Rabbi Noa Kushner

Insightful, wise and inviting, Pretend You Believe teaches that belief, like love, has to be experienced to be understood. Rabbi Kushner helps us ‘try on’ a religious worldview, to see through the eyes of our ancestors and reorient away from competition and toward the ultimate, unknowable mystery of God. Let yourself be surprised by what you discover with Rabbi Kushner as your guide.

Casper ter Kuile, author of The Power of Ritual

Pretend You Believe offers an invitation into faith and ritual practice that both skeptics and seekers didn’t know they needed. Noa Kushner is such a brilliant and funny storyteller that I almost didn’t notice how she was challenging the way I think about the deepest questions of religious belief and practice. I loved this book and found wisdom on every page.

Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, New York Times bestselling author of Heart of a Stranger

How to Enter Religion

Many of us long for spiritual connection, only to run up against confusion, discomfort and sometimes even aversion to organised religion. Noa Kushner understands this well. As the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, a progressive, experimental Jewish congregation, she has guided 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 transformational picture of religion for the moments in life when we yearn to transcend our self-imposed limits. She proposes that we treat religion, at first, not as something we believe but as something we do, so we can pursue the profound questions that perspective unfolds. How does prayer work? How do religious traditions evolve? What is the relationship between religion and ethics? And most of all, why should we be religious? 
 
Through luminous storytelling from the Torah, Jewish fable and her own life, Kushner crafts an elegant, persuasive case for religious community not only as an antidote to our society's corrosive obsession with status, but also a fundamental good in and of itself. Written in a Jewish idiom, but open to readers of all backgrounds, Pretend You Believe is a powerful meditation on God, responsibility, doubt, progress, justice, love, forgiveness, joy and more. With this book, Kushner has captured the wonder of religious feeling and inscribed an invitation to readers everywhere.

Pretend You Believe

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Rabbi Noa Kushner

Praise for Pretend You Believe

Insightful, wise and inviting, Pretend You Believe teaches that belief, like love, has to be experienced to be understood. Rabbi Kushner helps us ‘try on’ a religious worldview, to see through the eyes of our ...

Pretend You Believe offers an invitation into faith and ritual practice that both skeptics and seekers didn’t know they needed. Noa Kushner is such a brilliant and funny storyteller that I almost didn’t notic ...

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