To give reasons for one’s love feels awkward. You might be able to give reasons for your choices, but before I fell in love with the Bible, I never went to the library to read the Holy Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita, or even the Book of Mormon. That’s not how love happens—because love does happen; it happened to me.

What else can one do—what else can I do—but tell my story, the story of my love for the Bible: how to read, to study, to ponder, to preach the Bible; how it became my professional, even professorial, career, as that study watered, even lubricated, my soul.

For the longer I live, the less adequate and less useful become all those stifling distinctions between academy and church, faith and reason, the intellectual and the spiritual. There is such an interplay between those fabricated distinctions that one cannot live without the other. So here is the story, the story of my love relationship with the scriptures.

PART 1: GETTING HOOKED

Somehow it did not start with the Bible. In my home, the Bible was supposed to be a little too Methodist. It started with Jesus, mainly as he had come to me through the hymn book, which is used as a spiritual guide in the piety of the Church of Sweden, and which we read a hymn from on Sunday morning. To go to church was a dangerous sliding into Phariseeism, as I was brought up. Somehow, what I had gathered about Jesus spoke to me, fascinated me. The image I had was of an incredibly interesting mixture of strength and kindness—strength so different from the bully world of the school yard.

Jesus became not my hero, but rather my friend. I guess I was 12 or so when I sneaked away to church on Sunday mornings—in spite of the risk of Phariseeism—to be where Jesus was supposed to be. But then in fall 1935, I was invited to something called a Bible study group. And I was given a pocket New Testament, both as a symbol and as a text, and I was told to read it as if it was all about me—my life, my conscience, my duties to God and to my neighbor. I was hooked, for life.

Not about him: The Prodigal Son

The old principle tua res agitur—it’s all about you, or, it is your case—carried me for a long time. And I got a language for my faith; I got words for my feelings; I got pictures for my dreams. And my image of Jesus became more multifaceted.

When I thought I understood, there was always more and more and more. I had begun to feed on the mysteries of God. And it was intellectually a most stimulating awakening. That way of reading served me well, for a while. This was the time when I was naïve and arrogant enough to identify with the people I read about, or whose writings I read. I felt like Peter and I felt like Paul—especially when they had negative feelings. I felt like all the disciples. I felt like the Prodigal Son—I had not yet learned that the story in Luke 15 was actually about the older son, who is the one who is like church people, those who stayed on the farm (somebody has to), but couldn’t take it unto himself to be grateful when his brother came home. I wanted to become more like Jesus, wondering what he would say or do had he been where I was.

That way of reading lasted for a while, and who would say that it isn’t the way I still read and feel from time to time. But my love for the scriptures led me to ways of reading that were so much less ego-centered. The Bible was really not about me. It was many other things—in the long run, much more interesting things. It was about many things in distant lands, from many distant ages.

I came to read it more and more like a book, perhaps more as a “classic.” Now it spoke to me from a great distance, of centuries and cultures deeply different from my own. And it began to be, just by its difference, that the fascination grew, that it had a way of saying to me, there are other ways of seeing and thinking and feeling and believing than you have taken for granted. And it just added to my love—for love is not just fascination.

When I short-circuited my reading in those earlier days of having it just be about me, I slowly learned that this was a greedy way to deal with the richness of the scriptures.

PART 2: FIVE WRONG WAYS TO READ THE BIBLE

So let me share with you as a tribute to the Bible—and perhaps in a strange way—five “no” statements. It is usual when one is describing love to describe it in positive and glowing terms. But my friendship with the Bible gave me the joy, and the courage, to express my love in five statements of “not.” The first one I have pointed at: It is not primarily about me. Second, it is not always as deep as we think. Third, even Paul isn’t always totally sure. Fourth, don’t be so uptight. And fifth, it is probably not as universal as we think.

Friendly debate: In the Jewish tradition, God likes the argumentative

It is perhaps odd to express my love in such negative terms. But it is also perhaps in the line of that wonderful word of Jesus in chapter of John: I do not call you any longer servants, but I call you friends. Somehow I became friends with the Bible. In the biblical tradition, and in the Jewish tradition, to be called the friend of God, you had to be one who argued with God. Abraham, arguing about Sodom and Gomorrah, was called a friend of God. Job was called the friend of God. To me, Jesus is the friend of God, because he argues with God. And so, these five “no’s” of mine I bring to you as a sign of love and friendship.

The first “no” is the one which became the watershed in my love story with the Bible: It is not about me. In Galatians 3 it says that the law became, as many people translated, the tutor unto Christ. And I had learned, in good Lutheran theology—and John Wesley was on that line, too—that the law was for the preparation of my conscience. The law was the tutor, and tutored me so that I could fully understand not only what I should do, but also that I couldn’t live up to it, and hence needed a savior. The law was a tutor unto Christ, preparing, tendering my conscience, so that my need for forgiveness would become so great.

Then I learned Greek. That sometimes has its value. And it seemed to me very clear that the text actually said something quite different. It said that the law for the Jewish people had been a kind of harsh babysitter who saw to it that they did not raid the kingdom until it was Gentile time, so that the Gentiles could also be in on the deal. That’s what the text actually said: The law had been tutored until it was time for the Gentiles to come in. That was confusing. Then I looked in my concordance, and I found that what the preachers had been preaching about when they preached about Paul, the forgiveness of sins, was never mentioned by Paul in either Galatians or Romans.

It's all about me: Uh, no it's not

I started to recognize that when Paul spoke about justification by faith, he was really giving the argument in favor of his Gentile converts. He had to come to grips with how, in God’s word and God’s mind, his mission to the Gentiles fitted into God’s total plan. It was about the Jews and the Gentiles and not about me. What an awakening. And I read in Romans 7: I cannot understand that I act as I act, because the good things I want to do, I don’t, and the bad things I do not want to do, I do. I, wretched human being—who is going to rescue me? And I thought that at least it was about me. I mean it was psychologically sound and easy to show that that’s the way it is. But then I found that Paul said: If I act as I do not want and I do not act act as I want, then it isn’t I who do it. That’s what the text says. Then he said: Then I agree to the law that it is good. This sounded strange. He wasn’t very bothered, was he, by his inner conflict. He described something quite different. He used this wonderful psychological example to prove that the holy law and the commandment was holy, righteous, and just. I hadn’t cared about that, because I thought it was about me. And then I read: We have the God who justifies the ungodly. And Abraham believed, and it was counted him unto the righteousness (Rom. 4). And I thought that this had to do with God’s grace, by which we are forgiven. But it seemed that the point here was quite simply that Abraham was a gentile when he believed, because the circumcision didn’t happen until chapter 17 of Genesis and we were only in chapter 15.

So, Paul had found a wonderful exegetical key to the mystery of his Gentile mission. It wasn’t about me. And I read in Chapter II in Romans where Paul says: You Gentiles had gotten a little uppity toward the people of Israel, and I’ll tell you a secret, lest you be conceited, and that is that all of Israel will be saved, so that’s none of your business. So it was about Jews, about people.

And, imagine, I read these things during the end of the Second World War, when the camps in Auschwitz and Dachau opened up, and I still thought that Romans was a theological tractate about my soul. And I didn’t feel that it was about people. And I didn’t feel that Paul had fathomed that this Gentile condescension toward the Jewish people had started to happen already in his own time. How come the greatest missionary of the Bible warns his converts of missionary zeal? Isn’t that strange? Or, is it not so strange? Paul had been burned once. It was out of religious zeal that he had committed his only sin-—no, perhaps not his only sin, but the only sin he ever mentioned that he committed, namely, that he had persecuted the church. And he saw that now perhaps it started all over again with the Christians toward the Jews. Oh, that we had listened to him instead of to the tradition that didn’t see the Jews, but just made them a kind of brick in the game of interpretation.

