian web site Answers in Genesis, believes not only in the six-day account of creation found in Genesis, but also that there is scientific evidence for a ten-thousand-year-old earth, that the Grand Canyon is verification of a great flood, and that cave drawings and other fossil records illustrate that human beings and prehistoric behemoths lived together. This, of course, discounts the accepted idea that dinosaurs walked the earth more than a hundred million years ago. The museum is a sprawling sixty-thousand-square-foot compound housing animatronic dinosaurs (in some displays carousing with humans), a walk-through ark, displays on original sin, the killing of Abel by Cain, and the Tower of Babel. In one exhibit a triceratops is fitted with a saddle.

In early 2007, Newsweek released a poll that revealed, yet again, what has by now become very familiar data. When asked whether Americans accept the theory of evolution, nearly half say no. The poll also reveals that one third of college graduates believe that the world in all its variety came into being fully formed as described in the Bible. Three out of four evangelical Christians believe this event took place about ten thousand years ago.

Also last year, Ron Paul, the one Republican candidate that even some progressives believed would make a respectable president, had this to say when asked what he thought about evolution: “I think it’s a theory, the theory of evolution, and I don’t accept it as a theory.” What is most disturbing here is not Paul’s answer, but the way he forms it. By calling evolution a theory, he uses the word in its colloquial sense; something that is less than a fact. But evolution, as Stephen Jay Gould was fond of saying, is both a theory and a fact, when these terms are used in their proper context.

More recently the film Expelled, written and narrated by Ben Stein, portrays evolution as the root of modern evils, such as Nazism. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is depicted as a benign but rigorous theory that simply wants to critique evolution, suggesting that the idea of a designer is a rational, not necessarily religious, idea.

It’s humorous to imagine a family at the museum, the father placing his child in the saddle of the great horned beast, the child giggling, the mother smiling, and in the air around them the message that their faith is reasonable, that theories—the same that make DVD players whir and spin, that engineer hybrid SUVs—are in line with Scripture. But I can’t find it funny. Not just because children visiting the museum will likely walk away with a skewed idea of the history of the physical world, but more because they will walk away with a skewed understanding of the religious imagination.

Religious experience begins with an encounter, which is then given form by the imagination. We then turn this form into texts, prayers, rituals, and of course, myths. Communities gather around these stories and continue to use the religious imagination to keep them relevant. The very notion of being in communion with God, whether through prayer or ritual, in believing that a man died and was resurrected, or in eating unleavened bread for a week, is the least rational of endeavors. But this is where its power lies. If the moments we commemorate through our rituals had simply occurred in history, there would be little possibility of giving them new meaning in the way, for example, the American slaves saw in the miraculous moments of the Jewish Exodus story a vision for their own liberation. When ritual is seen as the retelling of a mythological event, then its ability to function as a metaphor is enlivened each time. A purely historical event is static. While it might offer a moral lesson, there is nothing inherently symbolic about it. The mythologizing of events makes them part of our ritual and liturgy and allows us to reimagine them. But the religious imagination has been replaced by a need to rationalize religious faith. The motto of the Creation Museum is “Prepare to Believe,” but revelation is not the intent of the exhibits. The purpose of the museum is to prove that the Bible is truth, and to induce religious stupor it plays on an ignorance of science and what the doing of science really means.

Religion functions because we do and say the same things over and over again, not to prove them, but to keep them alive in a world that demands we respond rationally most of the time. Even the most fervent biblical literalist usually goes to the doctor when he or she gets sick, and is happy for the medicine offered, medicine that was discovered and developed with that old stick-in-the mud, science, the same discipline that helps us to understand our world in all its complexity. Prayer might make the ill feel less hopeless, but it’s reason that gets the healing chemical compounds into the bloodstream.

Despite my wish to trust my rabbi’s teaching on the origin and the age of the earth, I was still not fully convinced. The next week, after we had said the morning blessings and opened the Chumash to begin, I asked, “But what about cavemen? What about Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon men? They found their skulls.” I was almost rising up out of my chair. He waved his hand and started turning pages. “Those aren’t old at all. They’re just the skulls of black people.”

This time I didn’t believe him. I knew that he was misreading the text, maybe even purposely. And it broke my heart.

I was incapable of doing anything else, so I found my place in the book and waited for him to begin. But even if this were to happen today, what would I say? Is there any kind of evidence that I could present that would show him how not only wrong, but how fundamentally sinister this idea really this? Like the exhibits at the Creation Museum, built on their own foundation of scientific interpretation, this kind of reason can’t be combated with a set of logical or empirical facts. The contemporary religious model is one that eschews doubt for certainty, which is the ruin of the religious imagination. The only artifact left standing is a concrete reality that holds no mystery.

