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My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith
My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith
My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith
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My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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One day a Georgia-born son of an Orthodox rabbi discovers that his enthusiasm for Judaism is flagging. He observes the Sabbath, he goes to synagogue, and he even flies to New York on weekends for a series of "speed dates" with nice, eligible Jewish girls. But, something is missing. Looking out of his window and across the street at one of the hundreds of churches in Atlanta, he asks, "What would it be like to be a Christian?"

So begins Benyamin Cohen's hilarious journey that is My Jesus Year—part memoir, part spiritual quest, and part anthropologist's mission. Among Cohen's many adventures (and misadventures), he finds himself in some rather unlikely places: jumping into the mosh-pit at a Christian rock concert, seeing his face projected on the giant JumboTron of an African-American megachurch, visiting a potential convert with two young Mormon missionaries, attending a Christian "professional wrestling" match, and waking up early for a sunrise Easter service on top of Stone Mountain—a Confederate memorial and former base of operations for the KKK.

During his year-long exploration, Cohen sees the best and the worst of Christianity— #8212;from megachurches to storefront churches; from crass commercialization of religion to the simple, moving faith of the humble believer; from the profound to the profane to the just plain laughable. Throughout, he keeps an open heart and mind, a good sense of humor, and takes what he learns from Christianity to reflect on his own faith and relationship to God. By year's end, to Cohen's surprise, his search for universal answers and truths in the Bible Belt actually make him a better Jew.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 29, 2008
ISBN9780061980336
My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith

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Rating: 3.5392156862745097 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really enjoyed this book -- the author is very funny but also has good insights into both traditional Judaism and modern Christianity. I learned as much or even more about Judaism than I expected -- the author spends a lot of time describing the Jewish traditions and ritual he was raised with while he explores and studies the Christian continuum by going to multiple church services, a Christian rock concert and even Ulimate Christian wrestling.

