Missives from the 6th Floor

Jacobs' description of his household being "Jewish the same way olive garden is Italian" had a certain resonance. Until a couple years before my Bar-Mitzvah we didn't really have religion. My dad's family is Jewish, my Mom's is Christian (we had so little religion I couldn't tell you what particular sect of Christian). We celebrated both holidays, but mostly as secular events. There was a tree, there were gifts, there was a menorah, there were gifts, and really all I cared about were the gifts - and the occasional extra days off from school.

The rest of the history isn't particularly relevant - suffice to say that my mother, myself, and my younger siblings underwent formal conversion, and I crammed for a Bar Mitzvah, and pretty much walked away from the organized religion aspects thereafter.

It didn't help that by that age it was pretty clear that science was going to hold more sway in my life than faith. (Come on people, I had stuffed nerds for center pieces at my Bar Mitzvah...)

So Jacobs' recurring hesitance to "jump in" and take things on faith - or to draw lines in what he could and couldn't embrace - felt very familiar. Despite his seeming skepticism, I thought his treatment of the subject was basically fair - and far from the farce I expected going in. There were humorous and touching moments, and moments that reinforced my ambivalence toward religion as a structured activity.

Throughout the book, I was repeatedly struck - as I am in day-to-day life- by the debate between his various advisers over the meaning, or appropriate interpretation, of words set down thousands of years ago. All sides asserted their correctness - with a sort of conviction and certainty that boggles my mind. The fact that there's no rigorous way to test their assertions, or rank them relative to each other seemed not to bother them.

I suspect it's that certainty that allows the ideas and rules captured in these texts - their original intent long since lost to antiquity - to continue to inspire acts of pure humanity and acts of unspeakable barbarism.

Near the end of the book, Jacobs' spent a few paragraphs on the idea of "cafeteria Christianity." He basically points out that based on his experience every sect - of both Christianity and Judaism - picks and chooses what to hold sacred, and oft times moves far beyond the stated (literal) meaning of the passage, encumbering it with millennia of interpretation and tradition.

And they all assert without testable proof that their particular selection, and interpretation, is the right one.

This is the idea I tried to capture in the title of my initial post on the book - a quote from an old Jew from New York who attended our local synagogue while I was a teenager.

"Everyone rises to their own level of hypocrisy."