Squaring what we know about the natural world with biblical faith is an attempt to sift out the rational chunks from the deposits of religion. Even the smallest gold nugget can make the faithful feel prosperous: Religious faith is not irrational and some of its most important aspects conform to what we know empirically about the world. But the attempt to reconcile religious faith with rationality has revealed this gold to be nothing more than pyrite (yes, fool’s gold), for its ability to trick even the most meticulous prospector into thinking he had struck it rich.

I’m certain many of the Americans polled by Newsweek don’t want to be unreasonable. Most people enjoy the benefits that science provides, from the technological wonders of iPods and Tivos to cancer treatments and mosquito-repellent candles. But most Americans also believe in God, something that they know intuitively contradicts a scientific world view. What to do? The idea that science is fallible in some regard, that we are not under its thrall no matter how much we take advantage of what it offers, is a small comfort. Maybe evolution just happens to be the place where science gets it wrong. This has long been the general American position on this issue. Many scientists of Darwin’s time felt the same way. If evolution is true, the specialness of human beings is called into question. For Christians this is particularly profound. If man evolved from lower forms then there couldn’t be the historical people known as Adam and Eve, created by God and given dominion over the earth. If they didn’t exist then they didn’t eat the forbidden fruit. If they didn’t eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil then there would be no original sin. And if there is no original sin, then redemption by Jesus is unnecessary. For religious people in general, whether or not they believe in Jesus, the threat is just as real: If we weren’t created in God’s image, where is real meaning for our lives found?

Scientists today are loath to admit that religious belief played an important part in their forebears’ impetus to examine and understand the natural world. Any sentiment that has even a scent of religious feeling is greeted with pinched noses, with great skepticism if not outright contempt. This is true even for those religious ideas that one might consider moderate or even liberal. Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, himself a student of neuroscience and a staunch atheist, suggests that the religious moderate is just as dangerous as the fundamentalist because the moderate leaves the door open to religious ideas in all their forms, including the damaging literal ones.

Even as arguments about God’s existence were waged in the cloisters, the exploration of the world, both in fact and by exaggerated accounts, was turning up wonders by the hundreds. As knowledge of the world expanded, explorers believed that our knowledge of God expanded as well. The Bible might be the central source of knowledge, they believed, but they knew it was not the only source. Second only to the Bible was the natural world. And as the Bible was a source of moral example, then the book of nature must be also. In this way the inspection of nature was a twofold enterprise. There was much to be learned about the behavior of beasts and birds, but there was also a secondary, metaphorical lesson. Nature represented something about God.

In a medieval bestiary translated by T.H. White there is a description of an animal called a Vulpus. The Vulpus, a kind of fox, covers itself in red mud and lays down until carrion-feeding birds land on it hoping for a tasty meal. A vicious and wily killer, the Vulpus easily devours them. But the description of this fabulous beast doesn’t end there. The bestiary goes on to explain that the means by which the Vulpus exploits the birds are those by which the devil exploits humanity. When people are concerned only with their earthly appetites, they are not aware of the devil and he, like the Vulpus, effortlessly consumes them. Only when our attention is turned to spiritual things can we recognize the devil for what he is. While the bestiary is a catalogue of animals, in its brief description of the Vulpus the book also comments on the failings of birds (and people). The writer finds a moral lesson hidden in the workings of nature. The moral meaning supplanted any factual account, and in fact many of the beasts found in these compendiums were fantasy.

For medieval thinkers, nature continued to hold this dual quality, as a vehicle for moral instruction and a reflection of God’s creative will. But eventually new discoveries in science suggested nature had an organization and purpose all its own. The fanciful creatures in the bestiaries couldn’t compete with the actual specimens of real things even more wondrous. As knowledge expanded, ideas about God began to take on a less supernatural quality. Maybe, some argued, nature was removed from any divine purpose. For the many who were deists, God had indeed made the world, but he took no interest in it, never intervened on behalf of his creatures, and certainly did not act in history. God set the universe in motion and left it on its way. For thinkers like Rene Descartes, nature was a kind of mechanism, and human beings automatons. But we possessed something else: a spirit. The body was imbued with reason and will by God.

In the late seventeenth century the theologian William Paley tried to reconcile the independent workings of nature and with his belief in a personal God in his book Natural Theology, where he introduced what has come to be known as the “watchmaker analogy.” Paley describes himself walking along a garden lane and coming across a watch in the grass. It’s easy to deduce that the watch didn’t grow out of the ground. Something so complicated must have had a maker. Paley then goes on to look at the world around him, ants crawling with purpose, ancient trees rising up, the sun warming the earth. How could these things, so much more complex than even a watch, not have had an intelligent maker also? God did make the universe, but he had not abandoned it.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an explosion of scientific expeditions was bringing to home ports all manner of plants and animals, not just supposed unicorn horns and tales of dog-men. The diversity of the natural world was displayed in all its glory in public museums, not hidden away in private collections.