I learned that it was not about me, but it was teaching me about God’s way of dealing with the world, with people, with tensions between people of different faiths. What an insight. What a wonderful book that I had claimed for my own soul game instead of feeling the big drama of God, in which I was very little.

PART TWO: How Not to Read the Bible 

A.J. Jacobs spent the past year living according to the Bible as literally as possible. That meant no pork, no sitting on a chair on which a woman has previously perched (you never know if she might be menstruating), and no mixing fibers. In this excerpt from his book, The Year of Living Biblically, he wades gingerly into the world of Biblical punishment.

* * *

Everybody must get stoned: PebblesThey shall be stoned with stones, their blood shall be upon them.
—Leviticus 20:27

The Hebrew scriptures prescribe a tremendous amount of capital punishment. Think Saudi Arabia, multiply by Texas, then triple that. It wasn’t just for murder. You could also be executed for adultery, blasphemy, breaking the Sabbath, perjury, incest, bestiality, and witchcraft, among others. A rebellious son could be sentenced to death. As could a son who is a persistent drunkard and glutton.

The most commonly mentioned punishment method in the Hebrew Bible is stoning. So I figure, as the very least, I should try to stone. But how?

I can’t tell you the number of people who have suggested that I get adulterers and blasphemers stoned in the cannabis sense. Which is an interesting idea. But I haven’t smoked pot since I was at Brown University, when I wrote a paper for my anthropology class on the hidden symbolism of bong hits. (Brown was the type of college where this paper actually earned a B+.)

Instead I figured my loophole would be this: The Bible doesn’t specify the size of the stones. So…pebbles.

A few days ago, I gathered a handful of small white pebbles from Central Park, which I stuffed in my back pants pocket. Now all I needed were some victims. I decided to start with Sabbath breakers. That’s easy enough to find in this workaholic city. I noticed that a potbellied guy at Avis down our block had worked on both Saturday and Sunday. So no matter what, he’s a Sabbath breaker.

Here’s the thing, though: Even with pebbles, it is surprisingly hard to stone people.

My plan had been to walk nonchalantly past the Sabbath violator and chuck the pebbles at the small of his back. But after a couple of failed passes, I realized it was a bad idea. A chucked pebble, no matter how small, does not go unnoticed.

My revised plan: I would pretend to be clumsy and drop the pebble on his shoe. So I did.

And in this way I stoned. But it was probably the most polite stoning in history— I said, “I’m sorry,” and then leaned down to pick up the pebble. And he leaned down at the same time, and we almost butted heads, and then he apologized, then I apologized again.

Highly unsatisfying.

Today I get another chance. I am resting in a small public park on the Upper West Side, the kind where you see retirees eating tuna sandwiches on benches.

“Hey, you’re dressed queer.”

Dreaming of GMILFs: Recent studies confirm that people's sex lives don't end once they hit 70 I look over. The speaker is an elderly man, mid-seventies, I guess. He is tall and thin and wearing one of those caps that cabbies wore in movies from the forties.

“You’re dressed queer,” he snarls. “Why you dressed so queer?”

I have on my usual tassels, and, for good measure, have worn some sandals and am carrying a knotty maple walking stick I bought on the internet for twenty-five dollars.

“I’m trying to live by the rules of the Bible. The Ten Commandments, stoning adulterers…”

“You’re stoning adulterers?”

“Yeah, I’m stoning adulterers.”

“I’m an adulterer.”

“You’re currently an adulterer?”

“Yeah. Tonight, tomorrow, yesterday, two weeks from now. You gonna stone me?”

“If I could, yes, that’d be great.”

“I’ll punch you in the face. I’ll send you to the cemetery.”

He is serious. This isn’t a cutesy grumpy old man. This is an angry old man. This is a man with seven decades of hostility behind him.

I fish out my pebbles from my back pocket.

“I wouldn’t stone you with big stones,” I say. “Just these little guys.”

I open my palm to show him the pebbles. He lunges at me, grabbing one out of my hand, then flinging it at my face. It whizzes by my cheek.

I am stunned for a second. I hadn’t expected this grizzled old man to make the first move. But now there is nothing stopping me from retaliating. An eye for an eye.

I take one of the remaining pebbles and whip it at his chest. It bounces off.

“I’ll punch you right in the kisser,” he says.

“Well, you really shouldn’t commit adultery,” I say.

We stare at each other. My pulse has doubled.

Yes, he is a septuagenarian. Yes, he had just threatened me using corny Honeymooners dialogue. But you could tell: This man has a strong dark side.

Our glaring contest lasts ten seconds, then he walks away, brushing me as he leaves.

Teaching kids that violence doesn't pay since 1971: Meathead and crew When I was a kid, I saw an episode of All in the Family in which Meathead— Rob Reiner’s wussy peacenik character— socked some guy in the jaw. Meathead was very upset about this. But he wasn’t upset that he committed violence; he was upset because it felt so good to commit violence.

I can relate. Even though mine was stoning lite, barely fulfilling the letter of the law, I can’t deny: It felt good to chuck a rock at this nasty old man. It felt primal. It felt like I was getting vengeance on him. This guy wasn’t just an adulterer, he was a bully. I wanted him to feel the pain he’d inflicted on others, even if that pain was a tap on the chest.

Like Meathead, I also knew that that this was a morally stunted way to feel. Stoning is about as indefensible as you can get. It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality? Later that week, I ask my spiritual adviser Yossi about stoning. Yossi was born in Minnesota and calls himself a “Jewtheran”— Jewish guilt and Lutheran repression mesh nicely, he told me. He’s an ordained Orthodox rabbi but never practiced, instead opting for the shmata trade— he sold scarves to, among others, the Amish. He’s tall and broad shouldered with a neatly trimmed beard. In his spare time, Yossi writes wry essays about Jewish life, including a lament about how his favorite snack, Twinkies, recently became nonkosher. I met him through Aish Ha Torah, an Orthodox outreach group.

He isn’t fazed by my question at all.

We don’t stone people today because you need a biblical theocracy to enforce the stoning, he explains. No such society exists today. But even in ancient times, stoning wasn’t barbaric.

“First of all, you didn’t just heave stones,” says Yossi. “The idea was to minimize the suffering. What we call ‘stoning’ was actually pushing the person off the cliff so they would die immediately upon impact. The person getting executed was given strong drink to dull the pain.”

Plus, the stonings were a rare thing. Some rabbis say executions occurred only once every seven years, others say even less often. There had to be two witnesses to the crime. And the adulterer had to be tried by a council of seventy elders. And, weirdly, the verdict of those seventy elders could not be unanimous— that might be a sign of corruption or brainwashing. And so on.

I half-expected Yossi to say they gave the adulterer a massage and a gift bag. He made a compelling case. And yet, I’m not totally sold. Were biblical times really so merciful? I suspect there might be some whitewashing going on. As my year progresses, I’ll need to delve deeper.

