Generation J

Goldstein, the founding rabbi of the New Shul in New York's Greenwich Village, gets it: He understands how fear-based American Jewish institutions -- which became dourly obsessed with anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and Israel's perils -- turned many away from Jewish life, and he knows how to entice them back without pandering to the baser demand for kitsch and nostalgia. As the title implies, Goldstein calls on the spirit of the renegade journalist Hunter S. Thompson's "gonzo" philosophy, according to which an individual rebels against an out-of-touch establishment while still remaining actively engaged in the particular enterprise.

It may sound corny when applied to Judaism, but Goldstein backs up the title with a legitimately creative and relatively irreverent idea about how to engage with Judaism anew: Look to the old. "We should question authority and challenge the status quo," he writes, "but we've got to do it through the excavation of traditional -- yet often radical and sometimes subversive -- teachings." Goldstein sprinkles the book with excellent examples of rituals ripe for revival (of which my favorite might be the Hasidic practice of setting out incense or fragrant spices at home on Friday afternoon as a sort of olfactory preparation for the Sabbath).

There are some substantive missteps -- his grave attack on the Kabbalah Centre's "theology" is like taking a jackhammer to an ant. But, all in all, this is clearly one promising rabbi: He has equal knowledge of (and appreciation for) both ancient tradition and contemporary life.

All of which makes it sad to report that the book has an essential flaw: Goldstein writes in distractingly ridiculous prose. Sentences are peppered with faux-expletives -- damn, lame-ass, what's our freakin' problem? -- and cringe-inducing phrases: "You bet your bagels," "This might seem like a pretty tall order, but God's no short-order cook." And then there are the anecdotes. On a Jewish Outward Bound trip to the Icy Reef near Antarctica, Goldstein points out a spiritual lesson that might be gleaned from the brutal environment. "You're not going to get all religious on us, are you?" one participant whines. "Not right here, not at the edge of the world?" To which Goldstein claims he responded, "You're damn right I am, you rabble-rousing Heeb." One begins to hope, desperately, that he is making this stuff up.

I don't know Robin Chotzinoff, but I could almost imagine her groaning along with me. Chotzinoff, the daughter of a non-Jewish mother and an atheist Jewish father, was raised on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the 1960s but soon fled for wider, artsier, druggier pastures. After decades of drifting, adventurously if a little dangerously, through life, Chotzinoff unexpectedly found herself drawn to Judaism. Thankfully, though, this was no simple overnight conversion. "Rather than becoming a born-again Jew," she writes, "I wandered over in the direction of Judaism and stayed there until I got used to it."

Holy Unexpected is a slim, delightful account of this wandering-over, and it is one I'd hate to ruin by describing it in too much detail, for the real charm here is Chotzinoff's writing. She comes across as funny -- and fun. She breaks her first Yom Kippur fast with a margarita (which "packed such a magnificent punch that we decided to make it a yearly tradition") and, in tackling the Jewish concept of yetzer harah (the evil inclination), imagines it as played by Kris Kristofferson. When, at her daughter's bat mitzvah, the rabbi accidentally jabs Chotzinoff's atheist father in the chest with the sacred scroll, she notes blithely: "For the first time, my father was touched -- hard -- by the Torah."

But, more important, Chotzinoff is that rare spiritual seeker who manages to be sincere without taking herself too seriously. Her quest introduces us to a score of learned religious figures, but it is often her own conclusions that prove most eloquent, as in her realization about the quest for atonement during Judaism's High Holy Days: "You have to admit you're human; that you will probably screw up again next year, but that your desire to make things right is believable." Believable: With one word, Chotzinoff assures us that, whatever else it might be, the pursuit of meaning is not ridiculous.

For many, that "believable" holds the key to faith. And this is one issue that -- no matter how Hasidic the reggae, how fragrant the incense, how "new" the Judaism -- will always demand reckoning. ·

Alana Newhouse is the arts and culture editor of the Forward.