Most refreshingly upfront about its goals: Robert Kopman’s 30 Minute Seder: The Haggadah That Blends Brevity With Tradition (30 Minute Seder, 2011). Who needs all that blah blah blah about Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah and Rabbi Tarfon? This haggadah isn’t appropriate, though, if your guests are the types to say, “What? It’s time to eat already? Can’t we please spend more time discussing whether there were 50, 200, or 250 plagues at the Red Sea?”

Least appropriate for a Seder in Lilongwe, Malawi: Yehuda Berg’s The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded (Kabbalah Publishing, 2009) would, it seems, be something of a faux pas over there this year.

Perfect if you find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions situation: For $18,000, the Premier Edition of The Szyk Haggadah gives you Arthur Szyk’s signature embossed in gilt on the cover, plus “22 carat gold tooling” throughout. Guaranteed to match your gold-plated karpas! For the non-insane, there are reasonably priced editions of Szyk’s 1930s anti-fascist allegorical masterpiece, such as The Szyk Haggadah: Freedom Illuminated (Abrams, 2011).

If your guests don’t like all these newfangled Seder elements: Take them back to the 15th century with The Washington Haggadah (Harvard, 2011), which offers a full-color reproduction of a manuscript illuminated in 1478 by a scribe named Joel ben Simeon (and which is named for its contemporary home, at the Library of Congress in D.C.).

The haggadah we’re still waiting for: When, when will Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander deliver that hipster haggadah they’ve promised? It tarries, but according to Amazon.com, it will finally arrive in October 2011: just in time for Thanksgiving! Next year in Park Slope, then?

Likely to disappoint the Shakespearean actors at the table: The intrepid Sue Fishkoff reports that the new edition of the Maxwell House Haggadah—the haggadah of choice of the Obama White House—includes, for the first time since 1934, an updated translation that has removed all those fusty faux-Renaissance linguistic touches we’ve all gotten used to, like “thee” and “thou.” Alas, alack! How art we supposed to worshippeth our Lord in just plain American English?

If you believe that the Holocaust should be invoked at every Jewish public event: A Passover Haggadah (Simon & Schuster, 1993) features Mark Podwal’s drawings and Elie Wiesel’s commentary and poems, which link the ritual to recent historical trauma: “A camp./ An inmate. … It is night,/ The first night of Passover. … The parable of Had Gadya is misleading:/ God will not come/ To slay the slaughterer.”

For big families who don’t understand the idea of economy of scale: If all you want is the traditional, Orthodox text, Artscroll’s Family Haggadah (Artscroll, 1981) is a bargain: only $3.59 a copy, bound in sumptuous-sounding leatherette (or $2.24 with a laminated paper cover). But it seems that somebody’s tam son must be responsible for the price on the slipcovered, leatherette set of eight, which costs $33.29 (that is, $4.16 per copy), as if to punish those who buy in bulk.

Good for fans of chanting: Eliahu Klein’s A Mystical Haggadah: Passover Meditations, Teachings, and Tales (North Atlantic Books, 2008) includes “a mystical meditation” before most of the rituals, drawn from the Zohar or from such gurus as the Rashash. These, along with anecdotes about the Hassidic masters and a dash of playful gematria, help Seder-goers in “achieving cosmic consciousness.”

For those who actually do want to tell the story of the Exodus, over and over, until the break of dawn: A Passover Haggadah: Go Forth and Learn (JPS, 2011) comes equipped with the extensive commentaries of Rabbi David Silber. The founder of the Drisha Institute in New York, Silber knows a thing or two about Jewish textual study and offers enough textual readings to keep you talking until the sun comes up.

Looks sharpest in your NPR tote bag: Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families (HarperCollins, March) allows you to greet Elijah alongside Cokie and Steven Roberts. The book comes to you straight from the D.C. intelligentsia, and brims with optimistic religious pluralism: as its authors told Vox Tablet a couple weeks back, Passover is by far the most Jesus-friendly of the Jewish holidays (blood libels notwithstanding).

For the tikkun olam crowd: Last year’s In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah (Devora Publishing, 2010) features a forward by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin praising the Joint Distribution Committee for its outreach to threatened Jews all over the world, plus commentaries by Ari Goldman—but it’s the photographs of Seders across the globe, from Yemen to Lithuania, that make an impression.