On May 28, 1807, two hundred years to the day before the opening of the Creation Museum, the Reverend Louis Benjamin Rudolph Agassiz had a son who would be the first in a long line of Agassiz men not to become a Protestant minister. Instead, he would develop an inordinate fondness for fish and become a leading figure in the field of ichthyology. This wouldn’t be his only legacy. Louis Agassiz, founder of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (now part of the Harvard Museum of Natural History), wrote one of the most important works on taxonomy, An Essay on Classification. In 1859, the same year the museum opened (a museum that would be the envy of many other institutions), Darwin’s book The Origin of the Species was making its way to booksellers. While Agassiz built his museum to be one of the finest collections of scientific specimens—barrels of fish and other creatures were constantly being delivered—Agassiz himself was a staunch opponent of Darwin’s new theory. His religion was informed by the deists who came before him, naturalists and philosophers who didn’t believe in a God that offered personal salvation, but held that the natural sciences proved, in effect, the existence of a divine will. In his book Agassiz wrote, “The organization of living beings in their connection with the physical world . . . prove[s] in general the existence of a Supreme Being as the Author of all things.”

Agassiz’s museum set the bar for all natural history museums, but there was one thing that all this collecting and classifying and storing of specimens made clear to its founder: The handiwork of God is clearly visible in the natural world. There is more evidence here than even the Bible could hope to demonstrate. What happened next is well known. Darwin forced the hand of the naturalists, and science sloughed off whatever religious sentiment was left. But Darwin also forced the hand of those religious communities that had no interest in science in the first place.

While philosophers, theologians, and naturalists were trying to show that faith was rational, that one could be an intellectual and a scientist, could enjoy the comforts of modernity and still hold to a religious worldview, many Christians decided they didn’t need God to be something that could be quantified. Faith isn’t rational because it relied on revelation. One didn’t come to God by way of philosophical analyses. You were born again and then, if you wanted to know something about God, you read the Bible. But Darwinism and modern approaches to religion (literary criticism, archeology) were threats to the very core of Christian theology: the centrality of man in God’s creation, his ultimate fall and original sin, and his redemption by Jesus Christ. To defend against this frontal attack, biblical literalists took up a peculiar kind of weapon. It wasn’t enough to simply defend belief as an experience. They began to use the language of science to prove that the natural world provided evidence for the biblical account.

A century after Paley and twenty years after the publication of The Origin of the Species, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote what some believe is his finest poem, “The Windhover.” The poem reads like an attempt to return to the prescientific vision of nature, but even that effort seems influenced by the naturalist’s spirit. The first stanza contains the naturalist’s meticulous inspection of nature and the spiritual yearning of the Psalms:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Hopkins recognizes the value of nature as a source of religious meaning, but he also understands that nature (in this case a falcon) still exists independent of that meaning. God might be found in nature, but nature can be understood without God. Even Agassiz, who wasn’t a biblical literalist, still uses literal language when writing about God. But Hopkins disregards any literalism. In fact, the poem is a litany of metaphors. There is not a single image that does not contain multiple meanings or possible interpretations. Nevertheless, the religious imagery is palpable. Take for example the use of the word “ecstasy,” long employed as being related to a particular religious state. Is the ecstasy that of the bird or of Christ, watching as his creation bears witness to God’s glory? Hopkins channels William Paley and the deists but he forgoes the rationality of their method for something else. Look, he says, at the wondrous workings of this falcon, so much like the complications of a clock. First, he acknowledges the desire to merge the rational and the religious, but he also returns the religious to its long lost home: irrationality.

Only metaphor can create a relationship between human beings and their world that is not one of pure empiricism. Religious language may pretend to literalism, but this is disingenuous at best. In his essay on Moby Dick, the literary critic James Wood equates Melville’s unending metaphors of the whale with those that stand for God. For Melville, the fact that language was capable of even attempting to contain the ineffable was both a wonder and a terror. Language says something and nothing about God, Wood writes: “Thus language does not help us explain or describe God. Quite the contrary, it registers our inability to describe God; it holds our torment. . . . Yet language is all there is, and thus Melville follows it as Ahab follows the whale, to the very end.” It is precisely because language is all there is that religion has tried so hard to move beyond language towards some kind of empirical evidence.

The “giants” my rabbi was referring to were taken from a passage that is part of a mythological story about divine beings who take mortal women as wives. Their offspring are called nephilim, described in Genesis as “the heroes that were of old, warriors of renown”—not Tyrannosaur and Triceratops. In the story of the nephilim, my rabbi saw an opportunity to trick a naive kid into believing the Bible was a legitimate source of knowledge about zoology. There was nothing in science to contradict it.

