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Rabbi Noa Kushner, described by Newsweek as a “rabbi to watch,” seeks to help people—Jews and non-Jews—approach religion in this more secular age with a new book, Pretend You Believe: How to Enter Religion.
While she now leads a congregation in San Francisco, Kushner grew up in Sudbury and credits the town and her family with helping to develop her thinking.
Kushner’s father, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, was the rabbi at Congregation Beth El in Sudbury for 28 years. He was known for leading services in jeans and encouraged the congregation to write a prayerbook honoring both the fathers and the mothers of the Torah.
Noa was a baby when her family moved here, and lived in Sudbury until she graduated from Lincoln- Sudbury high school.
“Back then, it was somewhat unusual to be Jewish in Sudbury. I was one of two Jewish kids in my kindergarten. But we often interacted with our neighbors around the Jewish holidays.
“I have such positive memories of being a child in Sudbury, playing in Heritage Park and decorating my bike for the Fourth of July parade. It was a very pastoral and gentle town with lots of room for imagination. Religious ideas were combined with the holiness of nature. And I always heard the church bells that marked time,” she recalled.
She and her husband, Rabbi Michael Lezak, moved to the West Coast after rabbinical school, and, while she remembers Sudbury winters as beautiful, “we don’t have to shovel the cars out now.” They are raising their three daughters in San Francisco, and her parents have now joined them there.
In addition to his work at Beth El, Lawrence Kushner is also the author of over 18 books, including children’s books, on Jewish themes.
“I stand on his shoulders with my rabbinate and my writing,” Noa Kushner said. “He encouraged me. He has wanted me to write a book my whole life. It will be a very meaningful moment to hand him a copy” when Pretend You Believe is published in October.
Kushner has been “thinking about these ideas for 25 years, and it took me seven years to write this book.”
She founded a San Francisco congregation, The Kitchen, “unapologetically a proud Jewish community, but with lots of different backgrounds and outward-facing. Anyone can participate.”
“I met many students questioning religion and I didn’t have a book to give them,” so she decided to write Pretend You Believe. “I wanted to write it very carefully and without off-putting language.”
Her subtitle, How to Enter Religion, is key. “I’m not debating God or no God or comparative religions, but how to learn what the world of religion is about.
“Decades ago, religion was part of daily conversation, but it has fallen out of community conversation and I would like to help bring it back.” Book stores, she noted, have sections of self-help books but rarely sections of religious books.
“This is absolutely a Jewish book—I only know Judaism—but I think the ideas could help people considering other faiths as well. I want to bring back the idea that religion connects us when we didn’t realize we needed to be connected.”
Kushner feels too often the framework people use to think about religion gets in their way.
“You really need to enter religion and try on this world view. I compare it to a novel—at some point you just have to read the book. You might not like it, but you have to experience it. I want to teach you how to enter the world of religion.”
The book, she said, is for anyone serious about exploring a religion. “The first question is not which flavor of ice cream do you want, but would you like to try some ice cream?”
She encourages readers to “stop experiencing religion from the outside. Religion is experiential, you just have to jump in. And it’s okay to pretend. Belief ebbs and flows. Some days I still have to pretend to believe to get into the room, then I can actually believe.”
Her end goal is awareness of awe and humility. For Kushner that means “I try to serve God the best I can with my life, as opposed to serving my self or thinking what I am getting out of life.”
Pretend You Believe can be ordered before publication from the publisher here.