If you have a favorite Orthodox superstar rabbi: Then he has a haggadah for you, whether it’s Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ Haggadah (Contiuum, 2007), or Norman Lamm’s The Royal Table (Orthodox Union, 2010), or The Carlebach Haggadah: Seder Night With Reb Shlomo (Urim, 2001), or Seder Night: An Exalted Evening (Orthodox Union, 2009), which includes “commentary based on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.”

Closest you’ll get to a Family Circus or Marmaduke haggadah: Richard Codor’s Joyous Haggadah (Loose Line Productions, 2008) features an energetic comic strip retelling of the Exodus—nothing cries out for the Sunday Funnies treatment like the Death of the Firstborn, right?—plus, charmingly, the Four Sons as performed by the Marx Brothers.

Most appropriate for a Seder fueled by psychotropic drugs: Newly available for shipping to the United States, Asher Kalderon’s Haggadah (Urim, 2011) features the artist’s lush, gradient-shaded images, which have all the trippy verve of 1960s rock posters.

Most of these people had never met Debbie Friedman. Many had never even seen her perform live. They had only heard her music on recordings or sung her compositions in synagogue. Yet they grieved as if they had lost a close friend.

More than perhaps any other Jewish musician of the past 40 years, Friedman reached listeners in an extremely personal and intimate way. She helped pioneer the participatory, sing-along style of musical worship that now characterizes liberal congregations across North America. She also awakened listeners to a particular strain of Jewish spirituality—inclusive, progressive, and above all accessible—that they had either sought in vain, or could not articulate clearly enough to pursue alone.

In the late 1960s, when Friedman first began writing and performing, musical change had begun to infiltrate the nation’s synagogues. A new generation of rabbis, eager to reach young congregants who were alienated by traditional Hebrew prayer and nusach, or liturgical music, began commissioning services that borrowed from folk, rock, and jazz. At the same time, the rapidly expanding Reform summer-camp movement offered a forum for young Jewish musicians with a taste for socially conscious folksong to experiment with material that owed more to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan than it did to traditional hazzanut, or cantorial performance.

Born in 1951 in Utica, New York, and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, Friedman’s own tastes ran to Judy Collins and Peter, Paul, and Mary. From an early age, she said she yearned for a more vibrant alternative to what she once described to the New York Times as the “dull and passive” services of the Reform and Conservative synagogues her family attended.

She picked up the guitar while working at a Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin, and she soon began writing and sharing her own music at Reform synagogues and camps. Her peers and partners included Michael Isaacson, who helped invent the Jewish camp song and folk service at Camp Kutz before embarking on a distinguished career as a composer of both liturgical and commercial music, and Jeff Klepper, who studied songwriting with Friedman at Kutz in 1969 and who, along with Dan Freelander, founded the popular folk duo Kol B’Seder.

By the early 1970s, these and other participants in the burgeoning American nusach movement were exerting an influence well beyond summer-camp circles. Their use of mixed Hebrew and English lyrics, pseudo-folk melodies, and simple guitar accompaniment, along with their emphasis on participatory unison singing, began to filter into Reform synagogues, gradually displacing the more formal format of a cantor accompanied by a choir and organ that had previously been favored.

But like her predecessor and Hasidic analog, Shlomo Carlebach, Friedman possessed a personal warmth and charisma that set her apart and earned her a particularly devoted following. She also continued to break new ground throughout her career. A lifelong feminist who aspired to the goal of kol isha for col isha, the voice of woman for every woman, she was an early proponent of using gender-neutral language, and her own experience with recurring, and often debilitating, illness from the late 1980s onwards led her to pioneer the music-driven healing services that have become a staple in many communities. Her setting of the “Mi Shebarach” has been adopted as a communal prayer for healing by congregations across the country, just as her havdala melody is now the standard in most Reform synagogues (even though many who sing it don’t know its provenance).

Still, Friedman’s legacy is not entirely unmixed. Even as illustrious a collaborator as Isaacson now laments the extent to which the simple folk style that he and Friedman helped popularize has elbowed more traditional, and often classically influenced, liturgical music off the stage, leaving many younger congregants ignorant of their larger musical heritage. (Ironically, in 2007, Friedman—who had neither cantorial training nor a college degree—was appointed to the faculty of the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where she taught both rabbinical and cantorial students.) And there are those who remain skeptical of the New Agey, “kumbaya” quality that adheres to so many of the guitar-wielding song-leaders who have followed in her footsteps.