    The only thing that occasionally annoyed me is when the author complained about Judaism being so archaic and rigid, and I wanted to say to him, "Well, that's because you have only experienced Orthodox Judaism -- have you considered trying a Reform, Conservative, or Reconstructionist congregation?" But I understand that being raised Orthodox, he couldn't conceive of switching sects.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Imagine this movie pitch: An Orthodox Jew, feeling disconnected from his faith and living in the American South, decides to go to church for a year. Mensch worships with goyim; hilarity ensues. In the end, said Jew learns that his faith is what he makes of it. I imagine him doing a fist pump; freeze frame; “Oy, oy, oy, oy!” And everything’s wrapped up in a neat little package: Benyamin Cohen’s My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith.I’m of two minds about this book. Cohen’s critics have accused him of being shallow, of failing to more deeply explore the issues he sets out to. Although I was initially surprised at such criticisms, I was, upon finishing the book, forced to agree with them. Cohen’s purpose is not so much to worship with Christians as it is to observe their ways of worship. Recalling the Methodist church across the street from the house in which he grew up, Cohen longs to taste the forbidden fruit of Christianity, but only as an observer. In short, Cohen’s mission is to rejuvenate his own faith (strictly within the confines of Orthodoxy) and, in a larger sense, investigate why his coreligionists continue to abandon their religion while, at the same time, Christians are so successful. Why is Christianity so fun?This is potentially deep stuff, worthy of careful reflection. Readers won’t find that here: Given Cohen’s determination to remain strictly within his faith, and perhaps compounded by his journalistic sensibilities, Cohen delivers well-rendered chapters--the personalities and events he describes are truly brought to life--each of which end with a handy little life lesson. All wrapped up like the Christmas presents he so desperately wants to enjoy.Trouble is, Cohen ignores resources that might have been handy during his quest. (That said, they may have been outside the scope of a book focused on his journeys among Christians.) Reform Jews are discounted early as “culturally Jewish,” a critique I think that many at the temple I attend might find galling, to say the least. And Cohen is married to a Christian convert to Orthododoxy--the daughter of a pastor! She, too, is dismissed as a source of inspiration early in the book.There is something going on in My Jesus Year, though. It is a well-written book, deeply funny, and it explores unexpected people and movements--such as the Black Hebrews, of whom I had never previously heard. And it is thought-provoking. I was forced to wonder: Judaism is a religion of right practice, not of right thought. If I am “spiritually” connected to my faith (a notion that many traditional rabbis would say is unnecessary), does that make any difference if I’m not following the Law? Can I rightly call myself a Jew? Or, as Judaism encounters modernity, is it right of me to say that the scholars of old were just men, that Judaism has always been an evolving religion, and that maybe, just maybe, flipping a light switch on Shabbat isn’t really “work”? This is, for me at least, food for thought.Don’t expect revelations or deep insights from My Jesus Year. But if you want to be amused, or if you’re willing to apply Cohen’s lessons to your own faith, then you might want to give it a look.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A quick read, and an engaging one. It feels similar to 'stunt' books like A. J. Jacob's ''The Year of Living Biblically, Derfner's 'Swish: My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever,' and 'Self-Made Man' by Norah Vincent (about going 'undercover' as a man in a bowling league, a monastery, etc.).As you might be able to tell, I have a weakness for these books. At best, they can be thought-provoking and informative; at worst, they're about young writers doing entertaining things to give themselves something to write about.Cohen's is near the middle of the pack. It feels a little contrived, but I believe him when he says that he's searching for a closer connection to Judaism through his year-long sojourn in Christian churches. Yes, he seeks out groups for their story value (wrestlers for Jesus, peculiar sects, evangelical mega-churches), but his parsings of the differences between Judaism and Christianity are interesting, if sometimes a bit pat.He also tries to go in with an open, respectful mind, but like me he's a smartass, and sometimes his discomfort with the situation leads to cheap wisecracks. He does turn his jokes on himself more often than his subjects. It wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as Jacobs' book, but I enjoyed learning more about Orthodox daily life and religious practice. A quick, light read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A really fascinating look at religion and judaism through the prism of the american south . The book was extremely readable, made even moreso by some of the author's excellent one liners. on flying to NYC looking for a future wife: "They were looking for Woody Allen in his 20s. I was looking for Scarlett O'Hara in a shtetl."On meeting his current wife, a convert to judaism: "She was still jonesing for Jesus then. Now she's making moves on Moses."I'm impressed at the efforts to which Cohen went to secure permission from a rabbi for this and I was left thinking of my comparative religion class in college where we were asked to experience religious services that were different to our own. I wonder what Dad, a former Catholic priest, would think of Cohen's journey. I wish that he'd been able to expand more on the different services he attended, especially those with which I'm entirely unfamiliar such as the Black Hebrews.I'm not 100% sure if it's true but Cohen cites a stat that, if true, is just mind blowing: "In the United States more people pray to Jesus on Sunday then atend all the weekend sporting events combined". Really? I'm not sure I know more than 10 of these people, and certainly not my age. I also found it very amusing how he almost feared Christians out of knowing so few.Part of what I enjoyed in this book is the books he recommended throughout his quest, which have since inflated my wishlist ;-) A great read for anyone trying to understand Judaism, Christianity or the Bible Belt. Wonder how his quest miht have differed in a different area that didn't feature, for example, Christian Wrestling
