This New York Times columnist rejected Judaism. He should admit it.
David Brooks, please stop saying you are Jewish.
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This is a guest essay written by Mark Oppenheimer, editor of “Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera,” an online journal covering American religion, politics, and culture.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
About 10 years ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks began writing about his own “faith journey,” to use the cloying evangelical phrase that, alas, is perfect for our purposes.
He had spent most of his career as an irreligious political columnist, with forays into wry sociological observation — coining the terms “patio man” and “bobo,” both still useful.
Brooks’ columns, and books, began to discuss his growing belief that there was something more than the material world, and he would often reach for Christian texts to help explain what that something more was. A writer who had always been interested in political writers like Burke and Marx, Lippmann and Bourne, was now invoking Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis and Tim Keller.
For those (admittedly few) of us interested in irruptions of faith into the secular media guild, Brooks became something of a puzzle. Had Brooks, who was Jewish, become a Christian? There were tea leaves to be read.
In 2013, about the time that his writing took on this Christian cast, he got divorced from his first wife, Sarah, who was Jewish. Two years later, in the acknowledgments of his new book, he wrote an adulatory, almost erotic thank-you to Anne Snyder, his research assistant. Two years after that, he and Snyder got married. They were spotted in (Protestant) church together, often, and today Snyder is the editor of a Christian magazine.
Nuptials are not destiny, of course. But over time, it became clear Brooks was some sort of Christian. In 2022, he came out and said as much, at a conference on faith and religion.
“I found [Christianity] so deep and beautiful,” he told the audience. “I would read Reinhold Niebuhr and [Tim] Keller and all these people, and I just found it convincing and beautiful. And then gradually it seemed true … they went from beautiful to true. I became a Christian around 2013, 2014 (a transition I liken to investing in the stock market in 1929).”
Whether he was baptized or not, he has never said — I’ve wanted to ask him, but he has turned down all of my requests for interviews, most recently last Friday. Still, there’s not much ambiguity around “became a Christian.”
Ultimately, Brooks’ religious identity should not matter to anyone but himself (and his Creator, he might add). In theory, we readers should be happy that he is finding fulfillment, even if his writing has taken a bit of a hit. (“When did David Brooks become Deepak Chopra?” one ex-fan of his joked to me, about five years ago.)
The problem, however, is that he is not writing as a mere Christian; often, he is writing as a conflicted Jew. And in doing so, he keeps getting Judaism very wrong. The more Brooks writes, the more it becomes clear that he is not particularly interested in Judaism, except as some sort of nostalgia trip, familial obligation, or cover for his own discomfort at having left it behind.
He should stop writing about Judaism, now.
The most recent, egregious example came last Thursday, with the publication of a long essay in the New York Times, “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be.”
It’s a personal essay about what it’s like to go from being an agnostic to being faithful, and in the genre of spiritual memoir — a wicked hard genre to pull off, one I would never attempt — it’s passable. He describes moments of numinous experience, like realizing on a subway ride that his fellow passengers each had a beautiful soul.
And he describes the reading he has done, the wisdom he has found in the writing of Christians like the poet Christian Wiman and the theologian Paul Tillich, and of course in the New Testament. Which leads him to this formulation of his own religious perspective:
“Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew. For me, the Beatitudes are the part of the Bible where the celestial grandeur most dazzlingly shines through. So these days I’m enchanted by both Judaism and Christianity. I assent to the whole shebang.”
Already, anyone theologically literate will be aware that Brooks is pulling a fast one. There is a name for people who believe in the “whole shebang” of Judaism and Christianity: They are called “Christians.” Brooks knows as much, which is why he writes next, a bit sheepishly, “My Jewish friends … point out that when you believe in both the Old and New Testaments, you’ve crossed over to Team Christian, which is a fair point.”
It’s not just a “fair point” — it’s the actual truth of what Christianity is. It’s the definition of a Christian: one who believes in the Old and New Testaments. To find a Christian who doesn’t also value the Old Testament is to find a fraud, an ignoramus, an antisemite, or all of the above; worshipping Jesus sans Judaism was, in fact, a Nazi project. Brooks is, by contrast, a thoughtful, humanistic dude, and he should realize how silly it is to depict himself as sort of Christian-ish, sort of Jew-ish.
Notwithstanding liberal Christian theologians’ attempts to soften their faith’s supersessionist message, it’s undeniable that Christianity is meant to complete Judaism, to make it whole; to be Christian is to deny the sufficiency of Judaism as a religion, and to deny the sufficiency of Jews as one’s religious community.
It’s also to deny that the Jewish commandments — keeping kosher, observing fast days, celebrating holidays like Sukkot and Passover — are in any way binding. If Christianity is true, then normative Judaism is ancient Near Eastern cosplay.