Yet Friedman herself never inspired anything but gratitude and devotion among those who knew her or her music. Indeed, she seems to have lived the lyrics to one of her most popular songs, “Lechi lach,” a song that now seems a fitting tribute to a woman who was both a guide and a blessing to the many people whose lives she touched.

Lechi lach to a land that I will show you
Lech l’cha to a place you do not know
Lechi lach on your journey I will bless you
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach

Lechi lach and I shall make your name great
Lech l’cha and all shall praise your name
Lechi lach to the place that I will show you
Li-simchat chayim, li-simchat chayim
Li-simchat chayim lechi lach.
And you shall be a blessing, you shall be a blessing
You shall be a blessing lechi lach.

Both of these stories are extremely well known to Jews today—they are our twin origin myths, one a story of great good fortune, the other an unfathomable tragedy. But there was also a third stage to the Eastern European Jewish exodus, comparable in scale to the first two, yet much less central to our historical imagination. In 1945, after all, there were still some 2 million Jews in the Soviet Union—the world’s second-largest Jewish population, after the United States. Today, almost all those Jews and their descendants live in Israel or America. But as Gal Beckerman shows in When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), it was anything but guaranteed that this huge remnant of Eastern European Jewry would survive as Jews. At times, it seemed possible they would not survive at all.

Beckerman’s riveting and important book shows that it took the grass-roots efforts of Jews around the world, as well as the power of the American government, to bring this story to a happy ending. If the movement to “save Soviet Jewry” is not well remembered, Beckerman writes, it is because “it is a victim of its own success.” Now that he has told the story so well, however, it will surely take its rightful place as one of the greatest dramas in modern Jewish history.

Beckerman is a reporter at The Forward, and When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone is, in the first place, an impressive work of reporting. The story he chose to tell spans four decades and three continents: from the 1950s through the 1980s, activists in the USSR, the United States, and Israel were all working for the cause of Soviet Jewry. What’s more, their campaign intersected with Cold War politics at the highest level: The struggle ended only with the fall of the Soviet Union and may even have played a minor role in causing that fall. This means that Beckerman has to braid together hundreds of individual stories, large and small. The characters in this book include Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Scoop Jackson and Richard Perle, Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev, Anatoly and Natasha Shcharansky, Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner.

But we also hear about less famous figures, whom Beckerman brings dramatically to life. The book opens in 1963 with Yosef Mendelevich, a Latvian Jewish teenager who joins an unofficial pilgrimage to Rumbuli, the wooded area outside Riga where the Nazis massacred 25,000 Jews in 1941. The mass grave was unmarked and untended, and a group of local Jews took it upon themselves to turn it into a memorial. It was Mendelevich’s first public Jewish act, and it would lead to a quarter-century of activism on behalf of Soviet Jewry—including a long stretch in prison. That was his punishment for taking part in one of the most dramatic and unlikely episodes in Beckerman’s epic: the attempted hijacking of a small plane, in 1970, in order to take 16 Jewish activists to freedom in Sweden. It was a mad undertaking, and the plot was broken up by the KGB before the plane was even boarded. But it sent a clear message to the world about the desperation of the refuseniks, Soviet Jews who had been denied permission to emigrate to Israel.

The link between the memory of the Holocaust and concern about the future of Soviet Jews, so pronounced in Mendelevich’s story, can also be seen in the American half of Beckerman’s tale. Lou Rosenbaum, a NASA engineer living in Cleveland, was politicized by reading Perfidy, Ben Hecht’s indictment of “the leaders of world Jewry” for their passivity in the face of the Holocaust. To Rosenbaum and Herb Caron, a local psychologist, guilt over what they perceived as American Jewish inaction—combined with admiration for the right-wing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky—led them, in the early 1960s, to interest themselves in the plight of Soviet Jews. Here was a cause that would allow American Jews to redeem themselves by asserting themselves. It is no coincidence that the organization Rosenbaum and Caron founded—the Cleveland Committee on Soviet Anti-Semitism, the nucleus of what would become the nationwide Union of Councils for Soviet Jews—was conceived as a goad to the American Jewish establishment, a militant grassroots alternative to the cautious American Jewish Conference on Soviet Jewry.