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I had to devote a bit of thoght to reviewing My Jesus Year. On the surface this book is kind of flip: a young male journalist tasting forbidden fruit and finding it not much to his liking. However, there's a lot going on beneath that surface. Author Cohen starts out as that all-to-cordinary character, The Boy in Rebellion. He's lost enthusiasm for his faith, but not the faith itself. He's tired of feeling as though he's outside the mainstream American culture. He conceives of the odd idea of exploring the varieties of Christian faith availabe to him as a way to recapture his own flagging beliefs. Since he lives in Atlanta, which may be called the Buckle of the Bible Belt, he has plenty of experiences to choose from.Cohen keeps a remarkably open mind; he visits as wide a variety as possible of Christian churches; he seems to have a lot of fun (not unknd fun, either); he maintains a respectful but not obsequious attitude toward all these avenues of worship. Ulitmately he discovers that his faith is important to him, that the "practice" of faith is just that--a way to become a better person of faith; and that the dry spells in one's spiritual life cna lead, however slowly, to a renewal of one's belief and joy in that beliefe.One thing that particularly struck me was Cohen's acceptance of the hugely divergent ways that Christians worhsip here in the U.S. This book is really an itneresting exploration af a personal spiritual journey, without being cloying or boring.I took off a half star for the journalistic style of writing. Even so, this is a book well worth reading.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Benjamin Cohen, an observant orthodox Jew, son of a rabbi and the only one of his siblings not to be either a rabbi or married to one found he was feeling spiritually alienated from his religion and its "black hole of laws", rituals and prohibitions but didn't even consider not practicing, that much of a black sheep he wasn't. Instead he decided to visit various Christian churches for a year hoping that would kind of jump start his faith. He had always been jealous of the fun he thought Christians had, he thought he could find out why Christianity was becoming more and more popular while Jews were practicing their religion less and less. I was surprised to find that while Judaism is not a proselytizing religion there is a sort of ministry among Jews for non practicing Jews to coax them back to the faith. Of course, by the end of the book his faith is indeed revitalized. I admit it was a rather strange book for an atheist to like, but his talk of his community and his family, especially his grandfather, and their importance in his life got to me. Faith is the glue that holds that community together, so he helped me see why it was so important to him.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    At first glance, the premise of this book seems rather silly. The son of an Orthodox Jewish rabbi spends a year exploring the churches of the Bible Belt. Feeling bored and uninspired by his strict religious observance, journalist Benyamin Cohen finds a rabbi (obviously not his dad) who gives him “permission” to visit these churches. Being from Atlanta, Georgia, Cohen begins a quest to find inspiration for his own faith by visiting Christian places of worship.I was distraught considering how Cohen’s father must have felt about his son going on this journey. This issue was addressed in the book, but nearly at the end. I think that was the perfect place to have discussed this so that it did not interfere with the way the reader experiences the author's travels.There were quite a few Christian groups and services which Cohen explored, including one which was involved with religious “wrestling” and another which did a sunrise service on top of a granite mountain (an experience not unlike my own years ago on top of what is believed to be the actual Mt. Sinai). The two descriptions that fascinated me the most in this book, however, were that of the Black Hebrews (not Christian) and that of the Catholic church. I knew about the Black Hebrews from having lived in Israel but never knew about their history. I was delighted to learn about this in Cohen’s book. In addition, I was mortified when Cohen decided to go to confession in a Catholic church. I have no idea how he ever pulled this one off, but he did so.The book is laugh-out-loud funny at times. I say this with reservation. This is not true for the whole book because there were times it seemed that Cohen’s humor was condescending. I’m sure that is not true because he reiterated several times throughout the book that he respected the religion of others and was not putting other faiths down. I think the feeling I got was just Cohen’s attempt at humor that succeeded more in some places than in others.I was hoping that the end of the book would not be something like, “I lost my religion and now I found it.” I won’t tell you how it ended other than to say I found the ending very moving. I’m Jewish and love my religion. I think there is much for people of all faiths to learn from this book. Knowing that this is Cohen’s debut book, I must say I’m in the mood to read more of his writing. I hope there will be another book in the making for the future. If so, I’d really like to read it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Interesting, funny, educational; I loved this book. Cohen's style is easy and likable. I highly recommend this to anyone who is interested in a light-hearted look at the Jewish and Christian faiths.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Cohen is, from all appearances, a very devout and conservative Jew. On the inside, however, he feels his spiritual life is empty. He longs to experience genuine spirituality. In addition, he has always had a secret envy of Christians.Somehow this leads Cohen to embark on a year-long adventure exploring Bible Belt Christianity. One more thing you should know about Cohen: He is a funny guy. That explains a lot. For example, it explains why Cohen spends his year visiting rock Christians and wrestling Christians and speaking-in-tongues Christians and healing Christians. He stops in on the fringes. Don’t be thinking Cohen is planning to stop in your little small town Christian church. No, he is looking for Christianity, but he is also looking for a good story.Mixed feelings about this. Cohen assures us and assures us he is not seeking to mock Christianity, that he wants to find the deeply spiritual Christians. But time after time he ends up chatting with another group of people that could have wandered out of the loony bin and, intentionally or not, he mocks. Cohen is very condescending toward Christians, at times, when he sees what he deems misinterpretations of the Law and misapplications of the Law. He says he finds many Christians who are much like him, going through the motions without really experiencing that depth one wishes for, and that is probably true. He also spoke with several Christians who helped him find his way back to his own religion and who helped him grow a little, including a priest who encouraged him to keep going through the motions until he experienced the depth. Very mixed feelings about this.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    What happens when an orthodox Jew decides to explore Christian churches? This is an interesting journey of self exploration into religion and faith. It's also funny to see different worlds collide; even leaving theology & belief aside, the methods for expressing religious faith vary widely. There is no attempt to convert you to any particular faith in this book, it's simply a personal story of one man's experience.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Benyamin Cohen's father is a rabbi, and his six other siblings went into the "family business." Why, then, is Mr Cohen writing about a year in which he went church hopping and exploring Christianity? This book is a spiritual quest, a voyage to understand why he felt so disconnected with the religion of his family.A wonderful book - he is self-depreciating (but not too much), insightful, humorous, and thoughtful.What Mr Cohen has learned while visiting Mega-churches, attending WWF with Christian wrestlers, and listening to Christian rock is that there is much that Jews can learn to promote judaism and make synagogues more interactive and meaningful. His journey brought him closer to his religion. His year in the Bible Belt made him a better Jew. I really really enjoyed this read.