There was, however, another reading that I might have embraced had the rabbi not worried so much about his faith appearing sane. The stories of the angels, of heavenly beings taking mortal women for wives and rearing a race of giants who would go on to do legendary deeds is precisely the kind of tale I wanted my religion to hold. As much as I held to a scientific world view, I ached for a mythic sense of time and history. I knew giants didn’t really exist, but this didn’t matter. The stories of giants, of heroes and angels, become metaphors for our relationship with the world, metaphors that point to its holiness. Whether tales are true or false is beside the point. And to try and make them true in the same way that archaeological evidence proves humans did not attach carts to lumbering brontosaurus is to maim—maybe even destroy—what their real value for us is.

Maisie is in the sixth grade at M.S. 51 in Brooklyn. She lives in that borough’s Cobble Hill neighborhood with her mother, her mother’s partner, and her little sister, Mia. She also spends time at the home of her father, John Baronian, and his wife, Erin McLaughlin. Somehow, between her school, homework, guitar lessons, karate classes, and the back-and-forth between houses, we managed to find time to talk to each other.

What’s your favorite subject in school?

I don’t know if it counts as a subject, but my favorite thing is drama.

You also attend Hebrew school. How long have you been going, and how often are you there?

Twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. This is my first year at the Hebrew school I’m going to now, but I went to another one for three years. So this is my fourth year of going to a Hebrew school.

So you started when you were around seven. Did you like it right away?

At first I wasn’t really sure about it, I think, but then I got used to it and I like it.

Did you get interested in going yourself or did one of your parents have the idea first?

One of my parents. My mom.

Why do you think your mom felt it was important for you to go to Hebrew school?

I guess because I’m Jewish and I’m going to have a bat mitzvah.

How much of Hebrew school is spent studying things that are not exactly religious, like history, and then how much do you spend on actual devotion?

Well, I think that they’re connected. Because when we learn about Jewish history, it’s about people who were religious.

Do you feel like you’re religious?

Yeah.

So you believe in God?

Yeah.

How do you picture God?

I’ve asked myself that question before, and I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’m not really sure.

Do you picture God as an entity or as more of a sort of energy?

What do you mean by energy?

Some people say they feel that God is everywhere. And some people picture almost a person, a specific being.

I think God’s sort of a mixture, like a person and also everywhere.

Do you think of God as a “he”?

People say “he,” and I’ve never heard anybody say “she.” But I don’t really think of God as a “he.” More sort of an “it.”

How do you feel sure that God exists?

I guess I’ve grown up believing in God, so I just do.

Why do you think you grew up believing in God?

As I talk about it, I think it’s from Hebrew school. And I also go to a Jewish sleepaway camp, Camp Young Judaea Sprout Lake. At camp we pray every morning, and we follow every rule of Shabbat.

Does it feel to you as if rituals such as observing all the rules of Shabbat are closely connected to believing in God?

Yeah, because, I mean, that’s one of the Ten Commandments: to observe Shabbat.

Do you think that God is loving?

Sometimes in weird ways, different ways, but yeah.

What’s an example of how God is sometimes loving in a weird way?

Like the story of Abraham and Isaac, and the sacrifice. It’s just to see if Abraham is actually faithful to God. It’s different than normal love.

Have there been any times in your life when you feel like God has been loving in weird ways? Times that you’ve been tested or challenged?

Well, it’s a test when something hard happens to anybody. I mean, not necessarily sacrificing your son—anything hard. When I started at my new school, since I went from a school in Manhattan to a school in Brooklyn, and most people went to school with their friends, I didn’t know anybody that went to my school. So that was sort of hard. But not really, really hard.

Why is it important to you to have a bat mitzvah?

Well, I’ve been studying for it at Hebrew school and I feel like it’s an important part of Judaism to have a bat mitzvah or a bar mitzvah. And because, well, most Jewish people have had a bar or bat mitzvah.

And why is it an important part of Judaism?

Because it’s becoming—well, not an adult adult, but becoming older.

Did your parents do it?

No, but I know that my mom wishes she did.

What are you doing to prepare for the bat mitzvah?

I’m learning how to read Hebrew, and that will help with the Torah. I’m learning prayer. And since you have your bar or bat mitzvah partly in the morning you have to lead a service, so I’ve been going to services also.

Do you know yet what your portion’s going to be?

No, I don’t start until like a year before my bat mitzvah. At my Hebrew school you don’t have yours until your thirteenth Hebrew birthday.

am eleven.”" />Do you think that you’ll keep going to Hebrew school after your bat mitzvah?

I don’t think I’ll keep going to Hebrew school, but I’ll still keep going to my Jewish sleepaway camp. Besides the part that you sleep over and it’s during the summer, my camp is similar to Hebrew school.

