Who Gives A Shit: What's Your Religion?

I don't really get religion.

My father's idea of celebrating his lapsed Jewish faith was to light a candelabra (we didn't have a menorah) and play the Fiddler on the Roof album with accompanying ukulele. My mom said she thought that if God was anywhere he was in nature, not in some judgy, smoky Catholic church of her youth. I used to sing in a cool Episcopal choir that once did a great production of Joseph and The Technicolor Dreamcoat. That's it for my religious education.

Much of the stuff people say and do in the name of their various religions seems more like mental illness to me than faith, truth to tell.  The whole thing seems implausible to my cynical brain. And I find zealots to be a tiresome lot.

We don't have too many round here. At least not on the surface. We had those "God-fearing Christians" from Westboro pay us a visit a few years back and I love, love, loved the response of Rabbi Andy Bachman from Temple Beth Elohim, where they decided to focus their protest. 

We've got the Church! Of Park Slope and their Postmark Cafe. Why the exclamation point, by the way?

We've got the Hassids once in a while blowing that horn and praying for our souls.

I once was asked to write an article on a Jews for Jesus-like church in Brooklyn called Chosen People Ministries, who preached that in order to be a "completed" Jew, you must embrace Jesus as the Messiah. Somehow, I found myself hanging with Boris, one of their paid missionaries, under the Atlantic Street Station one morning. 

It seemed an unlikely place to meet your maker, unless we're talking in the literal sense, but missionaries were out in force. On one end, there was Charlotte of Showers of Blessing Ministry, a big woman with a voice of the Islands, hoping to attract Jewish converts with a handmade sign adorned with Jewish stars and the words "strictly kosher."  "Shalom, shalom" she greeted us. 

Boris laughed when I asked him how many Jews he got on a good day. "I come to plant seeds," he told me. Boris had a background in sales.  Before he went to work for CPM, he was as an insurance broker.  On an average rush hour morning, he told me he pamphleted around 600 passersby. 

Sometimes conversation was unavoidable, as when an orthodox commuter stopped by for a rather heated chat. "2000 years that they are trying to kill your brother.  Come back home. We need you.  Six million jews didn't die for this," the man tells Boris.

"Just tell me," Boris asked me, "What's the difference between Orthodox Jew, Lubovitchers, Hassidim, Reform, Conservative, Messianic?  All of us, Jews."

Even I, heathen that I am, was like... wait a minute.

I asked Boris about witnessing to children. He put his cut off for kids at 13 and up. I asked him about witnessing to the sick and mentally-handicapped. He said, 'I came not to the healthy, I came for the sick, for the sinners.'" I asked why a mentally-handicapped person is a sinner.  

"If you read the scripture," Boris informed me, "you can find out that very often the people who are handicapped have this because their parents, and the Lord Yeshua says this, that their parents were sinful.  And he is saying that if you are sinful, this can be projected on third or even fourth generations."

I rose up singing just as soon as I got home to my godless flock after that commuter hour! Safe in sane Park Slope.

Then, I found out that the head of Chosen People Ministries not only lived in Park Slope but literally shared a common wall with the then Rabbi of Beth Elohim. Holy something! They had never spoken to each other in something like twenty years.

What about you guys? What's your religion? Do you even care? Show me the way, peeps. Light my eternal flame. Or whatev.