* * *

ALSO IN JEWCY

A.J. Jacobs kept a Jewcy blog last week in which he wrote about

• how his project worked
• the Biblical injunction against mixing wool with linen
• visiting a Creationist museum
• observing Shabbat by spending four hours in the bathroom
  

Jon Papernick tried a similar experiment in observance as "The Perfect Jew," in which he embraced Jewish rituals such as

• wearing a kippah for a week
• bathing in a mikvah
• negotiating like a macher
• keeping Shabbat

After finding out that the cutest boy she'd ever seen in real life was sending her dirty text messages from his honeymoon, Tamar Fox looked into Jewish laws around adultery.

Speaking of religious literalism, stoning still happens in some parts of the world. Ali Eteraz discusses America's role in promoting Iraq's new, not-exactly-woman-friendly constitution.

Last week I fulfilled my obligation as a Jew by apologizing to eight people. Only one forgave me. Apparently I’m that much of an asshole. The rabbis tell us that we must seek forgiveness directly from people we’ve harmed. Many modern Jews have diluted the confession to a half-assed “please forgive me for anything that I may have done intentionally or accidentally, that you may or may not know about.” Some have even stooped to anonymously blogging their apologies. But this gets you no Judaic brownie points at all: the rabbis are clear that it’s not enough just to say you’re sorry. We’ve also got to tell the person exactly what we did wrong.

If the person refuses to forgive us—which is virtually guaranteed if we apologize on an anonymous blog—we have to ask again on two separate occasions so that God will give us credit for trying. Maimonides says it’s best to repent in front of witnesses, but in true Generation Y fashion, I sent the majority of my apologies via Facebook’s messaging system. Here are the results of my experiment in groveling for absolution.

……………….

Star-crossed lovers: Freshman year can be so cruelGirl Whom I Dated Freshman Year of College: She lived on my dormitory floor. We hooked up after I convinced her to cheat on her boyfriend back home. (She turned her photographs of him facedown after we messed around the first time; this actually almost made me feel like an asshole.) I comforted her on 9/11. But she wouldn’t have sex with me after a couple weeks of dating, not even in the wake of the first terrorist attack on American soil—not even the oral variety—so I dumped her.

My Apology: “Wow, I was a dick to you freshman year, huh? I can't imagine you remember me too fondly but I've definitely mellowed and I try to treat people a little better, and women with more class, so for what it's worth.... I hope all’s well with you.”

Response to My Apology: No response.

……………….

The old sock-on-the-doorknob method: Essential for roommate harmonyMy Roommate Freshman Year of College: An Orthodox Jew. We had absolutely nothing in common. He never brought girls back to the room because of his religious beliefs and therefore refused to work out a “sock on the door” system, subsequently walking in on me and the girl whom I dumped after 9/11, not like it mattered because we weren’t having sex anyway. In retaliation I masturbated in our room while he tried to do homework, and I once smoked a cigar with the window closed, which triggered his asthma. (The stench seeped into everything: clothes, towels, sheets, toothpaste. He had to sleep on a couch in the student lounge for three nights. I did too, and I don’t have asthma.)

My Apology: “I definitely was a prick to you freshman year and probably could’ve handled the situation with more maturity. I hope that’s all a distant memory for you and that all is well in D.C. or wherever you’re living these days.”

Response to My Apology: No response.

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How many apologies?: Maimonides recommends threeGirl Whom I Made Cry in High School: On a class trip to New York sophomore year, a bunch of my friends spent the night in our hotel room talking dirty about chicks. We didn’t know that the girls were eavesdropping on our conversation through the door. At one point I compared two of them thusly: “[Girl #1] should give her tits to [Girl #2] because they’re totally going to waste considering her troll face.” Girl #1 spent the night sobbing in the stairwell. The other chicks forced me to apologize, but frankly she should have apologized to me for spying.

My Apology: “I'm sure you remember a certain incident on our New York trip. Well, I still feel pretty bad about that one, so I hope it didn't cause any long-lasting psychological trauma and you've long since moved on. I hope all is well w/ you and look forward to your response!”

Response to My Apology: No response.

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African-American Friend to Whom I Made Offensive Comment: His mother drove us home when we were in junior high since we lived in the same neighborhood. I honestly do not remember saying this—and frankly I have trouble believing it—but apparently at one point I rolled down the car window and screamed, “HELP! I’M BEING KIDNAPPED BY A BLACK FAMILY!” (Hey, at least I have an African-American friend… well, at least I did.)

My Apology: “Holy shit, did I really say that?!?!?!?!”

Response to My Apology: No response.

……………….

Whisker sour: Would you forgive?Girl Whom I Mocked for Having a Mustache: In her words on my Facebook wall, “Last time I remember talking to you I think I was still in junior high and you were making fun of me for having a mustache. It was a pretty good time.”

My Apology: “Wow, I am a dick and I am sorry! How’s it going?”

Response to My Apology: No Response.

………………..

"I'll tell YOU when I've had enough!": Yes, you have to repent for things you don't rememberGuy Whom I Insulted at His Own Party: My girlfriend and I were invited to a house party a year ago. I had never met anyone in attendance but she knew a bunch of people from her classes. I had a bit too much to drink—Tanqueray Rangpur, truly vile shit—and whispered in the host’s ear, “I know you’re a fucking pervert, you sick motherfucker; I can see it in your eyes.” As I was dragged out after a litany of subsequent accusations, I kept screaming, “You’re a fucking pervert; I can tell it, you sick son of a bitch.” My girlfriend covered her face in shame but had a wonderful time the next morning with her favorite game: Do You Remember What You Said Last Night?

My Apology: “I guess that was a pretty bad first impression. Just because you’re a Catholic doesn’t mean that you’re a pervert.”

Response to My Apology: No response.

……………………..

Party fowl: But it led to love!Friend Whom I Cock-Blocked for Love: I met my girlfriend four years ago at my friend Greg’s nineteenth birthday party. He had a crush on her, which I knew—and he had recently lost fifty pounds in an effort to make himself attractive to females—but she and I had amazing chemistry from the beginning and wound up in bed together that night. Anyway, my friend actually cried over it because he really liked her and really trusted me, which was a pretty big mistake on his part.

My Apology: “That was wrong, man. I betrayed you…I betrayed ‘bros before hos.’”

Response to My Apology: “I accept your apology. If you hadn’t taken her, I wouldn’t have met [my long-term girlfriend], so it all worked out for the best. Plus you’ll never forget to wish me a happy birthday.”

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Total landmine: Approach with cautionMy Current Girlfriend: A week ago she suggested that we should have pizza for dinner. “We haven’t exercised once this summer,” I said. “Don’t you think we need to lose some weight?” (She has commented for months that we need to lose weight, but God forbid that I acknowledge the same thing.) “What do you mean WE?!?” she bellowed, proceeding to not speak to me—or acknowledge my existence—for the next four hours, until I walked into the bedroom buck-naked, flexing my biceps and jiggling my flabtastic belly, also known as “the Lovechild.”

Response to My Apology: Orgasm sounds.

………………………

So there you have it: Eight apologies, only one absolution. Maybe Maimonides was right about not using Facebook.

[This article has been edited since publication.]

Listen closely: You can hear the stomachs rumblingI decided that I wanted a bat mitzvah when I was 20. I had been living in South Africa and spending a lot of time with Jews whose lives seemed enriched by their faith. Though I had not been raised religious and wasn’t looking for a holy-roller conversion, I wanted to do something to mark my Jewishness. The plan dissipated upon my return to the States, but my desire to participate in some of Judaism’s more meaningful rituals—an excuse to celebrate with people I love—did not. I have not lived up to my plan.