Do you think you’ll keep going to services?

Yeah.

Do you like going?

Um, yeah.

You sound a little hesitant.

I like it, but—it’s just that it’s early in the morning.

And what do you feel like you get out of going?

Well, I get to know prayers better. I learn ones that I didn’t know—or didn’t know well—before.

Do you feel like going to synagogue is connected to believing in God?

Yeah, I do. Because all the prayers that you say in synagogue are praying to God. And I guess you can’t really pray to something that you don’t believe in.

Do you have a favorite prayer?

I don’t think I do. But I like some of the tunes for some of the prayers. I like the tune that we do to “Mi Chamocha” at my sleepaway camp. It’s a very happy, upbeat tune.

Why do you think people want to pray together? Why go to temple rather than stay at home and pray in your own way?

I guess it’s more special when it’s with other people. Especially with a lot of people. And at home it’s just at home, not a special place.

Why have a special place?

I think because for some people religion is the biggest part of their lives, so they should have a special place for the religion.

Why do you think that religion is so important for so many people? Why do people need religion—or does God need people to be religious?

Well, in the Torah it says that God said to Abraham, “I am your God, and you will be Jewish.” And then once that went on and on and on, people followed what their families did.

Do you think that religion can help people deal with death?

Do you mean when they’re dying or after they’re dead?

Either.

Well, there are prayers for people when they’re sick to help them get better. I don’t know about after they’re dead.

What do you think happens when people die?

I really have no idea. I mean, it’s not like I can ask anybody who’s died what happened. I haven’t thought that much about death. I am eleven.

Say someone’s sick and says a prayer to get better. Does God actually change things and make people better?

I think that’s part of it. So, partly yes. But it’s also partly how much your body can handle.

Do you think if you have kids you’ll also want them to go to Hebrew school?

Yeah. It’s a big part of being Jewish. It’s a big part of my life. I would want it to be a big part of my kids’ lives.

Do you ever find yourself thinking about things you learned in Hebrew school and applying them to other situations?

Well, in a way. Like, in normal school we’re learning about ancient Rome; we learned about the Coliseum and about some of the emperors, like Julius Caesar. And before, we learned about ancient Greece. In Hebrew school they’ve talked about how the Romans and the Greeks persecuted the Jews. But they don’t really talk about it that much during normal school.

What’s your favorite holiday?

Probably Passover. Personally, I really like matzo, even though after a while—since I don’t eat leavened bread for a long time—sometimes it can get sort of annoying. I usually go away to family for Passover. I like doing that. The food is good, I get to see relatives. And it’s a story about freedom, the Passover story. It connects to the question you asked before about thinking about things I’ve learned. We’ve also studied ancient Egypt at school, and I’ve thought about the story of Passover when we do it, but obviously it doesn’t come up during school.

What are Seders like in your family? I’ve been at ones where people argue the finer points of the Haggadah for five hours, and ones where people run through it really fast and skip over whole sections just to get to the food.

Ours are somewhere in the middle. It’s not like I’m starving by the time the food is there. But it’s not like there’s not enough praying, either. Sometimes when we say the plagues we pass around little bags that have different things for every plague. There are little cows and if you squeeze them their eyes, like, pop out. And little fake bugs, and little frogs. And little paper things that represent the hail.

Do you enjoy looking for the afikomen?

Yes. I usually find it. I have a little cousin who looks for it with me. But I used to be the only kid—well, the only kid old enough to actually look for it. So I wasn’t looking for it against anybody.

Do you still ask the four questions?

Yeah. When my sister gets older, she’s going to do it, but she’s really little now. I ask the four questions in Hebrew.
.
What’s your favorite Passover food?

Matzo ball soup.

He’s been pulling out the stops lately, God has. I’ve seen my manuscript; I don’t blame Him.

“You’re paranoid,” says one friend. “God doesn’t care what you write.”

“I call Him a prick in the Preface.”

“You’ve got a persecution complex,” says another.

“God?” says a third (at $250 an hour). “You’re transferring.”

“I’m what?” I ask him.

He clicks the top of his pen, leans back in his leather office chair. “Let’s talk about your mother,” he says.

Okay, let’s.

She e-mailed me.

My mother has a son named Shalom whom she loves dearly, but he isn’t me, or more accurately, I’m not him. He is married with many properly Day-Eight-With-A-Rabbi circumcised children, none of this Doctor-in-the-Delivery-Room narishkeit. He lives next door to her, in a proper Yiddishe community, and he keeps the Sabbath and he calls it Shabbos, and he phones her before Shabbos and wishes her a good Shabbos and he meets her in synagogue on Shabbos and they walk home together on Shabbos, and he phones her after Shabbos and wishes her a good week and he calls it a gut vuch, and all the myriad conditions of her love are blissfully met (he also wrote a book, this son, and it was also called Beware of God, but it wasn’t short stories, it was mussar, chastisement, rebuke. “I loved it,” his mother said). She has been the victim of some cosmic bait-and-switch, and she has spent most of my life looking for the receipt. “This,” she says as she pats her pockets and looks through her coat, “is not what I purchased.”

