In Jewish Week

Last week, a sometime collaborator of mine, Rabbi Leon A. Morris, executive director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning in New York City, participated in an op-ed conversation in the The Jewish Week. He and Rabbi Evan Moffic, assistant rabbi at Chicago Sinai Congregation, debate contemporary Reform Jewish observance. At issue is whether Reform Jews who take on more traditional practice are doing so through an "informed choice" or simply pursuing flawed attempts to feel authentically Jewish.

Peter's Blessing

While we talk basically every day, Peter and I don't see each other very often. He lives in Cambridge, Mass.; I live in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Once the book arrives in November, though, we'll be traveling together a lot for promotional readings and talks. We'll keep you posted on those events.)

He and his wife, Amy, invited me for Rosh Hashanah on Thursday, and so, I made the trip. Amtrak was terrible, and I arrived to the new year's dinner a little later than I'd hoped -- right into the middle of a party. They'd invited several other friends, most of whom have kids, so I was tackled at the door (this was Peter's son, Sam), and welcomed with my first ever bite of gefilte fish.

There to celebrate my first Jewish New Year, as a Catholic -- and for a long time, a vegan -- I could note a whole variety of things that struck me about the huge spread, the conversations, the mayhem: Peter's always wanted me to try his mother's chicken soup; that was the first course, as delicious as it was simple (carrots, matzo balls, chicken, broth). Hebrew spoken by an Israeli (in attendance) is more enchanting and mysterious than when Peter, raised in the Boston suburbs, has his hand at it. And brisket is just as good the second day, when served for Shabbat.

It was the blessing before the meal, though, that impressed me most. Raised with the traditional Catholic prayer before meals -- Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ, Our Lord. Amen -- I wasn't sure what to expect when Peter quieted the room and asked for our attention. It had the feel, at first, of a typical, even secular, new year's wish -- that we might put behind us the failures and disappointments of the previous year and make resolutions looking forward. There was very little "God" in what Peter had prepared to say.

Knowing well, though, that many of us are not ready to put our current disappointments and failures behind us -- in other words, life doesn't always fall in line with the Jewish calendar, and there is still work to be done -- Peter went on to suggest that our New Year's resolution might be to look with new eyes at our current situations (good or bad), and use the holiday as a moment to reflect on what else can be done.

Happy new year. Keep at it.

A Prayer Book for Atheists

The Jewish Reform Movement is publishing its new prayer book, the Mishkan T'filah. Not quite in time for the High Holidays, but it will be available soon. There hasn't been a new siddur from the Reform Movement since 1975, called The Gates of Prayer. The new book is a departure from in that it seeks to engage not only non-Jews (given the rate of interfaith marriages), but also those that don't even believe in God. A prayer book for atheists? What are they doing praying anyway?

Recently Scott and I wrote an essay in which we argue that belief is not a necessary component to a religious life, and in fact, oftentimes literal belief in any one conception of God can be a dangerous thing. What isn't made clear in this essay, but does come through in The Faith Between Us, is that while Scott is an atheist I am a theist. And despite all the years of working on the book, talking about it with friends and family, there are still those that are surprised, and maybe even a little disheartened to know that about me.

And so I think the Reform movement has the right idea. This kind of prayer book suggests that belief is sometimes simply a way of speaking about the world, a language that we use to try and apprehend the ineffable. And so the language of prayer must also be able to stretch and make room for all the different ways we construct our dialogue with, yes, holiness.

L'Shana Tova.

To the Revealers and Buddha-Killers

Kicking around as I sometimes do, checking in on the websites of friends and colleagues, I returned this morning to the religion and media site The Revealer, which may still be operated under the auspices New York University (my new employer), but which has a new approach and mission. Jeff Sharlet, the friend and colleague who runs the site (and now seems to be working alone), writes:

"Things have changed: I've too many debts to other writers now to be a brawler, and, yes, I've a better understanding of how hard it is to produce even bad work, and when a major media outlet churns out a truly awful story about religion, I just don't have enough love in me to offer any comment deeper than 'what horseshit.'"

He's also posted a "Help Wanted" ad on the site, and I speak from experience when I say that writing for the Revealer -- working with Jeff (who is usually extremely busy) -- has always been completely rewarding.

