I just returned from a delightful lunch in Austin with a young woman who is helping me revise my memoir which chronicles our family’s fifteen year adventure in Charismatic Christianity. How’s that for an opening sentence?

As I watch our newly formed Reform fellowship implode because of back-biting, power grabbing and the ignoring of Jewish guidelines on how we should
resolve conflicts, I wonder anew at the sad condition of liberal Judaism in my home town.

Looking for spirituality in all the wrong places? It is amazing to me that so few Jewish people that I know factor in prayer as part of their daily life experience. Their confidence in their own abilities to solve problems and live a successful life is boundless.

Of course, that is what we have been taught in liberal congregations where the spiritual leaders also function without a conscious touch from the Divine. Though we say we are worshipping God in our services, truth be told, we have no belief in the God of the prayer book or the Hebrew Bible and thus, do not expect any intervention in our life’s path.