March 3, 2008
Review: Lawrence Bush's "Waiting for God"
For someone who doesn’t believe in God, Lawrence Bush sure knows a lot about religion.
As the son of avowedly secular Jewish socialists, the brother of an Orthodox Christian, the former speechwriter for a prominent Reform rabbi and the editor of a well-respected Jewish publication, Bush is in a unique position to know so much.
But, as he explains so eloquently in his new book, “Waiting for God: The Spiritual Reflections of a Reluctant Atheist,” Bush has remained faithful to his atheist beliefs even though he’s far more deeply involved in religious discussions than the average person.
The book is an erudite discussion of religion’s failings. But, perhaps to be fair, Bush also lets us in on his own foibles and his insecurities about atheism. In addition, he talks at length about how his family history affected his thinking on religion, including ruminations on his late father’s dour intellectualism and his brother’s post-college conversion to Christianity.
In addition to his work as a speechwriter for the late Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, Bush served for 13 years as the founding editor of Reconstructionism Today, the magazine of the Reconstructionist movement. He also served as the editor and commentator on the millennium edition of Leo Rosten’s classic, “The Joys of Yiddish.” His other books include “Bessie: A Novel of Love and Revolution,” “American Torah Toons: 54 Illustrated Commentaries, Jews, Money and Social Responsibility” (with Jeffrey Dekro), and two fiction titles for young adults, “Rooftop Secrets and Other Stories of Anti-Semitism” and “Emma Ansky-Levine and Her Mitzvah Machine.” Most recently, Bush has served as the editor of Jewish Currents, the secular, leftist magazine of the Workman’s Circle/Arbeter Ring.
“Waiting for God” is not an angry condemnation of religion, a la Christopher Hitchens’ “God is not Great.”
Instead, Bush takes an introspective approach to his atheist beliefs. He examines the experiences of the 1960s “Woodstocker” generation and analyses why many of his peers have turned to religion in recent decades while he refused, and continues to refuse, to give in.
He suggests that specter of nuclear war in the 1950s drove many of his peers toward spirituality and a distrust of science in their later years:
“For me, memories of life in the shadow of the mushroom cloud have long seemed causally linked to a whole range of character traits that marked the Woodstockers: our attraction to spirituality and “alternative (i.e., non-scientific beliefs, our love of irony and absurdity in art and politics, our desire to “turn on, tune in and drop out” from strivings that seemed doomed to transience and meaninglessness. Such connections between the surreal nuclear nightmare of our childhoods and the psychological character of our adulthoods have rarely been explored — perhaps because the profound threat represented by the Bomb impaired our ability to confront it.”
Bush also probes the effect of hallucinogenic drugs on the ‘60s generation and how it led many to believe in a higher power in an attempt to explain the transcendence they felt while on the drugs. Bush knows a lot about these experiences: When he was 19, he ingested a strong dose of LSD and ran stark naked around the streets of Venice Beach believing he was Jesus. A night in jail and his subsequent reflection on the experience led to psychological breakthroughs that saved him years of therapy.
For many other people, the hallucinogens served as a gateway to Eastern religions and spirituality, Bush says. But, here again, he stuck to his atheist ways:
“Although my psychedelic experiences made the gurus’ promises of enlightenment seemed credible and attractive, and although my druggy desire to chart the patterns of reality made the ancient metaphysical systems of the East seem resonant and impressive, I simply could not buy the idea that a 14-year-old from India could alter my consciousness with a touch to the forehead or that the dedicated pursuit of Transcendental Meditation would enable me to overcome gravity and levitate. Such miracle stories were not to be believed: The were equivalent, in my mind, to the Virgin Birth, the parting of the Red Sea, and other familiar religious miracle stories, only presented with more contemporary vocabulary and swathed in Eastern religious garb.”
The closest Bush seems to have come to accepting some form of religion is Reconstructionist Judaism. He praises Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan’s philosophy and beliefs but he never makes the leap.
He writes that he has a “bad case of hereditary allergy to religion, even in minute traces, and most especially to prayer services.” That seems to be the strongest reason for why he remains an atheist — it’s something he was raised with. He can admire from afar but never join in. In the end, Bush suggests that we set aside religion in favor of a “spirituality of interconnection” whereby human beings come together and act for the common good. Bush calls Kaplan “wonderfully accurate” when he remarked that mankind is unique among all earth’s creatures in that our “nature not only makes for the survival of the fittest, but aims to make the greatest possible number fit to survive.”
When I read Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” I never imagined a book could force me to confront my faith in God in such a forceful way. Bush does a comparable job in “Waiting for God,” and for that reason alone, this book is worth reading.
“Waiting for God: The Spiritual Reflections of a Reluctant Atheist,” is published by Ben Yehuda Press (208 pages).
For more news about Jewish books, sign up for our email alerts.
Thanks for sharing, please keep an update about this info. love to read it more.