In general, Beckerman sees the growing concern for Soviet Jewry in the 1960s as part of a generational shift in American Jewish identity. For Jews alienated by the militant later stages of the Civil Rights Movement, the cause of Soviet Jewry offered another way to fight for human rights, this time in a specifically Jewish context. For Jews troubled by the blandness and assimilation of postwar suburban life, it offered a new, more active and public Jewish identity. For young people navigating the counterculture of the 1960s, it offered a mass movement with charismatic leaders like Yaakov Birnbaum, the eccentric, unworldly founder of Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, and Shlomo Carlebach, the “singing, dancing hippie rabbi” who composed the movement’s anthem, “Am Yisrael Chai.” Then there was Meir Kahane, whose quasi-fascist Jewish Defense League switched from driving “around black Brooklyn neighborhoods swinging chains out their windows and yelling through megaphones about the schvartzes” to picketing the Soviet consulate in Manhattan and vandalizing the offices of TASS and Aeroflot. Finally, JDL thugs bombed the office of Sol Hurok, a Jewish impresario whose crime was to have done business with the Bolshoi Ballet. (The sole victim of that bombing was a Jewish secretary from Long Island.)

Cleverly, Beckerman counterpoints Kahane’s self-aggrandizing and reckless violence with the deeply disciplined resistance of the Soviet Jews themselves. To become a refusenik, Beckerman shows, was to make a frightening leap outside the boundaries of Soviet society. The process of emigrating was turned into a diabolical ordeal, built around a set of catch-22s. To get a visa to go to Israel, you needed a character reference from your employer; but when you told your employer why you needed the reference, you were certain to be fired; and once you were fired, you could be sent to jail for the crime of “parasitism.” Anyone who had ever worked for a scientific or defense agency—and a good number of Soviet Jews were scientists and engineers—could be refused a visa on grounds of national security. In time, the Soviets introduced an “education tax,” requiring anyone with a higher education to reimburse the state before emigrating—the fees were prohibitively high and functioned as an effective ban. And the most vocal activists, like Shcharansky, could be given long jail terms for conspiring against the state.

That so many Jews persisted to trying to emigrate to Israel, despite the obstacles, was a testament both to their heroic resolve and to the awfulness of conditions in the USSR. Yet among Soviet Jews, too, there were divisions and rivalries. To the politiki, the best way to serve the Jewish community was to fight the state for the right to emigrate. To the kulturniki, it seemed more urgent to instill Jewish identity, for instance by teaching Hebrew, and if possible to get the state to accommodate these activities. (Only a tiny handful of the refuseniks were interested in becoming religious Jews. Ironically, Beckerman notes, they were treated more leniently by the state, probably because the USSR could not take Orthodox Judaism seriously as a threat.)

And during the unpredictable periods when the USSR decided to let out thousands of Jews, it became clear that many of them did not actually want to go to Israel at all. Once they got to Vienna, where Soviet refugees were processed, increasing numbers renounced their Israeli visas and chose to go to America, instead—to the consternation of the Israelis, who looked at Russian Jewry as an essential demographic resource. But when the Israeli government tried to force the so-called “dropouts” to go to Israel, the reaction from American Jewry was indignant. Wasn’t the whole campaign for Soviet Jewry based on the idea that freedom of emigration was a human right? And if the Israelis really thought that a Jew was obligated to live in Israel, what did that imply about American Jews themselves?

As Beckerman shows, these cross-cutting tensions—between religious and secular Jews, Americans and Soviets and Israelis, establishment and grassroots, even between the U.S. Congress and the State Department—never went away. But they also never stopped the movement from pressing towards its goal. To Beckerman, in fact, one of the most important lessons of the “struggle for Soviet Jewry” is that American Jews should not be embarrassed to use their voice, and their influence, on behalf of specifically Jewish goals. In “this triumphant story,” he concludes, “Jews grabbed history and changed its course.” Today, when American Jews seem “too fractured to ever rally together again,” When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone is a timely reminder of how much can be achieved by a community united in the pursuit of justice.