For the Jew, Christianity is a heresy, an elevation of a false messiah. Which is not to say that the Gospels are not great literature, or don’t have worthwhile teachings; but for the Jew, they are not divine. Brooks says they went, for him, “from beautiful to true,” which suggests that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus.
If Jesus was resurrected, then we Jews are in error (maybe even stubborn, or hard-hearted, to use old antisemitic tropes). We keep praying for the coming of the messiah; if He came already, we’re just wrong. Point being: There is no accepting the whole shebang, because the two parts of the shebang contradict each other — for the Jew, anyway. It’s the Christian who believes in their consilience.
Again, I think that Brooks knows that he is trying to square the circle — square the bagel? — which helps explain one of his signature writing tics, the alternation of Jewish and Christian sources.
For every Wiman, he will cite a Jewish theologian like Joseph Soloveitchik; for every Tillich, an Abraham Joshua Heschel; for every Wilberforce, a Simone Weil (who was Catholic-curious, but never baptized); for every George Marsden, a David Wolpe. The problem here, aside from the pedantic demonstration of his own interfaith bona fides, is that Brooks often gets these thinkers wrong, especially the Jewish ones.
For example, Brooks invokes Soloveitchik’s “Halakhic1 Man” (1944, published in English in 1983) to make the argument that faith is, in part, about “the desire to become a better version of yourself.”
He quotes Soloveitchik on how, for the religiously observant, “the tortures of spiritual crises and exhausting treks of the soul purify and sanctify man, cleanse his thoughts, and purge them of the husks of superficiality and the dross of vulgarity. … He arises from the agonies purged and refined, possessed of a pure heart and new spirit.”
In Brooks’ reading, Soloveitchik — who lived from 1903 to 1993, and was regarded as one of the century’s great Orthodox sages — is recommending religion as a balm for the soul, or a self-improvement plan.
That’s “perhaps the biggest misreading of Soloveitchik I’ve ever seen,” my rabbi, Eric Woodward, said to me. “Soloveitchik’s entire point is that religion is not about comfort, but about obligation (specifically, halakhic [Jewish law] obligation), and while one can find comfort in this, the Halakhic Man is a steely force of following the law.”
What’s more, Soloveitchik would have been appalled to find his work invoked in a have-it-both-ways piece like Brooks’. Soloveitchik “was famously against Jewish-Christian dialogue,” Woodward said; the late rabbi despised precisely “the sort of mealy-mouthed kumbaya spirituality that Brooks expresses.”
The misuse of Jewish thinkers does not end there. At the end of the piece, Brooks invokes Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:
“‘I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,’ Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘and you gave them to me.’”
For starters, as Susannah Heschel pointed out to me, this is a bad misquotation of Heschel, who in fact wrote, “Never once in my life did I ask God for success or wisdom or power or fame. I asked for wonder, and he gave it to me.” To ask for “wonder” is to ask for something like amazement, or gratitude; it’s a disposition. To ask for “wonders” is to ask for miracles — something totally different.
It’s worth mentioning that a major collection of Heschel’s writings is titled “I Asked for Wonder.” It takes a bit of work to get this wrong.
And Heschel, like Soloveitchik, believed that the “wonder” was preceded by, indeed made possible by, obligation. Early in his book, Heschel writes, famously, “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” His entire project is intelligible only if one assumes the observance of the commanded Sabbath.
To repudiate Jewish law — worse, to take no interest in it, to ignore it — then invoke Heschel, is nonsensical. Plus, observation of the Jewish Sabbath is one of the ways that Jews mark their separation from secular life, and from Gentiles. It’s one of the ways Jews mark themselves as other, as different, as countercultural.
It’s a rebuke to precisely the kind of assimilation for which Brooks is making a (weak) quasi-theological case. Brooks’ “whole shebang” theology, in which nothing has a hard separation from anything else, is antithetical to Heschel, and to Judaism.
Brooks is interested in Judaism as chicken soup for his Christian soul. He likes the feel of it, or what he imagines the feel of it to be, since he doesn’t really have a feel for it — by his own admission. He attended an Episcopal school as a child, and grew up “either the most Christiany Jew on the earth or the most Jewy Christian, a plight made survivable by the fact that I was certain God did not exist,” as he told The New Yorker.
His investment in Judaism is as a kind of cultural antidote to the lamest, most shvach2 aspects of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, which in other contexts he idealized. The Jew is earthy, fun, perhaps mischievous.
“Sometimes I feel pulled,” Brooks writes, “by concrete moments of holy delight that I witness right in front of my face — the sight of a rabbi laughing uproariously as his children pile over him during a Shabbat meal, the sight of a Catholic priest at a poor church looking radiantly to heaven as he holds the bread of Christ above his head.”
As Rabbi Woodward pointed out to me, this “is a gross stereotype, right out of a classic Christian polemic against Jews. Because look what we see in it: a Jew concerned primarily with peoplehood, a Christian concerned with the sublime.”