Her e-mail came the day after I told my wife how well the writing had been going. She wrote asking to see pictures of “the baby”—we didn’t give my son a Hebrew name and she has yet to address him by his name. God, on a mission to stop me from writing, helped her out with ending:

I’d like to hold him, too, in my arms. Maybe one day.
- Mom.

PS: Fuck you.
- God.

You see, He knows that contact with my family—any contact—used to shut me down. I couldn’t write a word—I was too angry. William Stafford once said, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block.” William Stafford never met my mother.

But that didn’t happen this time. And I think I know why. I rode motorcycles for a while—sportbikes—on different racetracks around the country.

“It’s safer than on the streets,” we would say.

Not as safe, though, as leaving the thing parked in the garage. There’s something addictive about all that power in the palm of your hand. My neighbor, who hunts, says the same thing of his gun. It seems to me that a pen—or pencil, or keyboard, or paintbrush—feels the same way. Once you give in to it, and just give it some gas—that power can be hard to give up.

So I didn’t.

I replied to her e-mail, and I attached a small picture of our son. Then I unattached the picture of our son, and attached a picture of an African-American baby. Then I unattached the picture of the African-American baby, and re-attached the picture of our son. Then I attached a picture of a violin. Then I unattached the picture of the violin, and hit “send,” and then I went back to writing.

* * *

A few days later, my in-laws came from London.

“We’re staying a week,” said my mother-in-law.

“That oughta do it,” said God.

If you happened to walk by us sitting at a café at the Central Park Zoo two weeks ago, you might have thought we were a family of meteorologists.

“Is it always so cold here in May?” my mother-in-law asked.

“Not so cold, but cold.”

“It’s not so cold like this in England.”

“Oh, no?”

Long pause.

“But you have a lot of rain there, no?”

“Yes, yes. A lot of rain.”

“Right.”

“Here it’s dry but cold.”

“Yes.”

“There it’s warm.”

“Sure.”

“But wet.

“Yes.”

Now, here’s Sal with sports.

God also gave my father-in-law Parkinson’s, taunting me with the idea of my own parents’ inevitable aging and death. “Do you really want to write this book about them?” God asks (I don’t think God gave my father-in-law Parkinson’s just to keep me from writing, but I do think that having given my father-in-law Parkinson’s, He figured He might as well put the guy on a plane to New York to get me to stop writing. I’m not crazy).

My father-in-law’s disease had progressed some since I last saw him, his motor functions had become robotic and awkward. Watching him trying to eat reminded me first of an insect, then of a machine on an assembly line, his arm mechanical, bending this way and that as he tried to bring his fork to his mouth. My heart broke for him. Then it broke for my mother-in-law. Then my heart broke for my wife. Then it broke for my own father. And then my heart broke for my mother, and it broke for my sisters. It shattered for my aunt, collapsed for my brother, went belly-up for my uncle. My heart was kaput. My heart was on the fritz. My heart was a lemon.

There’s a happy ending, though—he’s still a prick! I did what they always say you should do: “Look beyond the disease and see the person.” And as horrified and remorseful as I had been to first witness his infirmity, within the hour I could no longer see it. I looked beyond the disease, and when I did, I saw the man who continues to tyrannize his daughter, to ignore her dreams, who to this very day refuses to hear of the pain he causes her. Pricks might want to revise that old shibboleth: “Stop looking at me. Look at my disease. I’m disabled, for God’s sake.”

Three long hours later, we drove home, a hundred and eighty miles up the Thruway, belting out songs with our son—”The Wheels On The Bus,” “Five Little Monkeys”—eatin’ ca-cas (crackers) and chuggin’ ba-bas (bottles).

It rained while we were gone. Our son is 18 months old now, and he has a big blonde ‘fro, and big blue eyes and little Keen sandals, and I lifted him out of the truck and steadied him on the ground and he ran down the driveway, stomping in the rain puddles and squatting down besides overturned newts.

“Newt,” he said. “Uh oh.”

I went inside and tried to get a little writing done before dinner. If I miss a day it’s that much more difficult to get started the following morning.

“Dada!” he called.

I ignored him.

“Dada!” he called again.

“What?”

“Dada!”

“WHAAAAT?”

“DADA!” he called.

He’d made his way into the bedroom and was standing beside my chair, his head cocked to get my attention. This is a game we play—he calls my name and I lean over in his face and pretend to shout “WHAAAAT?” as loudly as I can. Then he runs away and I chase him. He’ll claim credit for it, but I totally made it up.