When a friend invited me to her break-fast this year, I made up my mind not to fast unless I had a good reason. Taking a random sampling of Jewish friends, I found that most observed because of their parents, because that’s what you do on Yom Kippur. But we’d never done the High Holidays in my home, so the tradition was really mine to take or leave.

Consulting Rabbi Leonard Gordon about the fast’s biblical roots was informative, but predictable. I knew I’d need to find a more tangible reason than souls and spirits. I liked the drama inherent in Rabbi Alan Flam’s description of the fast as a “structured encounter with death,” and I was drawn to the possible peace of mind that I imagined confronting mortality might bring, but I worried that I’d be too self-conscious trying to achieve this state. I did not want the pressure of trying to feel something as massive as death. I wanted a reason that wasn’t shrouded in religion.

Dr. Myron Yaster insisted both to my relief and disappointment that so long as you have a functional metabolism, your body will be fine. Where I had thought that the fast was something to struggle through, Dr. Yaster made it sound like half of America is fasting. (Which of course they are.)

Help yourself: Is Yom Kippur really about body issues?Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair suggested that rather than being an excuse not to eat, Yom Kippur can be used as a way to forgo body issues for a little while. This self-help-y language, while perfect for a self-help column, was not entirely convincing.

It was Wendy Shanker, a regular (and insightful) Jewish girl, who finally convinced me I should fast. For Shanker, a day shouldn’t require deprivation to be holy, but it does require doing things outside the norm: not checking email, not putting on makeup, not having sex, and yes, not eating. It means going to synagogue and being reminded of family and thinking about what is important in the coming year.

I have decided to fast on Yom Kippur because I want to be with a community of people who are also trying to feel something. I know I won’t be the only person in the congregation who is perplexed by why it’s important to spend the day starving. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to “check in” or “turn inward,” or even keep quiet during shul, but I will make an attempt, and if I fail, I’m not a bad Jew.

Having trouble finding time for a meal?: You are not alone.For my final day of decision-making, I didn’t want to talk to an expert. I didn’t want to hear what the Torah had to say, or how my cells would dry up and die, or how fasting contributes to body dysmorphia. I just wanted to talk to a Jewish girl like me, someone who had a flexible relationship with the faith, and who practiced on her own terms. I wanted to know what her reasons were for fasting, if she did it just because, or if there was intention in the ritual.

I met Wendy Shanker at New York’s City Bakery. She daintily picked at black rice, snow peas, and chickpea-encrusted chicken, and sipped an ice coffee. I ate three vanilla bean cookies. Shanker is 34 years old, the author of the memoir The Fat Girl’s Guide to Life, and the kind of person you want as your friend. She’s warm, she’s proud, and she laughs easily.

Shanker, who doesn’t belong to a shul but keeps Shabbat and fasts each year, grew up believing that Yom Kippur was about suffering for sins, since for Jews, not eating is a major concession to God. As she got older, she found that a 24-hour fast doesn’t really work as punishment. It’s not long enough to cause much discomfort or to achieve elevated peace of mind, let alone a transformation. And fasting, as she noted, is not so different from what has become normal eating behavior. These days, it’s not only obsessive Jewish girls saying, “I had a huge dinner last night so I’m going to skip breakfast and lunch today,” but a good portion of everyday working stiffs who try to wedge their first bite of the day in at 4 p.m. If abstention is the status quo, does the Yom Kippur fast work as atonement?

Sweating off the pounds: Why Yom Kippur brings back unpleasant memories for some womenTalking to Shanker helped me understand on a personal level what Rabbi Gordon meant when he assured me that guilt and suffering weren’t the ultimate goals of the holiday. But I was still concerned about the way fasting echoes unhealthy eating behavior. I had perversely thought of the fast as having added weight-loss bonus, but for Shanker—who’d spent years trying to lose weight with various dieticians and trainers—not eating comes with an entirely different kind of guilt. Rather than giving her the secret pleasure of being allowed to skip meals, Yom Kippur instead roused unpleasant memories of being told not to eat. She’d had enough trouble dieting for her own well-being; why was it so much easier to do for God?

To make the fast meaningful beyond punishment-lite or indulging Jewish-girl body neuroses, I did not want to do it for an abstraction like God, or transformation, or even forgiveness. Shirking dogma and religious obedience, Shanker finds the fast significant partly because it reminds her of childhood and family, and partly because it makes the day different. There is no expectation of transformation, no half-hearted nod to forgiveness; she draws meaning from the day by designating it meaningful.

This is usually the kind of thing I hate—deciding something is meaningful just because. Unlike most mass holidays, there’s nothing particularly fun about Yom Kippur. There are no gifts, you can’t observe it until you’re old enough to at least fake solemnity, there’s even a special prayer just for the dead. And so unless you have a deep-seated faith or are just going through the motions, finding meaning in the ritual can be a struggle. This is what finally appeals to me, what makes me almost want to start fasting this instant—being in a room full of other people who are also trying to find meaning in what we have been told is a holy day.

Next page: Hunger Pangs

The guilt shouldn't be in the pudding: Is it healthy to fast in a country obsessed with food and weight?“I could eat all the time” is a favorite expression among the women in my family. It’s an exaggeration, yes, but not by much. We’re second- and third-helping kinds of eaters, the types who always eat dessert and apologize for bad moods by mumbling, “I was hungry.” But despite a seemingly unabashed pride in our appetites, none of us are particularly thrilled with our bodies.

Though I’ve never dieted or been diagnosed with an eating disorder, I have made—and inevitably broken—absurd promises to myself about food. I’ve sworn I wouldn’t eat dessert for a whole week, or that I’d go easy on bread, or even abstain from eating until 1:00 p.m. I feel guilty when I have Doritos, ice cream, and fries—all foods I’d like to eat every day. If this sounds strange to you, chances are you’ve never had an honest conversation with a woman about her relationship to her body and food. How could I separate a holiday that sanctions not eating in order to feel holy from the everyday pressures of not eating in order to be thin?

I took this question to Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, the director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at McLain Hospital in Boston. She disagreed with the idea that Yom Kippur contributes to dominant body neuroses. Judaism, she suggested, can actually counter unhealthy choices. Paraphrasing the Torah, Steiner-Adair offered the old body-is-the-temple-of-your-soul adage, insisting that Judaism actually promotes a healthy psychological and physical connection to your body.

It’s nice to think that the Torah discourages unhealthy behavior, but the ethics of Judaism can easily slip into obsessive behaviors. Indeed, Lori Hope Lefkovitz, a women’s studies professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (and the wife of Rabbi Gordon), pointed out that some kosher cookbooks, with their strict hygienic guidelines and separation of foods, read like a prescription for an eating disorder. Whether you’re doing it for obsolete sanitary purposes or for ritual purity, keeping kosher requires you to be vigilantly aware of everything that goes in your mouth. This can easily contribute to being freaked out about food in general.

Cracking under pressure: A disproportionate number of Jewish women suffer from anorexia.Though Steiner-Adair does not believe that keeping kosher contributes to eating disorders—she thinks eating disorders are a contemporary neurosis—she agreed that Jewish women are especially susceptible to the cultural pressure to be thin. Anorexia clinics, she told me, actually house a disproportionate number of Jewish girls. From her time spent working with women who suffer from eating disorders, Steiner-Adair thinks Jewish women grow up with the impression that to assimilate into American standards of beauty, you must be thin.