Book preview

My Jesus Year - Benyamin Cohen

ONE

Son of a Preacher Man

The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was a quiet man, staying among the tents.

—Genesis 25:27

THERE’S A STORY about my birth, and I’m told it’s not an apocryphal one. Eight days after I entered this world, the morning of my circumcision, my father and I had our very first bonding experience. Just me and him in the back room of a butcher shop. Allow me to explain. Please.

I was a tiny baby, and our rabbi was unsure if I weighed enough to medically handle a circumcision. My dad, a man who holds multiple graduate degrees, was getting medical advice from our rabbi. That’s like getting a chef’s opinion on Middle Eastern politics. Or Paris Hilton’s thoughts on anything.

Nobody in our neighborhood, the story goes, had a proper scale to weigh a baby. So my dad took me to the butcher.

Early on the morning of my circumcision, in the dark stillness before daybreak, my dad drove me in our family’s brown Plymouth Volare to Sam’s Kosher Meats and Deli. This was a depressing place. Sam was a cantankerous old man, always yelling at his wife in his thick eastern European accent. The place was in a constant state of disarray. Bad vibes abounded. Don’t bring babies here. This is not a manger.

In the back room, deep inside the frigid meat locker, my dad took my little baby body and placed it on the ice-cold metal meat scale. The scale read 5.2 pounds. At least that’s what he thought it read. It was 1975, and digital scales wouldn’t appear on the scene for years.

For years afterward, members of our tight-knit Jewish community would come up to me, pinch my cheek, and call me Butcher Boy. At my bar mitzvah, the Jewish rite of passage into manhood, someone brought a rubber chicken to the party thinking it was funny. It wasn’t.

My dad called the rabbi and woke him up.

Five point two pounds, he said. Will that work?

Yep, said the rabbi, in a bleary daze. He was surely still half asleep and completely oblivious to what he was agreeing to. And in that moment, my fate was sealed. There was no turning back.

Circumcision is more than just a minor surgical procedure. It is what ties a Jew to his ancestors. It’s a remembrance of the covenant between Abraham and God made back in Genesis. The only difference between Abraham and me is that he had a choice. I didn’t. At eight days old, I wasn’t given a vote. And now I’m stuck with this religion for life.

Hours later, in the company of a couple hundred of our closest friends and family, I officially became a member of my people. The ceremony involved a scalpel, a lot of pain, and an emotional dent that would leave me reeling for years to come.

This was how I was introduced to religion. It was forced upon me, beginning in the frigid meat locker of a kosher butcher.

THE COHENS ARE a clan of rabbinic rock stars. My dad’s a rabbi, and from the very beginning we were brought up to join him in the family business. Of us six kids only my younger sister and I didn’t either become a rabbi or marry one (although, for the record, she does work in Jewish education).

Religion was served to us on a silver platter—whether we wanted it or not. We kept kosher, we observed the Sabbath, we prayed three times a day. No questions asked. These were all givens. I went to a preschool called the Garden of Eden. Except in this kindergarten, sin was not an option.

What’s more, as religious as we were growing up, I never actually understood Judaism’s fundamentals. After I was circumcised, like a prepackaged product coming off an assembly line, I felt haphazardly heaved into the deep end of the Jewish religious pool with the rest of them.

I tried to rebel at every turn. In preschool, I’ll now finally admit, I tasted the sweet nectar of forbidden indulgence by gobbling up nonkosher Nerds candy behind my school building, crumpling its sin-soaked box back into my knapsack just before my carpool ride arrived. My dad once caught me yanking my tzitzit off one hot summer morning when I was about ten. What are tzitzit? you ask. The term literally means fringes and refers to the heavy wool garment with string and fringes on its corners that Jewish males are supposed to wear under their clothing at all times. Yes, let’s say it together, that’s crazy. I know.

In my childish eyes, my dad was someone who treated my siblings and me all the same, trying to raise us all in the same mold—with what appeared to me to be an ironclad fist of religion. With clenched teeth, he told us not to overdose on television, not to talk a lot with those of the opposite sex, and to avoid just about anything else that sounded like fun to a prepubescent kid. My brothers and sisters seemed to be fine with the religion we were born into. I, on the other hand, felt it as an unbearable weight upon my shoulders.

The fundamental basis of Judaism is that we’re the chosen people. But what if we didn’t choose to be chosen?

Don’t get me wrong. I still did everything I was told (well, except for the now infamous Nerds candy incident of 1980). To the outside world, I was the rabbi’s son, and no one would think otherwise. But a look inside my psyche yielded a different picture—one glossed with a gnawing sense of envy of those who could have what I couldn’t. No bacon cheeseburgers. No girlfriends. No Cosby show.