“Dada!” he said.

“What?

“Dada!”

“WHAAAAT?”

He laughed—”Ahhhh!”—and ran away, and I closed my laptop, slid it under the bed and took off after him, his head of crazy curls disappearing into the kitchen.

“I’m…gonna…GET YOU!”

God’s dirtiest trick yet.

No pressure.

I suppose I should be grateful—God has 72 names, one of which is Shalom; in a crueler mood, they might have named me Rock Of Salvation Auslander, or He Who Was Is And Always Will Be Auslander. I have a difficult enough time at the DMV as it is: “No, not Sharon Alexander. Shalom Auslander.” I had a difficult time in yeshiva as well. There it was the writing down of my regrettably sacred name, and not its pronunciation, that presented a problem. Studying and writing primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish as we did, everything I put my name on—quizzes, book reports, Highlights—became instantly holy. These once insignificant scraps of paper (and one time my brown paper lunch bag) could never again be mistreated, for now they contained upon them the very name of God Himself (and also, in the case of that brown paper lunch bag, a smiley face and a note from my mother reminding me to eat the fruit). It was forbidden to let them touch the floor, it was forbidden to throw them away, it was forbidden to place anything on top of them.

“Name of the Creator!” Rabbi Brier would shout in horror, pointing at the McGraw-Hill American History lying anti-Semitically on top of my Talmud test. “Name of the Creator!”

My superpower was more trouble than it was worth. When my classmates received their quizzes back from Rabbi Brier, they simply waited until his back was turned and tossed them in the bin. I had to take my quiz, walk outside the classroom, go upstairs, and hike all the way to the Bais Midrash (study hall) on the far side of the yeshiva where they kept a brown cardboard box reserved for holy pages without a home: torn prayer books, old Haggadahs, crumbling Talmuds, and the recently holified “What I Did This Summer,” by God Auslander. The only benefit was vengeance—if during recess my friend Dov ever got me out at dodgeball, I would wait until Rabbi Brier’s back was turned, lean over and quickly write my name on his test paper. “Psych!” Then Dov would have to travel 40 days and 40 nights to the Holy Box upstairs, the contents of which, at the end of every month, the rabbis would take out back and bury in the ground. Apparently God recycles.

What does this have to do with writing?

What does this have to do with not writing?

What does this have to do with digging holes in my head?

Piss off. You try writing something holy.

* * *I’ll get to Marley and Me in a minute.

* * *

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was the name of the Lord, and so the second word they came up with, immediately after the Word, was the word “holy,” which described the first Word, which you were prohibited from uttering, even though there were only two words in total, effectively cutting the language in half.

In the beginning, basically, it was one step forward and two steps back.

Soon came the words “shant” and “mustn’t” and “stoning” and “kill,” and then a whole lot of other words which you were required to say in the event you ever uttered the first Word, expressing regret for uttering the Word and promising never to utter the Word in vain again, so help you Word.

Other words followed—praising Word, extolling Word’s virtues, proclaiming Word as the one true Word. And Word help the son of a bitch who didn’t utter those words.

It was pretty much all downhill from there, which is when Word saw all that He had created, lit a joint, said “Screw it,” and was never heard from again.

Which is to say that I don’t really have a problem with Word. Word can do whatever He wants. Holy, though, has got me by the balls.

* * *

I’m sick of Jews lately. Perhaps “A Gateway to Jewish Literature, Culture and Ideas” is not the best place to reveal this.

You’re nothing but a self-hating bastard.

I spent time recently traveling to Chicago, DC, and Seattle on Nextbook’s Reading Series. I met some wonderful people, and deeply appreciated both the invitation and the support of the people who attended. But Christ Almighty, I’m inheebriated. I need to spend a week in a giant vat full of Boar’s Head hams with a glass of bacon juice and a bleach-blonde anyone.

You’re worse than Hitler.

Why? If I spent a week with Buddhists discussing my life with Buddha and why I write about Buddha and why I don’t like Buddha, I’d be sick of Buddhists, too. If I spent a week with pro bowlers I’m pretty sure that—

How can you write that?

The pro bowlers thing?

No, the Jew thing. How can you write that?

Not easily.

I’ve been stuck on one story in my memoir. It seemed simple enough when I began it, a small story about jumping in a cab and sneaking to the mall one Shabbos afternoon when I was ten. I was sick of Shabbos. “I hated Shabbos,” I wrote. I hated the synagogue, I hated the shoes, I hated the neckties, I hated the neighbors and the gossip and the fashion parade. “I hated,” I wrote, “Jews.”

I stopped writing.

