Religion American Style

...The two sides were so mutually hostile that Ari was bounced around every few years from one Jewish day school to another...

...This highly successful young journalist, who describes himself as a victim of neglect and misunderstanding, seems unable to do what reporters do best—take a step back and see things from the vantage point of others...

...Militant feminism and gay rights were the criteria of Religious Correctness...

...He is furious when his Orthodox girlfriend drops him once it is clear that he will continue to violate the Sabbath...

...And there were instances of Sabbath desecration from sheer laziness, which Goldman confesses always led to him having guilt feelings...

...He persevered nevertheless...

...Catholicism for the Pope—as for most Europeans—denotes a body of faith and practice to be accepted or rejected as a whole...

...Describing his interview for a job at the Times, Goldman frankly states that he was ready to work on the Sabbath—it was simply a matter of luck that the particular position he was assigned did not require him to do so...

...asked Briggs...

...Ari L. Goldman's TheSearch for God at Harvard—-part personal memoir and part description of what passes for theological education at the Harvard Divinity School—is an apt illustration of this unique phenomenon...

...The higher Goldman rose at the Times, however, the heavier the pressures became...

...As a participant-observer, the author brings to bear his well-honed journalistic skills, and the result is a sympathetic treatment that maintains critical distance...

...His childhood memories of the unbearable tension at home make the reader doubt that Ari and his two brothers would have been better off had the marriage been maintained, yet the bitterness of the divorce had such terrible consequences that one can understand his nostalgia for an intact family...

...Goldman, while covering religious affairs for the New York Times, received permission from the newspaper to spend a year broadening and deepening his knowledgeof world religions...

...If traditional religious institutions taught that homosexuality was a sin, he wryly notes, "at the Div School, the cardinal sin is being homophobic—that is, discriminating in any way against homosexuals...

...Well-meaning mentors advised him that the job of a reporter was incompatible with strict adherence to the faith...

...There were emergencies: the legislative debates in Albany that dragged beyond sundown on Friday, the necessity to work on Nelson Rockefeller's obituary on a Friday night...

...But the author's clarity of vision deserts him when he writes about his own Odyssey...

...Because the schools varied widely in quality andintheirdegreeof openness or opposition to the secular world, he emerged from the experience educationally handicapped and religiously disoriented...

...But he is too self-absorbed to see that becoming one's own rabbi might alienate those of more conventional religious views...

...The account of his religious development betrays the same lack of self-awareness, for his personally constructed pattern of Jewish observance is not, in principle, all that different from what he gently mocks when he finds it at Harvard Divinity School...

...An Orthodox Jew may not work, write or travel from sundown Friday until a little over an hour past sundown Saturday, except for the purpose of saving a life...

...I had to begin to become my own rabbi...

...He shows that many of the faculty and his fellow students considered religion little more than a vehicle for the social and political causes they favored...

...The account of life at Harvard Divinity School is fascinating...

...Goldman discussed his predicament with the most liberal Orthodox rabbi he knew...

...How he has precariously balanced—or failed to balance—adherence to traditional Judaism with professional success at the Times is a theme that dominates his book...

...Goldman discovered, too, that at Harvard the Bible "can be picked apart, examined, debated and condemned, but never, never accepted at face value as historic fact...

...Herelates his sabbatical experience against the background of his own religious development...

...He obviously came to like his classmates and most of his professors, but he was not blind to the shortcomings of the institution...

...Although polls consistently show that a greater percentage of Americans than Europeans believe in God, reward and punishment, and the afterlif e, and belong to some religious denomination, Americans are far more likely to reinterpret and reshape inherited religious teachings to fit their own sense of morality and their personal lifestyles...

...Not surprisingly, religious relativism led to fascination with the exotic and impatience with the familiar: "Nobody dared to impose Western values on Moslem women, even though they were quick to impose liberal values on Christian Fundamentalists...

...Finding that there was no way his lapses could be squared with Orthodox Jewish tradition, he convinced himself that Jewish law "is far more flexible and compassionate than the rabbis had told us...

...What John Paul perceived as some special failing of American Catholics is actually a pervasive element in all of the country's religious life...

...Goldman notes that "religious truth did not seem to exist at the Div School, only religious relativism...

...Most of the chapters open with a report on some aspect of the "Div School" and then, stream-of-consciousness style, meander into the autobiographical mode...

...It came as a shock to Goldman, whose Judaism stressed the necessity for the individual to change his ways, to find that at the Divinity School the demand for change "was directed outside," at society...

...For all of Goldman'sprofessed commitment to the traditional Sabbath, and his being "torn" between its observance and the world of journalism that might call on its practitioners sevendaysaweek, he leaves no doubt that his religion took second place to his career...

...The courses he took enabled him to attain a basic understanding of how Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and African religions affect their adherents, but nowhere in the curriculum could he find out "how Christians feel about themselves"—as if it were unfairly triumphalist for a Christian school of theology to present the case for Christianity...

...Avoiding frustration by tailoring his Judaism to his career, Goldman has designed his own version of religion just as surely as the feminists, gays and Third World activists he met at Harvard...

...There were the temptations to attend social functions on the Sabbath that, while not obligatory, were professionally prestigious...

...Americans, he complained, have a cafeteria-style approach to religion, appropriating the elements that appeal to them and ignoring the others...

...He is indignant when his suburban Orthodox congregation will not let him serve as prayer leader on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, because some of the members feel his lax pattern of religious observance makes him an inappropriate person to intercede with God for the forgiveness of the community's sins...

...Once it took the then Times religion editor Kenneth Briggs, an ordained Methodist minister, to convince Goldman not to violate the Jewish Sabbath by going to a gala dinner of the Legislative Correspondents Association: "How can you compare the two...

...Ari Goldman's sense of victimhood is rooted in fury at his parents for divorcing when he was six...

...Several times in the book, Goldman writes that he has been guided by the thought that religion "was supposed to enrich your life, not frustrate it...

...Reviewed by Lawrence Grossman Director of Publications, American Jewish Committee When Pope John Paul II visited the United States a few years ago, he criticized American Catholics for what he considered their lack of religious consistency...

...Born, raised and educated as an Orthodox Jew, Goldman was attracted early on toacareerin journalism...