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The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism Ever since I was a teenager, I constantly wrestled with fundamental religious and moral questions. One was: Why am I a Jew? I never felt that being born into a Jewish family should suffice to keep me a member of one of the world's smallest peoples and faiths. I needed reasons to be a Jew, and all my years of yeshiva and other Jewish education had not provided those reasons. During my year in England, I began to write an essay, "Why I Am a Jew," but never completed it. I always wanted, however, to make the rational case for Judaism, and for religion and God generally. After leaving Columbia, I felt ready. Years of almost daily talking with Joseph Telushkin, who in the meantime had graduated Yeshiva University and been ordained as a rabbi by the Orthodox university, prepared us both to undertake a daunting task: make a rational case for Judaism unlike any other in print. To think that we could do so at the age of 25 took some chutzpah, especially since we found no publisher who would sign up two young men with no previous publications to their credit. By 1975, I had spoken many hundreds of times, and while almost exclusively to Jewish audiences, the subject was no longer exclusively Soviet Jewry. I spoke on rational reasons to incorporate Judaism into one's life, on why so many young Jews were alienated from Judaism, and on God's existence. As a result of these lectures, I told Joseph that some questions were regularly repeated, and people needed answers to them. I came up with a simple and direct title for a book we should write, "The Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism". Note that the title says "people," not "Jews" – this is important, as even then I believed that non-Jews should look into Judaism. And, so, with no money advanced, with no publisher and no editor, we wrote the book, almost daily from about 3:00 PM to 3:00 AM, in my apartment in Whitestone, Queens. We looked up typesetters, binders and printers in the Yellow Pages, and published "The Eight Questions People Ask About Judaism" in 1975. Pre-orders from lectures paid for the printing. The book continued to sell so well that years later, we were approached by Simon & Schuster and told that if we rewrote the book and added a new question, Simon & Schuster would publish the book as "The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism". We did indeed rewrite the book and added a question, and the book has been in print ever since, first as a hardcover, now as a paperback. The book has been translated into Russian, Persian, Japanese, German and Spanish. It is one of the few introductions to Judaism used by the three major Jewish denominations, and it has convinced more than a few non-Jews to convert to Judaism, and many secular Jews to take Judaism seriously. |
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