Alas, these were the halcyon days of my childhood. And yet, I wondered: Why was I being denied a typical American upbringing? What had I done to deserve this?

My mom played good cop to my dad’s Dirty Harry. She let me watch television. She didn’t make a big deal when she found out about the crush I had on a girl at school. She treated me and my siblings more like individuals, encouraging each of us to embrace our strengths, whatever those may have been.

Unfortunately, this loving maternal parenting philosophy didn’t gain much traction, as my mother collapsed suddenly and died on a bleak January morning when I was only thirteen years old. I had just come off the religious high of celebrating my bar mitzvah, yet with her sudden passing I instinctively reverted to an emotional fetal position. I felt crippled and woefully unprepared for the adulthood that lay before me.

WHILE I WAS growing up, my dad served as the principal of a Jewish high school in Atlanta. He felt bad that, come Saturday morning, the students went their separate ways to their individual synagogues. He longed for a place where the students and teachers could pray together on the Sabbath. So just before my mother’s death, he decided to build an addition onto our home—a thousand-square-foot synagogue for them to pray in, with my dad leading the services. The construction contractor, a shady Israeli businessman, asked my dad for all the money up front. Apparently they don’t teach Business 101 in rabbinical seminary, because my dad gave him the money. All of it.

Not surprisingly, the contractor fled the country with my college nest egg. My mom had a massive brain aneurism shortly after the incident. She was pronounced dead two days later. I guess you could say that even as a kid I never really had a positive association with synagogues.

Don’t get me wrong. I indeed had moments of true religious verve and vigor as a child. I did in fact have genuine moments of spiritual inspiration. I remember fondly the day the synagogue attached to our home was finally completed nearly three years after the original contractor broke ground. It was a Friday afternoon. In a few hours, with the setting of the sun, we would usher in our Sabbath and inaugurate the sanctuary with its very first prayer service.

I entered the large room, alone for a moment, and took it all in. It was magnificent, a sight to behold. The new contractor, this one more honest than the first, had capped off the ceiling with a window-filled dome that allowed rays of sunlight to beam down into the sanctuary. They were like rays from heaven, perhaps my mother smiling down upon us. The room’s construction may have contributed to her untimely death, but I was sure her spirit in heaven was full of joy now that it was finally complete.

I closed my eyes and pictured being the first to give my mother the grand tour of the new edifice. My father was an avid book collector and had lined nearly every wall of the sanctuary with bookcases as high as the eye could see. The hundreds of Jewish books, neatly stacked on each shelf, infused the room with intellectual warmth. In the front of the room, on a raised dais, stood the ark protecting two Torah scrolls inside. I almost wished that we didn’t have to open for business in a few hours and that the room could remain in this virgin state forever.

Judaism didn’t always suffocate me; there were periods of my life when my faith made me feel whole. Growing up in that synagogue, in the confines of those walls, I actually felt God’s presence. Spirituality was real for me. It was tangible—in my prayers, in my thoughts, and in my daily life. I felt I could ask God, I could supplicate, I could cry, whether it was asking for divine assistance with getting a girl to like me, praying for an A on the next day’s math test, or wondering why God had decided to rob me of a mother during my adolescence. Entering my teens without the aid of a mother would be the foundation of an eventual psychic distance between myself and God, one that would later blossom into full-blown cynicism.

The synagogue, with all it represented, brought some stability into my young psyche. The pain that its construction wrought on our family dynamic eventually gave way to a peaceful plateau, a place where I could feel close to my mother’s long lost spirit and heal my wounds ever so slowly. But right before my eyes, whatever little stability my life had was about to be yanked from under me.

Less than two years after my mom’s passing my dad remarried, this time to an artist from San Diego whom he didn’t bother to introduce me to until they were practically engaged. I immediately assigned her the role of the proverbial evil stepmother, even though I hardly knew her. I met my future stepbrothers when my dad was showing them around our home shortly before they were to move in. The younger brother took up residence in the bedroom built underneath the synagogue and lined the walls with his Tony Gwynn posters and other sports paraphernalia.

After my mom died, even though I wasn’t the oldest child, I had taken over many of the household duties. I had gotten into a comfortable routine that was shaken up by my new stepmother. She brought new rules and a new set of systems into the house. This was not the blessedly, blissfully blended family of The Brady Bunch.