As happens in walk-ups, one day I passed the woman—petite, beautiful, black-haired—on the stairs four times. We finally introduced ourselves; Carole warmly welcomed me to the building. I met her husband shortly after that. Yitzhak Buxbaum is a small, wiry 63-year-old with a close-cropped beard. He usually wears a beret and jogging shoes, and has an odd air about him—at once intense and distracted. In our hallway chats, I learned that he had written several books about Judaism and spirituality (among them The Life and Teachings of Hillel, A Person Is Like a Tree, and The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov), and that he has a commercial website—jewishspirit.com—that bills itself as a “gateway to spirituality, mysticism, and kabbalah.” Most interesting to me was the fact that he was a maggid, an ordained storyteller. I’d never met one before, and I was curious about how and why he came to be one. Luckily, Yitzhak loves to talk.

We met in the second-floor apartment, which is full of books and decorated with exquisite religious paintings—Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian as well as Jewish. This is where Yitzhak does his teaching and writing, and Carole gives yoga lessons.

On your website, you mention in passing that you used to be an atheist. That surprised me.

When I went away to college, that was the first time I was required to put religion on a form, and I put “none,” because like many people of my generation—maybe yours, too—after the bar mitzvah that was the end of it. I happily call myself at that period a fastidious atheist: philosophically hardcore and strict. My mother was an atheist. My father believed in God, but not in a very active way.

I was studying biology and zoology—that was my field of science. There is an inclination in science, of course, to be materialistic: not in a greedy sense, but in terms of spirituality, needing proof. I didn’t have any belief in a big person in the sky. That was my scientific attitude, coming through my rationalism.

But as far as I can tell, your life now is devoted to the religious and mystical. Something clearly changed. What happened, and when?

Because of the crisis of the Vietnam War I was depressed, like many people, and I had to decide what the meaning of life was. So I started to explore, just a little bit, religion, which was very strange for me. I was influenced by Tolstoy, who at the age of fifty became totally religious. His Confession is amazing. It’s a seventy-page book that explains how he came to believe in God. And I read Kierkegaard; his idea of the leap of faith was also influential for me. I had to figure out how one departs from rationalism.

I had been going to graduate school at the University of Michigan. Then, because of the war, and the turmoil connected to it, science seemed irrelevant. And my interest in animals seemed irrelevant. I learned about rich and poor, and the suffering in the world, and oppression. I dropped out. I was in my early twenties. I was this wild radical, with what I called a Hebro, the Hebrew version of the Afro.

If you weren’t a student, it was a matter of going to the Army, going to jail, going to Canada, or teaching. I followed a friend, a Harvard guy, back to Cambridge and I started teaching high school, but it meant nothing to me. I had to discover the meaning of life, or else I was going to lose myself. I spent weeks and months thinking. I’d sit in the Pamplona Café for hours. People thought I was doing nothing, but I was the most intensely focused I had ever been in my life.

Then one night I was walking down the street, and I realized that the deepest thing I knew was that I had to do good. If I felt obligated to do good, what was obligating me? It was not from my parents, it was not from the culture; it was something very, very deep. Half a year later I realized it was God.

Was your search for the meaning of life always tied up with Judaism?

At about the same time that I had that realization, I was also thinking about being Jewish, which had previously seemed of no interest or relevance. I reflected on my Jewishness along the lines of the “black is beautiful” and women’s movements, and recognized that I was ashamed of who I was due to an internalized anti-Semitism. I opened up to investigate Judaism. I read Martin Buber, and then went to see Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, my great rabbi.

The first time, I went with a friend to Brandeis, where Shlomo was appearing in the student union building. He spoke and sang so beautifully. Forty-five minutes into the event he jumped up, and all the people around us jumped up—and started to jump up and down to the music. I said to my friend, “Let’s get out of here. This is a worship service!” I wasn’t ready for worship. I was dipping my toe in, and someone shoved me in the pool—but I didn’t know how to swim. But after some months I was so attracted by the perfume of Shlomo’s holy presence that I just had to see more of him.

I started going to the Hillel at Boston University regularly. Shlomo was teaching there. After some time of attending, I came up with the correct question for him. I realized that God is not an object, so we can’t ask, “Does God exist?” the way we ask, “Does a table exist? Does the building exist?” A person from a rationalist perspective thinks they can just cogitate, “Is there a big person in the sky?” God is something different. So at a question-and-answer session, I said, “Shlomo, I’ve never met God.” And Shlomo said, “Brother, I would like to introduce you.”

What happened next?