While Steiner-Adair’s optimism in the Torah as a way to help women get over body issues struck me as naïve, I did like her suggestion that the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur should be a time to remove yourself from the strange dialogue women have about food. In fact, Steiner-Adair sometimes tells her anorexic Jewish patients to eat a little more on Yom Kippur as an alternative way of observing the holiday. Flipping the rules this way helps undermine the idea that eating is bad. Similarly, those who decide to fast need to stop thinking about food as sin. “Don’t worry if you can’t hold the fast,” Dr. Steiner-Adair told me. “You’re not a bad Jew and you’re not a bad person and you’re just not bad.”

Instead of using Yom Kippur as an excuse to not eat, Dr. Steiner-Adair says, you should use it as a time to think about who you want to be in the world. This is a simple enough suggestion, but I’ve never connected the holiday with personal reflection. I certainly spend enough time during the rest of the year thinking about what matters, but typically in a list-making, goal-oriented kind of way. Whatever my ambiguous relationship toward spirituality in general and Judaism in particular, I liked the idea of using the fast as a designated way of taking stock.

Having spent the last three days hearing the various opinions of officialdom, for my last interview I wanted to get a personal take on the fast. Tomorrow I’m going to forget doctors and rabbis and instead talk to a regular Jewish girl, the author of a memoir about body image who has plenty of reservations about both religion and dieting but fasts nevertheless.

Next page: Lunching about fasting.

Hold off on the Manischewitz: Water is better after a fastDr. Myron Yaster is the reason I started fasting, though he doesn’t know it. Yaster has been observing the fast since his bar mitzvah 41 years ago. He attends a Conservative synagogue in Baltimore, the same one where his three children were all bar mitzvah’ed. Since the eldest of those three children happens to be my boyfriend, the guy I followed to synagogue three years ago, it seemed especially appropriate to get medical advice from him.

I wanted to speak with an M.D. because when you separate fasting from a religious or political context, it comes down to a simple question of metabolic health. As a mostly non-observant Jew, I have a hard time accepting religious practices that compel you to inflict pain or even stress on your body. What I wanted to learn from Yaster was exactly how much stress our bodies undergo during this religious rite. Additionally, I wanted to know if there was any kind of documented physical transformation I could expect as a result of not eating.

Yaster assured me that a 24-hour fast is fine for anyone with a normal metabolism. The physical effect of fasting on the body is sort of like being on a high-protein or low-carb diet where your body is tricked into using fat as a primary fuel. Although you might feel a little lightheaded or cranky by the 22nd hour, a one-day fast has almost no effect at all on your health or ability to function.

Don't let the Torah get you down: Bodies can handle a lot of deprivation.At sundown on Yom Kippur I generally head straight for the lox plate and bagel basket to stuff myself with as much fish and bread as I can grab. Yaster explained that while this is a common urge, liquid is really the first thing you should have after the fast (wine doesn’t count). I’ve never seen someone bring Gatorade to Yom Kippur dinner, but it’s an ideal way to break the fast, since it contains a severe infusion of salt, water, sugar, and glucose—the things you need to maintain a well-functioning metabolism.

Though he put all fears of masochistic worship to rest, I came away from our conversation feeling somewhat let down. It is true that I don’t want to harm my body just because the Torah says so, but part of me was expecting—hoping—for the fast to be more of a physiological undertaking. If your body hardly registers 24 hours without food, any real physical change is unlikely. It seems that achieving an inward-focused death-like state, as Rabbi Greenberg suggested, requires a lot more than the hungry, sleepy stupor I tend to fall into by the holiday’s end. In spite of my own misgivings with religion, I didn’t want my fast to be the equivalent of a crash protein diet.

In a culture that rewards abstinence, where Atkins is a household name, it is impossible not to associate fasting, no matter how holy, with the desire to be thin. As someone with a fairly normal attitude towards her body for an American woman—not pleased but not moved to change—I know I will have to confront the fast-as-diet before deciding if I want to observe. Tomorrow I will talk to a clinical psychologist who specializes in eating disorders, particularly among Jewish women.

Next page: Yom Kippur as a time to eat more, not less

No slurp for you: Even Pinkberry is off-limitsI am not a faster. Forget going a whole day without eating—it’s hard for me to go more than a few hours without a snack. Fasting wasn’t a tradition in my home. Neither were bat mitzvahs. And it was a small miracle in my family when a Passover Seder lasted more than 20 minutes; we wanted to get to the meal.

But despite past irreverence, I did once go all 24 hours of Yom Kippur without eating so much as a cracker. It was for a boy. I knew he observed the high holidays, so I went to services hoping that even if we couldn’t make out, we could at least discuss how hungry we were. But I did not want to fast this year because of someone else, or just because I was Jewish, even if I enjoyed the dramatics of synagogue and the reward of the break-fast on an empty stomach. I wanted to see if I could find an intention for fasting, or if it would remain an empty ritual.

Could I get anything spiritual out of it? Would it change me, physically or otherwise? I wasn’t sure I’d be able to separate my fast from the more superficial reasons women give up food— dieting and its more sinister cousin, anorexia. Since I’m not very religious, a day of fasting is probably the biggest commitment I’ll make to Judaism all year. If I can’t find a good reason to do it, then why should I bother with any other element of Jewish ritual? Why consider myself Jewish at all?

With the holidays approaching, I’m going to spend the next week looking for answers to these questions. I’ll talk to rabbis, of course, but I also want to consult people who won’t give me the same reasons for fasting that you hear in synagogue. A doctor will be able to tell me about the physical aspects of the fast. An expert on eating disorders should shed light on the body issues that go along with a day of self-denial. And a normal Jewish woman, someone who has thought long and hard about the rituals of eating and fasting, will help me figure out how to make the choice for myself.

Rabbi Leonard Gordon of Philadelphia’s Germantown Jewish Centre, a Conservative synagogue that also houses a Reconstructionist congregation, seemed like a good blend of old and new school, and was happy to talk in the benign avuncular way I imagine rabbis are always happy to talk. On the phone, I asked what abstinence—from food, from sex—had to do with atonement.

Celebrate your ribcage: Where's the line between a fast and a diet?Gordon explained that Leviticus, Chapter 16, Verse 31, says, “You shall practice self-denial,” or “You shall afflict your souls.” I honestly could not see how this was different from Judaism’s other 364 days of self-affliction and guilt, but Gordon explained that the point of fasting isn’t self-punishment; it’s to remind yourself that you have control over your body.

The difficult part of the fast, Gordon went on, is focusing not on your hunger, but on your soul. I’m wary of a body/soul separation to begin with, and I also have trouble engaging in any spiritually infused language. However, while I may not ascribe to biblical creed, I do like the idea of being able to exercise self-control. So far, the religious rationale for fasting sounded good, but I still lacked a sense of cleansing or atonement that is supposedly crucial to the holiday.

I emailed Alan Flam, a rabbi I’d known peripherally in college, to find out whether I could expect anything spiritual from the fast. Not that I was looking for a quick fix to make up for 22 years of disbelief, but I did want to know: If I made the fast more than an exercise, if I did it right, would the day feel special? What he wrote back was not a prescription for spirituality but a suggestion for making the day different by avoiding the ordinary, necessary activities of quotidian life. I found it beautiful:

“Yom Kippur is the only time on the Jewish calendar that we seek to renew our inner spiritual connection through pulling away from the physical, outer world…. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg [co-founder of the Jewish Life Network] suggests that Yom Kippur is a structured encounter with death. Only by confronting issues of our mortality can we engage in the work of transformation that Yom Kippur demands. Fasting is a way of bringing us closer to a death-like state.”