I blamed my dad for all of this disruption. I despised him for doing this to me. I didn’t care about his feelings or his need to move on after my mom died. I was an angry teenager who had lost his mother, and I blamed my dad for giving me this lot in life. After all, if he hadn’t been an overly enthusiastic rabbi, I never would’ve been brought up in a wacky family that builds a synagogue next to their dining room. If it wasn’t for him, I could lead a normal life, one free of all these ridiculous religious strictures.

No longer was it enough to just be mad at my dad; I also began to resent everything he stood for (Judaism) and everything that I believed had sent my mother to her early grave (the pressures of being a rabbi’s wife).

It’s true what they say about Jewish guilt. It’s intoxicating and all-encompassing. As much as I thought I wanted to, I couldn’t just stop doing the Jewish commandments cold turkey. No, that wasn’t going to work. Ironically, I knew enough not to do that. I had been taught that, despite what we may be feeling inside, we are commanded to do these things. Judaism had my hands tied.

So in lieu of actual heresy, my spirit began to ebb and flow. My emotional connection to my religion began to vacillate. Prayers, the Sabbath, and a myriad of other Jewish commandments became less important. And, ever so slowly, my spiritual connection to God began to fade.

My growing religious apathy soon became coupled with an even greater vice: envy. Envy of those with things I couldn’t have.

For years I had looked longingly at the church across the street from my house, its pristine landscape looming just outside my bedroom window. I watched, with transfixed eyes, each Sunday morning as the khaki-clad parishioners and their always smiling progeny emerged from their shiny minivans and walked into the sun-dappled, stained-glass sanctuary.

Pastor Duffey, the minister of the church, was my sole tangible entrée into this mysterious world of Christianity. During the few occasions he came over to our home—to shut off our oven, for example, after we had forgot to turn it off before the onset of the Sabbath, when Jews are prohibited from using electricity—I tried desperately to get a glimpse of who this man was. What was his life like? How did it feel to not be strangled by the myriad rules of an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle? How did it feel to flick on the light switch on the Sabbath? Where was he going after he left our house? To a football game? To eat pork?

While my upbringing was defined by what I couldn’t do, it seemed to me that Christian kids had it all. In my eyes, they were wealthy, happy, and able to watch TV whenever they wanted. They had a choice. Should we watch Transformers or He-Man? Should we watch anything at all?

It was as if I had left the uterus with a yarmulke on my head and a Talmud already in my hand. All I was missing was a beard. A certain prescribed lifestyle was all I knew. I was brought up with certain expectations of who I was and who I should become.

Average Christian children seemed to just have it easier, unencumbered by the history of persecution we felt as Jews. In my eyes, they seemed to go through life with a laissez-faire attitude I could only dream about. They didn’t have to worry how long their sideburns were (another Jewish law). They didn’t have to wear tzitzit. They could eat at any restaurant, no matter how unkosher.

I felt lost, a traveler without a compass. I didn’t feel a connection to my own religion. What’s worse, the religion of others was tempting me, so close and yet so far away.

AS I ENTERED my college years and moved away from my dad’s house and his overbearing ways, I felt an uncontrollable sense of freedom. Probably the same way Ben Franklin would have felt if he’d had the opportunity to shop at Circuit City. Forget the kite. This hi-tech wonderland would have been too much for colonial Franklin to grasp. He wouldn’t have known where to begin.

I considered McDonald’s, its famed Big Mac and cheese the sheer embodiment of all that’s unkosher, but its utter and unbelievable unkosherness enveloped me in guilt. I thought about something less dramatic, perhaps a visit to a seedy bar. But after five minutes in the smoky joint, I gasped for some fresh air. Apparently, my feeble Jewish body wasn’t built for blaring music coupled with an unhealthy dose of carbon monoxide. (Indeed, years later, a doctor confirmed what every Jewish male already knows—we’re allergic to everything.)

This reminded me of a reality show I watched called Amish in the City. As a rite of passage the Amish send their teenagers on Rumspringa, a vacation from religion lasting several months to many years. During this time the kids are supposed to decide if they indeed want to lead an Amish life. The producers took five Amish teens and plopped them into a Hollywood home with five mainstream teenagers, including a stereotypical jock, a vegan, and a gay guy. They spent that summer dancing at rock concerts, getting their GEDs, and attending red-carpet events—you know, the usual stuff non-Amish kids do in their spare time. At the conclusion of the show, not one of the teenagers wanted to go back to an Amish lifestyle. I could relate to that.

As for me, I wanted to date a shiksa, a gentile girl, wrapped in bacon, but all I could do was order cable. My big defiant act was watching the Cartoon Network, something that had been denied to me as a kid. We didn’t have cable when I was growing up, so I was oblivious to miraculous inventions like its twenty-four/seven lineup of animation. What kind of heretic was I when I was in my midtwenties and my biggest vice was watching The Smurfs?