* * *

Which brings me to Marley and Me, propped up at the front of the bookstore, tail a-waggin’, its oversized “New York Times Bestseller!” sticker obscuring the title but staying clear of the adorable goddamn dog.

“A dead doggie story,” I grumbled.

I was there to pick up the new Grove Centenary Editions four-volume hardcover boxed set of Samuel Beckett.

“You’re here for the Beckett set, too, right?” I said to the woman beside me who was busily filling her basket with copies of Marley for all of her friends.

“Aw, she’s a cutie, inn’t she?” she asked, smiling at the cover.

I nodded.

“Dead though,” I said.

“So sad,” she said, clasping her chest.

“Ever hear of Darfur?” I asked.

She laughed. “Oh, you!”

I went to the rear of the store where the Beckett had been proudly buried inside an old cardboard box on the floor behind what used to be the Information Desk but was now where employees dumped their unfinished lunches.

I carried Sam back to the Marley display. He had to see this.

“A motherfucking dead doggie story,” I said.

That wasn’t quite the way The New York Times had described it. They said something about tender, warmth, and affection; I couldn’t really make it out through the blood running into my eyes from gashes I’d been nervously digging in my head while trying to write something important, something meaningful, something….Holy.

Holy?

What a dick.

Little God Auslander, sitting in a vat of Boar’s Head and still believing books are holy. Or that they should be holy. Or that the ones I write should be holy. Nice little corner I’ve holied myself into: when I think what I’m working on is holy I can’t write it, when I think what I’m working on isn’t holy I don’t want to.

Rabbi Brier had seen me writing my name on a baseball card. It was a Carl Yastrzemski. I had just traded for it with Avi Tuchman. “This before you now,” said Rabbi Brier, “is the name of God.” “Yaz?” I asked. “You must never throw this away,” he said (no shit—it cost me a Willie Randolph and a mint Lou Pinella).
We kissed our prayer books before we prayed, and we kissed them again when we were done. We washed our hands before reading from the Talmud. When we opened the Ark and took out the Five Books of Moses, everyone stood, and we sang, and we prayed, and when we read from those books we used a long silver pointer because it was forbidden to touch the books with our bare, impure, unholy human hands. You must never throw this away.

Now go write something.

What new freedom it is for me, to imagine books are just books. 600,000 published a year, is that the latest number? To quote Rabbi Lenny, “To is a preposition, come is a verb.” And God is a noun, and one guy wrote about dead doggies, and I wrote that I hate Jews. I also hate the Grove Centenary Editions four-volume hardcover boxed set of Samuel Beckett, but you don’t see Paul Auster (ed.) flying off the handle. Christ, it looks like a collection of fucking seforim. Dark blue clothbound hardcovers, with nothing but a few spare gold-embossed words on the spine. Absolutely sacred. If there was one guy who didn’t treat words as religion—who pretty much unholied everything he could—it was Samuel Beckett. But the set in my hands didn’t feel like Samuel Beckett; it felt like the collected Torah lectures of Reb Shmuel Beckett, shlita, the famed student of Rabbi Joyce of Dublin (the R’JAD), May His Memory Be Blessed Among the Greats of the People of Israel.

Maybe making things holy makes religious people feel holy. Maybe making books holy makes book people feel holy. Maybe the whole “holy book” thing was just a vast Rabbinical ploy designed both to dissuade us from questioning the books which they had written, and to keep us from writing our own.

Or maybe not.

Maybe I’m just paranoid.

Go write something holy, see how far you get.

The news sparks a critical question: What would Gabe do? Apparently nothing. A Red Sox spokesperson told me that Kapler, Boston’s “go-to-guy” for things Jewish, has not made any public mention of whether he’ll strive to avoid a fatal decree (fire, plague, strangling) this coming year or simply strive for a homer in their weekend showdown with the Yankees. (Please God, at least one with bases loaded, if you don’t mind, and I promise to respect my elders more often.)

For the tortured club of Red Sox fans, of which I am longtime and proud member, a final match-up against the Bronx hegemon begets theological questions. Does God exist? If so, how can he let one team suffer so much? How can he allow Yankees fans to languish in smug ignorance of the humility and compassion that loss bestows? Is he so merciless?

More importantly: Does God have a favorite team? I’d suspect it’s mine. Not because of the obvious: if I’m made in God’s image, he’s for Boston. But the Red Sox’s struggle to unshackle themselves from the chains of defeat is a perennial attempt at redemption that echoes the personal run-up to Yom Kippur. (No prose, mind you, is too florid for this eternal contest.) As much as we try to be good, as they try to win, our transgressions (I have wished ill, I confess, on Derek Jeter and his obdurate patron) betray us—and the holiday allows an opportunity for a fresh go-round. This pennant gives fans yet again hopes for twin inscriptions—in the book of life, but no less critically, in Cooperstown.