Well, I left Cambridge, came to Brooklyn, and went to Lubavitch yeshiva. I studied with them for half a year. I grew payes and a beard. I always have to be a radical.

What did your mother and father think of all of this?

My mother was a very tolerant, nonjudgmental person. She wondered why I did this, but she was okay with anything that I did. My father was thrilled, because he had been trying to tell me for years and years and years how Judaism is the meaning of life. He was a businessman, and he hadn’t been very articulate, but he was sincere. But he couldn’t bear the fact that I had long payes, these sidelocks. I learned in Lubavitch that you can make a deal—a business deal—about religious things, which, from a secular point of view, seems totally bizarre. I said, “Dad, if you’ll put on tefillin, I’ll cut the payes.” So he put on tefillin every morning and I cut the payes. And it had an amazing effect, because he came back to religion.

Well, from the beginning, it was the center of my life. Once I decided what the meaning of life is, I didn’t go back to a relaxed attitude. In fact, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the famous rabbi, said, “If God is not the most important thing, He is nothing.”

When you decided to make God the center of your life, did you go through any emotional or psychological changes?

In one sense your personality changes. In another sense, it doesn’t; I am the very same person I was when I was an atheist. One thing that happened was I ceased being interested in music other than religious music. I am not proud of it, or think this is the correct way to be. I just lost an interest in secular music, because music speaks emotionally—and emotionally I am tuning into God all the time.

How did you figure out how to combine your religious life with a way to exist in the material world? You didn’t want to be in academia anymore, you weren’t a businessman like your father.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidism showed me the kind of lifestyle that I admired: people who were tremendously devout and religious, but had friends and family. So as I started to read more and more the Jewish stories, I started a little group. I would read a story and we would discuss it. And that evolved into my becoming a maggid, meaning an inspirational speaker and storyteller. I received s’micha, the ordination to be a maggid, from Shlomo.

And then I started writing books. I was constantly reading all these texts that presented high ideals, religiously and spiritually, in Judaism. I said, “Yeah, I’d like to do that.” But I didn’t know how. So when I encountered nitty-gritty, practical ways to attain something spiritually I would note them down. And then I realized, “Gee, this stuff is not available.” And that’s when I produced my first book, my gigantic book, Jewish Spiritual Practices.

What happened after you published this gigantic book?

I became a teacher of Judaism. I taught for many years at the New School. I taught Jewish mysticism, and also ecumenical courses, like “Spiritual Stories from Around the World.” I taught at Makor for a number of years. I have taught at, like, five hundred synagogues.

After I had been doing this for about twenty-five years I decided it was time to train other people. I started a program to train people to be maggids. Twice a year people come for an intensive. I have ordained ten people already over the last two years.

How do you decide whether they are ready to be ordained?

I am not trying to put impediments in people’s way if someone wants to spread God’s light. If they go through it with some attention I generally give s’micha. My wife, Carole, went through the program, and she had no aspirations to become a maggid. But I gave her ordination as a baal misapair ruchani, a master spiritual storyteller.

If God is the center of your life at every moment, how do you also have a marriage?

One of the things about Judaism is that it is nothing crazy, you know? Camus said that he didn’t want to be more godly, he wanted to be more human. And I think that’s the Jewish attitude. Carole is religious, but not as “fanatical” as me. I think it has become more central to her, but my secular interests are limited. It sounds bad, but it isn’t, I hope. She’s a big outdoors person. She has more interest in the world and seeing things. I go along and have a great time, but I am less motivated. It’s like Rabi’a, this great Muslim mystic in the early days. Her assistant told her to come outside and see the wonders of God, and Rabi’a told her to come in and see God Himself.

Why do you feel it’s your job to teach people about God and Judaism and mysticism?

You know that Muslim group called Tablighi Jamaat? They are worldwide, but they are more based in Pakistan. They are proselytizers, and the Western intelligence services feel they are providing a pool for the Jihadists. But ten or twenty men go out to another country or a remote area of their own country, and proselytize for a month. The Mormons do something similar. And Lubavitch has it built in, too. But I feel that the other branches of Judaism have to come up with some radical way to institutionalize proselytizing among the Jews. Nobody is ashamed to stand out on Court Street and pass out literature about environmentalism or politics. So why should people be ashamed to pass out spiritual literature?