What’s more, all of this freedom (while initially enjoyable) was in fact very limiting. The ease of a lifestyle free of religious strictures was tempting, but I had been taught otherwise. I knew this would be an unsatisfying way for me to go about my life. I knew I needed more. I yearned for a closer connection to something deeper, something more meaningful.

Again, I found myself looking to the Christians across the street. Not only did they have a life that was more fun and exciting than mine, but they seemed to be enjoying—nay, embracing—their religion all at the same time. It was a paradigm shift for me. Religion equals happiness. How could that be? I had to sit down.

We all, by nature, are riddled with personal uncertainties. They surround us on a daily basis. Our country is at war. Terrorism is a real threat. Our nation’s political philosophies are divided. People are looking for certainty, some kind of stabilizing factor they can grasp onto. They want to have a concrete basis to build their lives upon. Enter religion.

For most Americans, church serves as that stabilizing factor. The sacred congregational community serves as a foundation on which they can rely upon in troubled times and a welcome place where they can feel they belong. And clergy is their bedrock, an unshakable force from which they gain strength, confidence, and fortitude.

To many, that’s what religion is supposed to be. The irony was that, for me, religion was anything but. My religion was what was making me feel less certain about the world around me. Yes, I believed in God. But the conduit through which I connected to Him—my faith, my Judaism—wasn’t resonating with me. And that troubled me even more. I felt that the religion I was given wasn’t allowing me to access God the way I wanted. Maybe God made a mistake when He made me a Jew. Was I supposed to be a Mormon instead? Maybe a Baptist or a Pentecostal? I don’t know. I just know this didn’t feel right. Instead of being a stabilizing force in my life, my religion was what was shaking me to the core.

Was I alone in these thoughts? I certainly couldn’t be the only Jew to have negative feelings toward my religion. America is replete with Jews who are apathetic at best. Indeed, I’m sure people from all walks of life, from all religions, have the very same issues at one point or another during their lives. After all, we are all pilgrims on our own individual journeys toward faith.

This realization—that I was not alone—was a start. Misery, as the saying goes, loves company. Now what?

Using my new cable TV service, I flipped on a Sunday morning church service. Christians were already cooler than us. They had televised prayers. The pastor, a tall black man in a shiny gray suit with an inordinate number of buttons, was rousing. The audience was enraptured. But I didn’t get it. All he was doing was shouting aphorisms. Basic ones, too. God loves you! Be good! Don’t lie, cheat, and steal! How could such fundamental tenets be inspiring to people? It boggled my mind.

It almost seemed shallow. Wasn’t religion supposed to be this deeply fulfilling experience between us humans and a Higher Power? In college I had minored in religious studies and had learned of the Tao of the Eastern religions, of the deeply philosophical nature of humankind’s place on this planet. How could this be transmitted by a slickly dressed showman shouting rudimentary one-liners?

AFTER THREE DECADES in Atlanta, my dad had found employment elsewhere and packed up our home. He sold it to a real estate developer who turned around and rented it to a bunch of college coeds. It has since become a frat house; the synagogue room now hosts keg parties.

As happens with most families, my siblings all left the nest and moved to other cities for college and to start families of their own. I was the only one who stayed.

So this is where I found myself. I felt abandoned by my family. And, even more, I felt abandoned by God.

This was not the way I wanted to lead my life. My actions were being fueled by anger and resentment. My decisions—to not visit family, to gain little from religion—were being dictated by years of friction and ill will. I so wanted something positive to live for. I needed some compelling, proactive reason to move forward on all fronts. This spiritual stagnation was eating me up inside, and I had to do something to fix it.

At the time, I was twenty-six, an age at which most of my Orthodox friends were already married. Some even had kids. They were starting their own lives and, I assumed, creating their own new connections to Judaism through the support system of spouse and children.

Thoughts of marriage became my cure-all. Surely, a nice wife I could bring home to my dad would show him I wasn’t a completely lost cause. Wistfully putting all my hopes in the dream that getting married would solve all my problems—with my family and my religion—I began to think about it constantly. It became all-consuming. It was what got me through the day.

TWO

How to Find a Wife in a Hundred Dates

So Boaz took the convert Ruth and she became his wife.

