Pretend You Believe

How to Enter Religion

By: Noa Kushner

From one of the country’s most visionary and perceptive rabbis, a rediscovery of the potential for religious experience to transform contemporary life

Many of us long for spiritual belonging and connection, only to run up against our confusion and discomfort with organized religion. Noa Kushner understands this well. As the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a groundbreaking Jewish congregation in San Francisco, she has helped 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 picture of religion not as something we design or consume, but as something we enter, just as we are. What if we temporarily set aside statements of belief and instead approach religion as something we do? Kushner proposes we can then pursue the profound questions this perspective reveals. How is prayer supposed to work? Which comes first, religion or ethics? Why should we be religious? Through imaginative storytelling and a plainspoken, accessible teaching of Jewish sources, as well as hard-won lessons from her own rabbinate, Kushner creates an elegant, thoughtful guide for anyone who has wondered about the limits of today’s consumerist worldview and is curious about what religion might have to offer. Written in a Jewish idiom but open to readers of all backgrounds, Pretend You Believe is a powerful meditation on God and humanity, responsibility and forgiveness, love and doubt, progress and justice. With this book, Kushner has captured the wonder of religious feeling and inscribed an invitation to readers everywhere.