The idea of proselytizing rubs many people the wrong way.

I feel that the Jews have to get over this. So many of our people are unconnected religiously.

Have you had any doubts since all this started? Any dark or confused days?

I don’t have any doubts. For my intellectual integrity, I have to allow that there is, like, a one percent chance there is no God. But I don’t operate that way. And if there wasn’t a God, it would be some kind of glorious mistake, just about the noblest mistake possible. I am not a seeker; I am a finder. People too much glorify this questioning in Judaism.

I held onto that business card for two years. My first semester at Columbia was mostly spent drinking 40s at punk shows on the Lower East Side and making ‘zines, but eventually I decided to seek out this mysterious rabbi. The synagogue was plain: pink walls, rows of metal folding chairs, a simple ark for the Torah, a disorganized bookcase, and a lace-curtained divider separating men and women. At the back near the door, a cherubic older man rocked and prayed. Turning, he asked my Hebrew name. Reb Shlomo smiled, kissed my forehead and said, “Chaya Sarah! I am so happy to see you.”

I had grown up in congregations where the aisles were used as catwalks during the High Holidays. Here, worshippers were freaks, geniuses, outcasts, and eccentrics—more like members of the tribe to which I imagined myself belonging. One was a former yeshiva student who now favored various Hindu gurus, but still kept Shabbat. One was a Kahanist alcoholic from Transylvania. One got arrested for aiding a runaway teenager and other congregants rallied to help bail him out of jail. Reb Shlomo referred to all of them as “holy schleppers.”

Years passed, and I continued to fiddle around in the liminal spaces between Jewishness and everything else. I met others who seemed to do so as well, consciously or not, and became sort of fascinated by how many other Jews there were like me. “Like me” meant someone who had hitchhiked across the country a half dozen times, traveling up the Pacific Coast highway with surfers, along Route 66 with Cherokee women, and across Interstate 80 with a shoe salesman. It meant someone who had been in and out of relationships with a punk boy from Memphis, an Ecstasy dealer from Toronto, a chain-smoking sculptor, an activist saxophone player, and a self-fashioned motorcycle adventurer. It meant someone who had glimpsed the divine at Sufi zikrs, Hindu kirtans, Buddhist meditations, pagan equinoxes, and Native American peyote ceremonies.

Like me also meant someone who had been reared on Solomon Schechter Day Schools, Shabbat dinners and bat mitzvah lessons. Someone who was second-generation American, named after a great-grandmother killed in Auschwitz, and who had grown up in an atmosphere thick with accents, foods, and melancholy. It meant someone who had studied in an Orthodox women’s yeshiva, and who felt maybe there is a Divine Source who expects something more from us than intellectual appeasement and Western liberalism.

For some, I began to think, being Jewish was the main-course brisket on their identity dinner tables. Everything they do, everyone they know is Jewish. Maybe they have a couple of side-dish identities—being a woman, a litigation attorney, from St. Louis—but by and large, they are Jews. But then, there were people for whom identity itself is more of a dim sum, and their Jewish part like one small, tasty dumpling amid a variety of other yummy treats. I was a dim sum Jew, and so were most of my friends. I had the idea one autumn day to make a magazine for us. This magazine, I decided, would be called Heeb.

It took about a year and a half for me to get my magazine going—to procure funding, cobble together a volunteer staff, set up a little office in my apartment, solicit and edit content, and find a designer who would work for nothing. I got a rudimentary website up, figured out how to accept online subscriptions, made a subscriber database, printed T-shirts in my living room, and organized a launch party. I had been working 80 hours a week and was just short of losing my mind.

Finally, the first issue came out. It had some funny pictures of Jewfros, hip-hop reviews by the grandmother of one of our editors, and a Neil Diamond centerfold. It had a dryly hysterical analysis of the connection between Nazis and Pizza Hut, a memoir of one young writer’s teenage affair with Allen Ginsberg, and staged photos of a sexed-up wedding. Nothing too declarative or definable. It was an attempt to capture what was Jewish by sideglance rather than head-on.

There was an odd publicity blitz. In a flash I was interviewed by the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, CNN, ABC, New York Magazine, the Village Voice. It was disembodying, and the press generally either adoring, mocking, or fascinated. But through it all, the magazine clearly became a symbol that young Jews had arrived—and weren’t afraid to make fun of our ourselves. I found myself to be the movement’s unwitting spokesperson, and thought I was done with it until a call came one afternoon from Howard Stern’s show.

