Noa Kusher’s Pre­tend You Believe is direct­ed toward at least two major audi­ences: seek­ers who are attract­ed to reli­gious life but have trou­ble believ­ing in God and reli­gious insti­tu­tions, and rab­bis and faith lead­ers who encounter such seek­ers. It will be most mean­ing­ful for seek­ers and most help­ful to those answer­ing their questions.

Kush­n­er is the daugh­ter of the Reform rab­bi and writer Lawrence Kush­n­er. In Pre­tend You Believe, she ref­er­ences the infor­mal, havu­rah-style atmos­phere of the syn­a­gogue in which she grew up, where peo­ple learned togeth­er and tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies were flat­tened. Now the rab­bi of The Kitchen in San Fran­cis­co, Noa Kush­n­er has cre­at­ed her own mod­el of a suc­cess­ful com­mu­ni­ty of learn­ers. This book is the out­growth of her expe­ri­ence there.

Pre­tend You Believe is not a sus­tained the­o­log­i­cal argu­ment. Rather, it is an engag­ing mix of ideas expressed ana­lyt­i­cal­ly, ancient midrashim expli­cat­ed in unique ways, Chas­sidic tales with fresh inter­pre­ta­tions, and sto­ries and anec­dotes from the author’s own life. This eclec­tic approach has the advan­tage of appeal­ing to dif­fer­ent kinds of read­ers. Under­ly­ing Kushner’s approach is the belief that one can­not be taught or argued into reli­gion or belief in God; above all, one has to prac­tice and let the expe­ri­ence enrich and change one. Kush­n­er writes, ​“The way to gain reli­gious faith, com­fort, belong­ing and love of God is to do reli­gious things, to par­tic­i­pate in the reli­gious vocab­u­lary of rit­u­als, words and actions with sincerity.”

Too often, Kush­n­er claims, the rit­u­als and prac­tice of Judaism are sep­a­rat­ed from the eth­i­cal imper­a­tives. This sep­a­ra­tion leads to a dimin­ish­ment of both aspects of Judaism. Indeed, she advo­cates using the key words ​“awe” and ​“respon­si­bil­i­ty” as opposed to the thin­ner terms ​“spir­i­tu­al­i­ty” and ​“ethics.” Toward the lat­ter part of the book, Kush­n­er tells a beau­ti­ful sto­ry of a stu­dent who was writ­ing a book and need­ed an obscure ref­er­ence devel­oped from an arti­cle by an old­er rab­bi on the oth­er side of the coun­try. He wrote and called the rab­bi but received no response. Frus­trat­ed, the stu­dent flew across the coun­try to meet the rab­bi, who greet­ed him with an embrace and said, ​“Now we can study.” Kush­n­er uses this sto­ry to illus­trate two dif­fer­ent mod­els of approach­ing reli­gion. The stu­dent fol­lowed the con­sumer mod­el—what am I going to get out of doing some­thing—while the old rab­bi is look­ing for the depth of expe­ri­en­tial learn­ing and prac­tice. The stu­dent has the sec­u­lar mind­set and the old rab­bi the true reli­gious mindset.

Under 125 pages, Pre­tend You Believe is a remark­ably deep book filled with some­thing we are short of today — gen­uine wisdom.