A Hot New Start-Up, Peddling Penance

Such is the premise of Ann Bauer’s novel Forgiveness 4 You. Grayson Carl writes in his review:

Throughout history, across faith traditions, I imagine the fantasy of a more “convenient” religion is universal. . . . Bauer’s satire, starring an ex-Catholic priest roped into launching a non-denominational forgiveness start-up, is distressingly credible on that point. “Key Insight,” a creative brief produced by one of her characters, reads and rings true: “Today’s busy professionals are seeking a faster, more service-oriented route to achieve spiritual peace than traditional religion or psychotherapy.” Uber, but for penance. . . .

Bauer’s novel is a way of wondering why we all, Catholic or not, so often fail to seek forgiveness. If even we notoriously guilty followers of the Pope won’t make an act of contrition, it’s hard to imagine the culture at large embracing the penitent instinct. “Great potential for growth in the Baby Boomer market,” one of the book’s memos reads, “but will require awareness campaigns to promote the concept of ‘guilt,’ which fifty-three-to-sixty-eight-year-old respondents to a survey reported they are ‘less likely’ or ‘unlikely’ to experience.” The trouble, Forgiveness 4 You intimates, isn’t that absolution isn’t “easy” enough; it’s that it rarely occurs to us to ask for any in the first place. We know not what we do.

Read more at First Things

More about: American Religion, Catholicism, Forgiveness, Literature, Religion & Holidays

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society