An NPR kind of gal, I had never heard Howard Stern before and didn’t know what to expect. It was like being stuck in a room with a bunch of fourth-graders for 40 minutes, more bizarre than insulting. Howard railed against my magazine, commenting on the unforgivable offensiveness of its name (what it must take to offend Howard Stern) and making tangential remarks about gas chambers. He also got me (under truly irrefutable pressure) to show him my ass. The show finally went to a commercial break. Howard leaned over, shook my hand, and said, “Sounds like a great magazine. Good luck.”

In many ways, Heeb was exactly as I’d intended it: secular, irreverent, political, and funny. It was my own subconscious writ large and distributed at Barnes & Noble. Therapy probably could have afforded me a less revealing sphere in which to work out my questions about what the hell this Jewish thing meant, but the train had already left the station.

As it turned out, it was a train that other people wanted to get on. Emails and letters came in from everywhere—Montana to Missouri, Long Island to Las Vegas—saying variations on the same thing: “Finally.” They wrote in about dating angst, neurotic families, and seders. They wrote lurid tales of what happened to them at bar mitzvah parties, summer camp, and Hebrew school. Some wrote about having been the rabbi’s daughter, or having shtupped the rabbi’s daughter (on the bima, no less). The cumulative effect spoke to some deep longing that people seemed to have—to be cool in their otherness, to belong to a subculture that was theirs alone.

But as more people got into Heeb, the more disconnected I felt. After a while, it was like I was putting out a magazine for people with brown hair. Sure, I have brown hair. I like having brown hair. But I can talk about it only so much until it feels irrelevant, not to mention self-indulgent. Being the poster girl for hipster secular Judaism wasn’t really me. And although I was glad for Heeb‘s success and worked very hard for it, the popular message was, roughly speaking, that being Jewish is cool.

Being Jewish, cool? Um, dork factor: ten.

It’s not cool now, it never has been, and it never will be. But, this was the message taken by many people, and I was its mortified messenger.

I preferred the definition of Jews as ultimate outsiders. That I bore this ridiculous message of coolness made me want to crawl under a rock. I finally felt true Jewish guilt, having created and unleashed a monster against my core beliefs. I didn’t want to be a “cool Jew.” If anything, I wanted to be a holy schlepper.

So after four issues and almost three years, with an easy exhale, I left.

Not long after I was having coffee with my friend Moishe, who grew up Hasidic in Brooklyn, had been a talmud chohem, sent to the most prestigious yeshivas. From a young age, the rabbis predicted he would be among the greatest minds of his generation. He loved learning Torah and was very good at it. Except he couldn’t find proof that God existed. He attacked the idea from every possible angle, but nothing could help him overcome his persistent doubt. So at 27, Moishe shaved his beard and went to live in the secular world, which he found terrifically cold and alienating compared to his Hasidic community, but at least there, he felt he was no longer living a lie.

Moishe and I were talking at a diner. At some point, he told me this story:

Once, there was a young rabbi. People came from near and far to hear this young rabbi speak, because the way he spoke about Torah made them feel like they were flying through the air. And when the rabbi spoke, he himself felt like he was flying, such was the enjoyment he received from teaching Torah. Once he met with his own rabbi in the privacy of his study. There, he confessed that he didn’t believe a word that he said. He didn’t believe that the Torah was true.

“Oy,” said the young rabbi, “how can I go on like this? They hang on my words, and I enjoy teaching them, but this is hypocrisy!” The great rabbi looked at him and replied, “So you enjoy it, and they enjoy it. You get joy from it, and they get joy from it. The only one it’s bad for is hypocrisy!”

I thought of how far I had drifted from the 18-year-old who hung out at Carlebach’s synagogue between acid trips and punk shows. Back then, I had my own weird little search going on for a place within Judaism. It was something I tinkered with in a quiet, personal way. When the tinkering turned public, it ceased to be mine anymore.

Moishe and I looked at each other, he who had left his prodigious study, and I who had left Heeb‘s hipster posturing. They were things we were good at, that gave others joy. But they were lies of a sort, and the guilt of hypocrisy was too great to brush aside. It felt more truthful—more Jewish, even—to be outsiders.