That made sense to me. When you spend a whole day hyperaware of how much living you cannot participate in, you’re forced to stop thinking about the usual neuroses surrounding food and sex and other indulgences—all those things that should matter less as you approach death. Fasting should clear your head of all this anxiety. (Well, that—or make things so much worse.)

I still don’t understand what exactly is “transformed” when we deny ourselves food and water. Do we make ourselves ill? Is sickness necessary for transformation? Talking to a doctor would ground my decision in health and science which—no surprise here—I find a lot easier to believe than religion.

Next page: Four out of five doctors agree: Judaism needs more Gatorade.

Recently a lapsed Catholic friend confessed a serious case of religion envy—for the religion I happened to be born into. “I’ve always had a strong admiration for Judaism,” he told me. “If I had to choose any religion, it would be yours.” Ironically, I had a similar confession to make: I’d always felt the same way about the Catholic Church.

In an age when schoolchildren in the most goyish suburbs learn to sing “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” alongside “Silent Night,” when churches and synagogues engage in interfaith outreach, and where politicians regularly lump sharply contrasting belief systems together under the category of “faith,” it shouldn’t be surprising that religions can seem interchangeable. Especially when your own religion feels a bit lacking. Don’t like fasting on Yom Kippur? Why not try on Catholicism for size? Unhappy with the latest Pope? Drop by your neighborhood synagogue or mosque. But religious values aren’t a Chinese menu, where we can pick two from Column A and three from Column B to suit ourselves. In fact, the better metaphor here would be a delicately balanced house of cards; pull out one from the middle, and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Making Catholics want to be Jews since 1909: Isaiah BerlinAs my friend explained his high regard for Judaism, I realized that he was attracted to certain Jewish cultural traditions but didn’t realize how they fit into a larger philosophical framework. He had two reasons for his high regard for Judaism, beginning with our people’s famous penchant for heterodoxy. Unlike Catholicism, we have no Vatican that issues The Final Word which all Jews must follow. He also admired our tradition of scholarly debate: rabbis carrying on heated discussions long into the night, not to mention Jewish writers and intellectuals like Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt carrying on that tradition in the secular culture. My friend found this refreshing compared with Catholicism, in which the word of God goes directly through the church to its adherents, with no room for questioning.

I found it difficult to recognize the religion he was describing. True, we lack a central authority, and our rabbis don’t hector us from the pulpit like stereotypically stern Irish priests. But then our rabbis don’t need to hector us, as the Jewish laity has more than ably fulfilled that role. Judaism emphasizes faith performed in the context of a community (which is why, in order to pray, you need the presence of ten adult males.) Step outside its accepted norms and you’ve got two choices: subject yourself to an earful about it from family, friends, and strangers, or walk away from the community.

And while there is a lot of debate in religious circles, I wouldn’t necessarily categorize it all as intellectual since it focuses mostly on matters of ritual rather than philosophy. (What’s so intellectual about a debate over whether it’s permissible to put sugar into tea or tea into sugar on Shabbat?) This reflects Judaism’s emphasis on practice over intent—the here-and-now over the metaphysical. Our leaders often find themselves absorbed in such profundities as the proper way to slit the throat of a chicken. In fact, most of our greatest intellectuals (Spinoza, Marx, Freud) were reacting against the grain of our religion, not with it. Compare this to Catholicism, which inspired St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Dante.

Beat that, Judaism: Notre Dame in ParisAnd that’s why, as I told my friend, I’ve long had a secret case of religion envy for Catholicism, with its emphasis on the soul, not rituals. Catholics have the freedom to live their daily lives as they see fit, because Catholicism has few rules governing the banalities of what to eat or what clothes to wear. Also, especially in contrast with Jews, Catholics have a much better knack for pageantry and decoration. Walk into any Catholic cathedral and then a Jewish synagogue; which space is more likely to inspire a state of awe and meditation conducive to prayer? Perhaps the chief source of my Catholic religion envy, though, is the ritual of confession. Imagine it, free therapy! For a Jew, what could be a bigger wet dream?

But as my friend quickly pointed out, Catholicism’s fetishization of the soul can become meaninglessly ritualistic in itself. Catholics can eat shrimp to their heart’s content, but their penalty for breaking the faith’s few key rules is rather extreme: an eternity in hell or a slightly shorter time in purgatory. As for Catholicism’s theatrical pageantry, it’s fun to look at occasionally, but after a while, it can all get a bit tacky, even gruesome. The point is not to inspire individual meditation, but mass conformance to Catholic dogma. And Confession isn’t a bit like therapy. The priests aren’t there to sympathize but merely to help you atone—all in all, a ritual as empty as the rabbi of a synagogue with over a thousand members shaking a congregant’s hand on Shabbat.

That’s when it hit me: Understanding someone else’s religion is like learning a language. You can’t just translate the words one-to-one. Rather, you have to begin by tackling the logic of the whole supporting system underneath.

100% halal: A kosher symbol on a soda bottleIt’s not just a question of Judaism and Catholicism, either. I find it lovely that many Muslims search for the kashrut symbol on non-meat products in American grocery stores because a kosher product is often also halal. Keeping kosher and eating halal, however, are hardly the same thing. In fact, one of the reasons kosher meat is not considered halal is that kashrut is based on the Jewish principles of cleanliness and the ethical treatment of animals. Halal rules incorporate these principles, but they privilege the uniquely Islamic value of submission to God’s will, which is why a prayer affirming the greatness of Allah must be uttered immediately preceding the animal’s slaughter.

Why do we feel the desire to mold unfamiliar religions to fit our own wishes and ideals? Maybe in an era of terrorism and armed conflict in the name of God, we want to comfort ourselves by affirming the notion that deep down we really are all the same. (We are, but our religions aren’t). For some of us, religion envy may be a symptom of a consumer society in which almost every product can be customized to fit each customer’s specific tastes. “Would you like your sandwich on whole wheat, foccacia, rye, white, country Tuscan, country Tuscan whole wheat, or country Tuscan whole wheat low-carb?” “Would you like your religion belief-centered, practice-centered, monotheistic, pantheistic, ritual-heavy, or ritual-lite?”

The more I hashed the matter out with my Catholic friend, the more it became clear that our religion envy came out of sadness, even regret. Just as children idealize their friends’ parents when their own parents seem not to understand them, we too idealized each other’s faiths (and denigrated our own) because of our desire to correct what we saw as the flaws of the religions we’d been born into. Religion envy is a band-aid, but it doesn’t quite fit over the wound.

Inscribed "I had a blast at Benjy's Bar Mitzvah": The pope's kippahFor example, my friend stumped me with the following un-Jewish question about Judaism: “What happens if you don’t go to synagogue? Is that a sin? Does that mean you’re going to hell?” He’d been turned off from Catholicism after being told that skipping church on Sundays was a mortal sin.

But Judaism addresses the subject of hell only in passing, with scant detail. For all Judaism’s rules, our emphasis is not on doing right to receive a reward or avoid a punishment, but on doing right for its own sake. Perhaps the best answer I could come up with was, in true Jewish form, another question: “Does the Pope wear a yarmulke?”

Similarly, in all my questions about Catholicism’s emphasis on spirituality the name “Jesus Christ” never came up. In fact, I was surprised when my friend explained that you can’t be a good Catholic without affirming your belief in Christ as the Son of God who once walked on Earth and died for our sins. “But what if, even if you’re not sure Jesus was divine, you follow all of his teachings to the letter?” I asked. Nope, not good enough. For Catholics, faith in Jesus’ godly status is a prerequisite. I’d been unable see this dogmatic aspect of Catholicism because I was too busy admiring the religion’s spirituality as an antidote for Jewish dogma.

