Ross Douthat and the Jews

Douthat's smart, evocative new invitation to religion makes me wonder, “Why aren't Jews writing books like this?"

Before I get to my friend Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I want to keep honoring my promise to collaborate with ChatGPT on portraits of my paid subscribers. One of my newest paid subscribers is someone I will call “Alex C.” I don’t know Alex’s gender, age, anything at all. But after I communed with the spirits and asked them for some more info on Alex C., this is what I told ChatGPT: “Please give me a picture of a 27-year-old female accountant who plays ultimate on weekends, loves Rottweilers, is experimenting with vegetarian cooking, and hopes to be a guest on The Voice.” And this is what I got:

Alex C. is clearly about to go solve crimes, with her trusty canine sidekick. I imagine that she uses the Frisbee as a weapon, when necessary, knocking out (even decapitating) bad guys. I’s proud to have her as a paid subscriber!

If you would like to be the subject of a portrait collab between me and Señor ChatGPT, become a paid subscriber!

Also, scroll to the bottom for a special invitation for paid subscribers to a Zoom talk I am giving on Thursday evening.

---

I have now read, and re-read, Times columnist Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. I read it the first time so as to be a more competent editor of this review of the book, by journalist Jonathan Rauch (whose name I keep mistyping as ruach, Hebrew for “breath” or “spirit”), which is well worth a read. And then I read it again. I don’t have anything so fancy as a review to share with you, but I do have an assortment of thoughts:

1. Ross is a friend and neighbor of mine, so while I have no financial stake in whatever I say about his book, I am not a totally neutral, disinterested party.

2. My, aren’t we in a religious moment! Not necessarily for the country as a whole—as the aforementioned Jonathan Rauch argues in his new book, we are actually going through a collapse of religious engagement; attendance at houses of worship, and membership in religious groups, has never been lower in the United States, and it shows no signs of rebounding. But in intellectual circles, the past decade or so has seen a bumper crop of engagement with religious themes. I am thinking of the work of writers like Barbara Ehrenreich, David Brooks, Douthat, Rauch, and even secular reporters like Sebastian Junger, whose recent book about his near-death experience opens up to religious themes. (If you don’t have time to read the book, listen to him on the podcast, of

   Andrew Sullivan
   ) This moment reminds me of the late 1960s, the subject of my dissertation and first book, when, nation-wide, religious involvement had already slipped from its peak in the Kennedy years, but all the questing and seeking of the young, often in New Age and “hippie” religions, led to a spate of articles about a “campus religious revival.” We may be in something like that now—a revival of interest in religion among educated elites, and in certain eccentric circles, even as the landscape generally is seeing much less religiosity. (For more on this, check out the graphs of religious demographer
   Ryan Burge
   .)

3. Douthat’s book is—and this will surprise some readers of his—mostly not an invitation to be Roman Catholic, or even some sort of Christian. For the most part, the book is an argument to believe in God, conceived broadly. The evidence Douthat adduces—the fine-tuning of the universe, near-death experiences, etc.—does not necessarily point to a Christian god. However, you won’t be surprised to hear that, in the last chapter, Douthat throws down for the the Christian god, the Jesus story, and in particular the Jesus tradition as embodied by his own Roman Catholic Church.

   I won’t get into the minutiae of why Douthat believes Christianity is the most likely of all religions to be true; my take on his argument may be the stuff of another post. What I want to focus on for now is one reaction I had to this final chapter—and thus to the book as a whole, as it concluded—which is that it’s a very Christian thing to argue for Christianity, to argue for the correctness of their own tradition. There aren’t many books out there, by Jews, urging people to give Judaism a chance.

   Yes, there have been some, including four (!) books titled Why Be Jewish? They are very different books. One is by the liquor billionaire Edgar Bronfman; another is by the Conservative rabbi David Wolpe; another is by the late Orthodox rabbi, Israeli politician, Jewish Defense League founder, and well-known provocateur Meir Kahane (by far the most interesting of the books); and one is by the children’s author Doron Kornbluth. (Update: a quick Amazon scan suggests there are several more books called Why Be Jewish?, a couple possibly of the self-published variety.)

   There aren’t many books out there urging people to give Judaism a chance.

   But all these books are aimed at Jews, urging us to be more Jewish. None of these books is suggesting to the people of the world, mostly Gentile, that, if seeking, they should consider Judaism.

   There is an obvious reason for this: by tradition, Jews don’t proselytize. Note that I say “by tradition,” because it’s not by law, or by Torah: there is no prohibition against Jews proselytizing or evangelizing. Broadly speaking, we don’t proselytize for two reasons: First, there is no requirement to make others into Jews; besides which, unlike in traditional Christianity, the Gentiles’ salvation does not depend on choosing the right religion. Rather, while Jews must obey 613 commandments (by Maimonides’ count), Gentiles are expected to obey only the seven Noahide laws, the commandments stated to Noah after the flood, which according to the Talmud were:

1. Do establish laws [sometimes rendered as “establish courts”].

2. Don’t curse God.

3. Do not practice idolatry.

4. Do not engage in illicit sexuality.

5. Do not participate in bloodshed.

6. Do not rob.

7. Do not eat flesh from a living animal.

So whereas Christians, worried about Jewish souls, seek to convert us, we don’t have that worry about Christian souls—as long as they are basically good people, they can have a portion of “the world to come” (olam ha-ba), which is one of the various ways we vaguely talk about Heaven, or an earth filled with the resurrected dead (which sounds awesome to me).

But also, for most of our history, Jews lives in lands where, if we tried to convert Gentiles, we could get killed for our troubles. So we didn’t do that. And we developed no evangelical tradition.

That said, it is also a Jewish belief that some people have the souls of Jews whether they are born into the tradition or not. According to one Kabbalistic teaching, people moved to conversion have the souls of Jews in prior generations who were cut off from the Jewish people. And even if one does not subscribe to this particular belief, it seems empirically true, looking around, that there are people who are drawn to Judaism; you can hear many converts say things like, “It just made sense for me,” or “I felt home at last.”

And for those people who find a home in Judaism, I’m glad for them, just as I am glad for people who discover Buddhism and all of a sudden their lives get better, or people raised religiously who come to atheism and all of a sudden feel liberated. I want people to thrive. Thus, it’s a good thing that there are people in the world making the case for Judaism.

And there are certainly books one can read that make the case for Judaism. In fact, two of them were published last year, by two leading rabbis: Sharon Brous published The Amen Effect and Shai Held published Judaism Is About Love, an important theological treatise that did not get enough attention. But those books are aimed at people born Jewish. Much of the best writing for converts or aspiring converts is, perhaps unsurprisingly, coming from converts themselves. I’m thinking of Nellie Bowles’s now defunct Substack newsletter about her conversion, or the forthcoming Godstruck, by Kelsey Osgood. Somewhat ironically, one of the best books on Jewish practice comes from a Jew who became an Episcopal priest: Lauren F. Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath.

What we don’t have, I think, is a smart, accessible book making the case for Judaism to the seekers and secularists, or lapsed people of whatever faith, who might pick up Douthat’s books, looking for a reason to believe.

---

This Thursday, at 8pm Eastern time, I will be giving a Zoom talk to a group of Jewish Yale alumni. The title is “The Importance of Jewish Journalism—Is There a Future?” And I have secured permission to invite my paid newsletter subscribers. The sign-up link is below—and I thank you.