It’s not surprising that Brooks would want to stake a claim to both stereotypes, to see himself in the religious lineage of great dads and ascetic holy men. But they are stereotypes nonetheless.
“These days I go to church more than synagogue,” Brooks writes in the New York Times, in what I imagine as a late entry for 2024’s understatement of the year. “But I’ve learned you can’t take the Jew out of the boy. I’m attracted to Jesus the Jew, not the wispy, ethereal, gentle-faced guy with his two fingers in the air whom Christians have invented and put into centuries of European paintings. The Jewish Jesus emerged amid revolution, violence and strife. He walked into the center of all the clashing authority structures and he overturned them all. The Jewish Jesus was a total badass.”
In this view, to be Jewish is not to reject the heresy of Christianity, nor to study Jewish texts, nor to observe Jewish law, nor to meet one’s obligations by giving charity or attending shiva for mourners or fasting on Yom Kippur or celebrating, at Passover, the exodus from slavery.
No, to be Jewish is to engage in a sort of rough-hewn badassery. To be authentic. To keep it real. To believe in Christianity without leaving behind one’s Jewish style. This is the Jews-for-Jesus temptation in a nutshell: Worship Christ, but in a Jewish way.
Besides the messianic-Jewish messaging, there is another lineage to this sort of writing, and that is the Romantic version of religion catalogued in 1902 by William James, in “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (which Brooks cites). This is the contention that all religions are more or less the same, or at least aiming at the same thing, some profound metaphysical reality that we all see, if through a glass darkly (to crib from the New Testament, cribbing from the Talmud).
Any differences that we may perceive, any suggestion that the Jew believes something different from the Muslim, or the Latter-day Saint from the Catholic, is just a kind of religious immaturity, a clinging to ethnic or religious chauvinism.
The logical consequence of this kind of thinking is, ironically, the vague, buffet-style spirituality that Brooks used to be so good at skewering, in books like “Bobos in Paradise.” If you can be Jewish and Christian at the same time, presumably you can be Wiccan too, and also Sufi, and also … well, one can go on.
And for the individual, there is no great risk to being all these things at once (aside from unfortunate bumper stickers). It’s a low-commitment lifestyle made up of, to quote Brooks, “the Free to Be You and Me mentality, the whole New Age panoply, which at heart is spirituality without obligation.”3
But obligation is the heart of the matter. The difference between religion and spirituality is that the former comes with obligation, to practices and to people. Judaism is not “a total badass style” — it’s the promise that if someone in your synagogue community dies, you will attend the shiva, bringing food or just your presence.
One reason to be there is so the mourners can say the Mourners’ Kaddish, which one is obligated to say in a quorum of 10 adult Jews. Obligation upon obligation.
It’s not that every Jew takes on every obligation, nor that every Jew feels obligated by Jewish law. Some feel obligated in other ways, like wearing a Jewish star to proclaim solidarity. Or simply continuing to say “I am Jewish” despite not being observant. We Jews can fight ad nauseum, and do, about what it means to do it right, to be authentic.
And I favor the biggest possible tent for these conversations, with room for the maximal number of Jewish voices. But those voices should take Judaism seriously, as something more than a pocket square, a spritz of cologne, or a repertoire of allusions to dead rabbis.
“Today, I feel more Jewish than ever, but as I once told some friends, I can’t unread Matthew,” Brooks writes. Guess what? I too feel more Jewish than ever, and I too can’t unread Matthew! But that doesn’t make me a Christian. Belief in the resurrection, and baptism, would. And if it ever comes to that, I’ll stop saying I’m Jewish.
Halakhically, according to Jewish law, I will always be a Jew, because of who my parents are. But it would feel suspect, and misleading, to keep insisting on it.
A Jew who has apostatized is not a Jew in good standing; he would not get called to the Torah in synagogue, would not get counted in the minyan. These distinctions might not matter to Brooks, who is a Christian, but they matter to Jews, and he should respect that they do.
The job of journalists is to report true things. And what is true for Brooks seems to be, “I lived as a Jew for a long time. Now I’m a Christian, because it’s true, completely true, in ways that Judaism is not.”
He should write that.
Merry Christmas.
Jewish law
Yiddish for weak, pathetic; (of a place or gathering) lacking in activity
Brooks, David. “Bobos in Paradise.” Simon & Schuster.
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Brooks wants his cake and eat it too. If you believe in the divinity of Jesus you are no longer a practicing Jew, you are a practicing Christian. Period. You may have Jewish genetic roots, as many of my friends are finding out through 23 and Me, but it does not mean you are part of Am Yisrael. Brooks has chosen to leave Judaism. That is of course his choice. He should grow up and admit it. But then again if he did that he couldn't Jew-wash his opinions on Israel, could he?
David Brooks is a mshumad an apostate to the Jewish faith and should be viewed as someone with no authority to speak on anything relating to Jewish tradition