If we must accept the notion that different faiths are indeed fundamentally different, where does that leave those of us who’d like to promote interfaith understanding, particularly now, when we’re so frightened of people who passionately believe things that are antithetical to our own belief systems? A false understanding of how other religions work is just as bad as no understanding. Instead of promoting untruths like “we all believe in the same God, just with different names,” we should approach the faith of the Other with a completely open, almost childlike sense of wonder and bewilderment. In other words, we should be adult enough to say something as juvenile as, “Wow, your god used to think if you eat meat on Fridays you’d go to hell? Interesting, but I don’t understand that at all. Tell me more.”

Do you remember the first time you felt Jewish anger? Not the inchoate, pre-adolescent, Patrick-Malone-called-me-a-kike-on-the-playground-rage—which is anger, certainly, but it is anger directed against some dipshit-junior-varsity pogromist with bad teeth who you knew, even then you knew, would grow up to drive a Doritos delivery truck—but real blood-in-the-face anger, when someone you assumed to be intelligent surprised you by saying something just crushingly ignorant about the tribe.

The first time I felt such anger, I remember, was in June, of 1981. The cause of this anger was a New York Times editorial about the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak.

I was, like most Jews, immoderately happy to learn that Israel had set back Saddam Hussein’s evil ambitions. It was the same sort of happiness and relief people older than I am felt when Israeli commandos flew under cover of night to Uganda in order to rescue Jews from certain death.

The Osirak attack seemed wise, given Saddam Hussein’s unclothed desire to transform himself into a modern-day Saladin. To do so, he was readying himself to take the dire step demanded of Arab leaders by the camp of Muslim rejectionists—obliterating Israel from the map. And the strike itself was elegant, balletic, pinpoint; the target was destroyed, and the Israeli planes returned safely home.

Now, I will admit to contradictory feelings about Jewish power: I was, in my teenage years, already shading left. I was a member of a socialist Zionist youth movement, and to my comrades and me, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while justifiable in 1967, seemed—to the extent that anyone thought about such things in the innocent days before the first Palestinian Intifada—like a terrible and arrogant and self-damaging idea fourteen years later. On the other hand, Osirak was not about territorial expansion, but territorial protection. F-16s—Jewish F-16s flown by Jewish pilots—destroyed a factory whose raison d’etre was mass Jewish death. If we had had a Jewish Air Force in the time of Auschwitz, we would not have had Auschwitz.

So my feelings about the Osirak attack were mostly uncomplicated ones, of happiness and pride and relief. But then I read the Times—my newspaper. In the liberal Jewish homes of the tri-State area, the New York Times was—and is—not merely a daily source of news, but a kind of religion unto itself, and its catechism could be found in the columns of the editorial page. On June 9, the Times printed an editorial under the headline "Israel’s Illusion."

"Israel's sneak attack on a French-built nuclear reactor near Baghdad was an
act of inexcusable and short-sighted aggression," the editorial read. "Even assuming that Iraq was hellbent to divert enriched uranium for the manufacture of nuclear weapons, it would have been working toward a capacity that Israel itself acquired long ago. Contrary to its official assertion, therefore, Israel was not in `mortal danger’ of being outgunned."

My memories of events twenty-years ago—and ten minutes ago—are usually indistinct, but about this editorial I remember vividly what I felt, which was betrayal. The Times was owned by Jews and run by Jews. The editorial page was run by a man, the masthead said, named Max Frankel, which was most certainly not an Irish name.

How could they? Don’t they have any sense? Who were they trying to impress?

I had moments of doubt—What if Israel was actually in the wrong? After all, the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, was not my sort of prime minister—he was Herut, a revisionist, a Jabotinskyite, a mortal enemy of my Zionist and socialist youth movement.

I erred on the side of Israel, of course; I could do no other thing. But being on Israel’s side was sometimes a discomfiting place to be.

And then along came Dylan. Specifically, Jokerman, and even more specifically, the best bad song on Jokerman, or on any other Dylan album: "Neighborhood Bully."

Many people, of course, are rescued by Dylan. It just never occurred to me that I would be one of them, especially not in 1983: In 1983, Dylan, as far as I knew, was still a meshumad, who abandoned his people for—what, exactly?—for the chimera of Christian peace? The man had become, in the words of Larry Yudelson, the Dylanologist, "the most famous Jewish apostate in American history." It was a terrible day when that bit of news broke: The sadness I felt when I heard that Dylan had joined the other team was matched only by the relief that flooded me when I learned that Cat Stevens’ real name was not, as I had been led to believe, Stephen Katz—making the emergence of Yusuf Islam on the world scene a nettlesome thing, but not a catastrophe for my too-often-vexed tribe.

So there I was, staring at the cover of "Infidels"—is Dylan really standing at the Western Wall?—and "Neighborhood Bully" began to play on the record player. This, to my shock and surprise, is what I heard:

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized,
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him,
He was supposed to feel bad.
He’s the neighborhood bully.

Did Bob Dylan just sing what I thought he sung?

Well, he’s surrounded by pacifists who all want peace,
They pray for it nightly that the bloodshed must cease
Now they wouldn’t hurt a fly.
To hurt one they would weep.
They lay and they wait for this bully to fall asleep.
He’s the neighborhood bully.

He did, didn’t he?

I listened to it twenty times. It took my breath away. Dylan wasn’t apologizing; he wasn’t asking forgiveness for his tribe, or even for his tribal feeling. He certainly wasn’t cringing, and he wasn’t wringing his hands in the American Jewish style. He was singing like a shtarker. Dylan was a shtarker! A two-fisted Jew!

This was a voice of unmediated resentment, and the voice of pride—pride in the outsized achievements of our pitifully small tribe, and pride in our stubborn refusal to agree to our own extinction.

"Neighborhood Bully" was written with acid, and there’s not much wit in acid. But that is the point: "Neighborhood Bully" wasn’t meant to be clever or detached. Dylan was not committing an act of poetry. "It’s just him screaming," Bob Levinson, a leading student of Dylan—he teaches a course on Dylan’s lyrics at the New School University—told me. "But it’s the scream that was in his mind at the time. That’s how Jews were feeling. It was a `fuck you’ song."

The critics, Levinson said, hated it. "Everybody felt it was preachy and had no subtlety, completely black and white. They said it’s a non-Dylan song. But it is a Dylan song. That’s the beauty of it. You have to deal with it as a Dylan song." In other words, you have to deal with Dylan as a Jewand not as an ordinary, temporizing, self-conscious Jew—but a Jew with dangerous feelings.

"Neighborhood Bully" was a gift, a strange gift, from a Jewish prophet, and it was sui generis.

Until 1989, when it happened again. Another unapologetically defiant song issued forth from another stand-up Semitic rock star.

Lou Reed’s "New York" is a frenetic and raw exploration of moral and physical decay in Reed’s beloved city. One track, though, is—superficially, at least—entirely off-theme. It is called "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim." Its targets are different than those of "Neighborhood Bully", but it is about the same phenomenon: Betrayal, and a specific form of betrayal: Betrayal of the Jews by people who should know better.

Good evening, Mr. Waldheim
And Pontiff, how are you?
You have so much in common
In the things you do
And here comes Jesse Jackson
He talks of common ground
Does that common ground include me?
Or it is just a sound
A sound that shakes
Oh, Jesse, you must watch the sounds you make.

