Pretend You Believe

Many of us long for spiritual belonging and connection, only to run up against our confusion, discomfort, even disgust with organised religion. Noa Kushner understands this well. As the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a progressive, experimental San Francisco Jewish congregation, she has guided thousands of people into a relationship with religion they never thought they would or could experience. In this concise, soul-stirring book, Kushner offers a transformational picture of religion for the moments in life when we yearn to transcend our self-imposed limits. She proposes that we treat religion, at first, not as something we believe but as something we do, so we can pursue the profound questions that perspective unfolds. How does prayer work? How do religious traditions evolve? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? And most of all, why should we be religious? Through luminous storytelling from the Torah, Jewish fable and her own life, Kushner crafts an elegant, persuasive case for religious community not only as an antidote to our society's corrosive obsession with status, but also a fundamental good in and of itself. Written in a Jewish idiom, but open to readers of all backgrounds, Pretend You Believe is a powerful meditation on God, responsibility, doubt, progress, justice, love, forgiveness, joy and more. With this book, Kushner has captured the wonder of religious feeling and inscribed an invitation to readers everywhere.

NOA KUSHNER is the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, an experimental congregation that has grown since 2011 into a globally recognized institution, serving thousands of families throughout the Bay Area. Kushner and The Kitchen have been featured in The Forward, Tablet, Ha'aretz, and elsewhere, and Kushner has been profiled in SF Magazine and Newsweek/The Daily Beasts 'Rabbis to Watch.' She holds a degree in Religious Studies from Brown University and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College.