—Ruth 4:13

DELTA FLIGHT # 506 from Atlanta to New York was making its final descent into LaGuardia. This was the second time this month I had taken this flight, and already the seventh time this year—and it was only April. But I had to make the trek because if I ever wanted to find a single marriageable Orthodox Jewish woman, it just wasn’t going to happen where I live in Atlanta (I had dated all five of them already). So I had no choice but to hop a plane to the Big Apple twice a month for my very own version of The Dating Game. I couldn’t complain. After all, the biblical Jacob spent seven years enduring backbreaking labor for his true love, just to be told by his conniving future father-in-law that he would only be allowed to marry Rachel after an additional seven years of hard work. That’s fourteen years. Working for your father-in-law. The least I could do was visit Manhattan—a place, mind you, my proud Southern heritage had taught me to despise with every fiber of my Confederate being.

But I didn’t fly up just for one date—or even just one girl. I had worked out a system that allowed me to date a lot of women in a relatively short amount of time. During a five-year dating spree in my twenties, I went out with more than a hundred women. And they all seemed to be various versions of a sitcom cliché.

One girl was actually married and didn’t bother to tell me until after I had paid the tab for dinner. In her defense (though I’m not sure why I need to be defending her in this book), she was technically separated. That made me feel a little better, I guess, although I’m not quite sure why she felt the need to use air quotes when she said separated. Was she not really separated? Was she only somewhat separated? Was she still married? That meal was the last time I saw her. As far as I know she’s still married, still going out with unsuspecting single men, and still relying a little too heavily on air quotes.

As for me, my typical New York itinerary looked something like this: Fly up on a Sunday morning, go on five dates (coffee, lunch, coffee, coffee, and dinner), then fly back on the last flight out Sunday night. I boarded the plane those evenings so hopped up on caffeine that I was jittery as I handed my boarding pass to the flight attendant. It was really no way to lead a life.

But this is what my Judaism had taught me. Like my ancestors before me, I would marry inside the faith. The future of my people, I was told, lay on my gawky shoulders. It was the burden I was to bear. As if that hadn’t shrunk the dating pool enough, I knew I could only marry someone who was also Orthodox. Someone who—like me—waited six hours between eating meat and milk, didn’t turn the lights on during the Sabbath, and adhered to all the other unbelievably strange laws that I’ll explain in the next chapter. Despite my almost lifelong frustration with my faith and the myriad laws it obligated me to follow (again, next chapter), I actually wanted to marry someone who was observant like me. This was because the lifestyle had become so ingrained in me I knew no other alternative. And I was actually fine with that. I just wished I could appreciate this Judaism I was so monotonously doing.

So for the most part, I seemed to be dating girls with backgrounds similar to mine. We had each been force-fed Orthodox Judaism growing up, and we were each being told who we should date and marry. And we each felt resentment toward Judaism because of it. It was perfect up to that point. Our only major difference was that I was from the South, which made me more chilled and laid-back. The girls were from Manhattan, which made them talk a mile a minute and have a tough exterior that I didn’t find too attractive. They were looking for Woody Allen in his twenties. I was looking for Scarlett O’Hara in a shtetl.

A friend once set me up on a date with a girl in New York who was less religious than I was. Midway through the date, she grabbed onto my arm as we were walking and held it as we crossed the street. Run-of-the-mill activity in the nonreligious dating world. But in my universe touching before marriage was a cardinal sin. And we were smack in the middle of Times Square, with some of the busiest street corners on the planet. I was mortified.

Okay, I realize at this point I should briefly explain why a girl holding my arm is the religious equivalent of a Catholic skipping Lent. It’s just not done in our circles. Segregating the sexes is an integral philosophy used ubiquitously with observant Jewish children from the time we’re in elementary school. And by the time we reach high school, when faith often takes a backseat to our raging hormones, we’re told not to have girlfriends or boyfriends. Told is a polite way of putting it. In no uncertain terms, my dad informed me, was I to fall in love during my formative teenage years. Well, needless to say, I took that as my cue to start lining up potential girlfriends.

I fancied myself a Casanova of sorts, flirting with all the girls at the private Jewish high school I attended. But, instead, I ended up feeling like another literary legend—Romeo. Beth Schwartz was the girl I thought I was going to marry. We were going steady on and off throughout high school. I would say we were dating, but I don’t think we ever went out on an actual date because of the aforementioned ban on girlfriends. Both sets of parents forbade it, and that made us want to hang out even more. In that youthful state, we really did believe our forbidden love was akin to that of Romeo and Juliet. The uphill battle our religion provided added to the up against all odds gestalt.

This Shakespearean comparison was compounded by the fact that I would actually sneak out of my house in the middle of the night, ride my bike to Beth’s house, and throw pebbles at her bedroom window. The Montagues and the Capulets became the Schwartzes and the Cohens. All we needed was an apothecary and this would turn tragic.

But it didn’t. I had worked out a system to sneak out of my house

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