Waldheim, it will be remembered, was a secretary-general of the United Nations who passed World War II in a Nazi uniform. The Pope earned Reed’s scorn for shaking Waldheim’s hand. But Reed seemed most offended by Jesse Jackson, whose crimes against the Jews were mainly associational and epithetical—his disconcerting relationship with the Nation of Islam, his characterization of New York as "Hymietown." But his was an act of betrayal, and betrayal stings:

If I ran for President
And once was a member of the Klan
Wouldn’t you call me on it
The way I call you on Farrakhan?

"Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim," like "Neighborhood Bully," is not a great song. But it is brave, and original: Reed finally exposed to the world his tribal heart. In a music culture that celebrates gauzy universality, and scorns ethnic particularism (except when given voice by a Chuck D or a James Brown), "Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim" was a revolutionary act.

And it was a kind of rebuke to the norms of American Judaism, as well. Be polite, we’re told. Write a letter to the editor. Sign a petition. Give to the UJA, the ADL, Hadassah.

But Bob Dylan and Lou Reed are instructing us differently. We can sneer as well, and threaten, and mock, and call things by their names.

Like most everyone—certainly like most everyone visiting this website—I looked to rock and roll as a form of personal liberation. But I came to see that, thanks to two of rock’s greatest practitioners, it could be a form of Jewish liberation as well.

Originally published on Jewsrock.org

Bad posture, beer breath, the Sprockets catsuit—turns out you can sport despair most any way you like. Perhaps, per genre, you are Waspy and gaunt, wear lots of black, read Thomas Bernhard, shun camaraderie and social events, and, most important, appear to know something about the world the rest of us don’t. Or you’re Jewish. And possibly fat.

Thing is, if you’re Jewish, you’re getting the short end of the stickArt courtesy of Dave Choe. The moody Jew always seems less Sid Vicious, more Larry David; less Robert Smith, more Lou Reed. (Nothing wrong with Lou Reed, though if I had to pick a rocker to sleep with, Vicious is a shoo-in.) These guys, the sexy ones, don’t choose despair, but experience it as a byproduct of being alive. But guys like Larry David and Woody Allen seem to covet despair like a drug. There’s even a certain pride there, like: Tada! I can leech the pleasure from most anything!

To wit, a story: I recently had a facial, a pillaging-of-the-skin experience for which I paid $150. Let it be said I don’t know how to wear makeup, I pronate in high heels, and that aside from the Semitic albatross called big hair, I’m not really the girly type. So when I say I got a facial, it is with the rider that this was bound to be unpleasant. And, in turn, thrilling.

At the spa, it was like this: The staff is obsequious and I hate every one of them. The girl at the desk tells me I look exhausted, then gives me a mesh duffel with flip-flops and an eggshell muumuu. She escorts me to a lounge, which is nice, except for the women in flops and muumuus. I head for a platter of snacks. I spy poppyseed crackers, whose shrapnel will likely end up in my teeth. I eat, like, twenty.

And, oh good, here comes the facialist.

We go to her room. She tells me to unpack the mesh and hang the muumuu; she says I can put my clothes on a chair, that I should lie face-up under a sheet and she’ll be right back. I find these instructions oblique. Am I supposed to get naked? I’m having a facial, why would I get naked? Am I supposed to wear the muumuu under the sheet? But she said hang the muumuu. I realize she’s going to return any second and that I’m still clothed except for my boots because in no scenario does it make sense to wear my boots. But what about socks? I can hear her about to come in, so I grab my cell phone and make like someone called while I was getting ready, hence the delay, sorry, sorry, only once she leaves, I’ve gotten no closer to knowing what to do. Finally I ditch everything but the underwear and get under the sheet hoping she’ll never know what decisions I’ve made. If she ends up between my legs, I guess something will have gone awry.

The facial gets underway. I am told I don’t know how to care for my skin. I am told I cannot continue to act like a child. I am familiar with this refrain, coming, as it does, from my mother and therapist alike.
The facialist massages my arms. I get gooseflesh and worry she’s gonna think I’m aroused. Then she addresses her talents to a region below the ankle. If there are sock bunnies cleaved to the balls of my feet, I will hang myself. The longer she kneads my heels and calves—yep, my calves, good thing I haven’t shaved in two days—the more miserable I get.

Is this fun so far? This is the opposite of fun. But maybe it’s funny. I certainly hope it’s funny because if there’s humor to be wrung from every occasion we’re able to drain of pleasure owing to neuroses, grandiloquent self-abasement, and excess body hair, it’s the silver lining in an otherwise debilitating ethic.

Think big. It’s no secret that Woody Allen—paradigm of Jewish angst—originally titled Annie Hall “Anhedonia.,” which means an inability to enjoy life. Allen’s shlubby, neurotic conduct in the movie seems to question whether the pathology is congenital to Jews, or adopted. Does Allen open a compact of blow just so he can sneeze all over it and despair, or does he sneeze because he’s constitutionally incapable of enjoying the experience that is snorting blow? Affect, instinct?

Depends who you ask. Certainly a hankering for misery butts heads with one of the Socratic dialogues, the Meno, in which Socrates disembowels Meno’s idea that some people desire bad things. His logic goes like this: People who desire bad things know they will be miserable as a result? Yes. And miserable people are unhappy? Yes. Does anyone want to be unhappy? No. Ergo, no one wants bad things. The loony assumption here is, of course, that no one wants to be unhappy. I love this dialogue because it’s fun to watch Socrates dispatch—with élan—the possibility that people are fucked up.

I took this question to my shrink, who, unlike Socrates, is pretty well acquainted with the fuck-ups. Whence a desire for anhedonia, I asked her. Why covet a condition that can only result in misery? Her answer: preemptive despair. Preemptive despair! Since things never work out for the Jews—historically, there’s some truth to this—we’ve learned to steel ourselves against misery by being miserable from the start.

I found this hilarious. It’s just so Jewish. So convoluted. And it collapses the instinct/affect binary by suggesting that our affect is instinctual—i.e., if we can’t help but choose unhappiness, we’re dealing with a choiceless choice. One of these double-bind scenarios into which so many of our tragic heroes are thrust. Macbeth and Bovary, Lear, Raskolnikov, the “can’t help but” phenomenon accounts for at least fifty percent of literary tragedy, if not more. By the same token, if you tweak the phenomenon, you get comedy. Of course you do. Character as fate, a comedy of errors, people who are funny precisely because they can’t help but ruin everything. Yoked to the shrink’s theory, you get the atavism of misery—a Jewish narrative that spans centuries—and the narrative it inspires by way of entertainment.

And that’s why it’s no accident your “miserable Jew” archetype ends up being a funny guy for hire. “Killing your dad so you can marry your mom” isn’t exactly stand-up, but it’s good enough for a chuckle. Stick Smith or Morrissey in the presidential suite and he might fall into the jacuzzi, or lament travesties wrought by our idiot government and the agony of having to wake up each day. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, or Jason Alexander, or Jackie Mason (okay, he’s not funny) will upturn everything in the presidential suite until he finds that used condom hewn to the box frame that ruins the special pleasure of staying in the presidential suite. Then he will lament said travesties and the condom, because it augurs devastating solitude for all his days. It’s the condom as prognosticator, as catalyst for anxious rant that ends up being hilarious. And excruciating. Ever notice how painful Curb Your Enthusiasm is? It’s the fulcrum of tragedy and comedy; of course, the difference is so slight.