I learned at The Revealer that another religion site Peter and I have both contributed to has been resurrected, this time with a new look. Peter Manseau, who with Sharlet wrote the book Killing the Buddha: A Heritic's Bible, has begun keeping up the website of the same name, KtB.

Manseau writes:

"Killing the Buddha insists that if religion matters at all it matters enough to be taken to task. We believe it’s high time for a new canon to be created, and that the Web is just the place to collect it. We refuse to accept the internet as a world wide shopping mall. We know intuitively it can be a sort of Talmudic cathedral, a tool of transcendence made of words. We’re here to build it. If the end result looks more like Babel than the City of God, so be it. Babel, after all, came close."

Here's to the Buddha-killers. Welcome back, guys.

More On Unbracketed Belief

Before Monday, I'd never read the Stephen Prothero essay that Peter mentioned on this blog, although I had read the book that Prothero was busy promoting -- American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon -- when questions like "Which Jesus is your favorite Jesus?" got him thinking about the trouble with Religious Studies departments. (Prothero's favorite Jesus, by the way, is the one celebrated in many African American churches, Jesus as "black Moses.") My life in at Union Seminary is a fairly distant memory these days. Although I recall "bracketing" my belief quite a lot while in class. And I think Prothero's complaint, like Peter's about Harvard Div., is a good one: academic Religious Studies departments are not good places to talk about faith. But then, where are those good places? Where are those safe places?

Prothero's essay gets at that, too. Admittedly, I find his reflections a little naive and nostalgic, not to mention still college-centric. And with all we busy people have going on these days -- families, jobs, lesson plans and books to write -- how do we find the time, or an outrageously caffeinated assemblage for this:

"When I was in college, a group of students gathered regularly a bit after midnight and argued, often for hours, about politics, economics, and religion. It was an eclectic crew. We had Marxists, liberals, conservatives, an atheist, a Jew, a born-again Christian, and a conservative and a liberal Catholic. We went at one another, no holds barred, consigning our friends to heaven and hell, calling Christianity (Marxism as well) an opiate of the masses, and otherwise making all manner of outrageous judgments about the world and ourselves. As far as I know, none of us was hurt by any of the provocation. And I learned more about myself (and real friendship) in those sessions than I did in all my college courses combined."

For Prothero, like for us, understanding faithfulness is ultimately not about college or caffeine, Marx or Christ or Muhammad. It's been about friendship; one that can handle doubt and questioning, silences, bad church-going, and, as Peter said, even my atheism.

Funny, though, that in an essay about the virtue of unbracketed faith, Prothero still brackets this most important thing: "(and real friendship)."

Belief Unbracketed

Scott starts teaching this week, a course similiar to one that I taught for many years at Simmons College; a freshman expository writing course that uses texts relating to religion and cultural studies. One of the challenges that I faced in the classroom was how to not only be objective and allow all the students their own beliefs , but also how to not let my own beliefs bleed through in my teaching. And yet, I still struggle with whether or not this is an appropriate response in a religion class. When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, there was very little discussion in the classroom about individual belief, which is as it should be in a scholarly discussion of religion. And yet, at the same time, there was always a sense of something lacking. There was a point at which engagement with texts and ideas had to hit a wall, as we were all afraid to let our own religious views actually come to the surface.

In a compelling essay for the Harvard Divinty Bulletin, "Belief Unbracketed:
A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From," by Stephen Prothero, the BU professor writes that "More than any other idea, Edmund Husserl's notion of bracketing, or epochē (from the Greek for "holding back"), has defined Religious Studies as a discipline. What do folks like me do? We enter empathetically into the worlds of religious people in an attempt to understand the believers who inhabit them. We set aside questions of cause and effect, good and bad. We check our world views at the door."

But Prothero, in a critique of Robert Orsi's idea that religion scholars need to "suspend the ethical" argues that we should take the risk to tear down the wall that sperates the scholar from her subject: "In homage to Husserl, Orsi, Chidester, and all the ghosts of Religious Studies past, let us continue to suspend the ethical and understand with empathy. Let us delight in difference and tear down the barriers between ourselves and our subjects. But then also tear down this barrier: the barrier against our own judgments. If we really want to resuscitate religion as a moral enterprise, make bracketing a temporary strategy rather than an eternal imperative."

It will be interesting to see how Scott confronts religiosity in his own course, particularly as an atheist, but also a religious Catholic.