God

Oops. Not only did I go on a blogging hiatus (thanks to pre-vacation, vacation and post-vacation distractions), but I did so after writing about mine and Ellie’s God problem. Hopefully, attentive readers didn’t conclude that, despairing of God’s goodness, I’d decided to give up writing for The Jewish Week.

Of course some might have been hoping I did exactly that. Like “SG,” a gentleman whose e-mail greeted me upon my return from vacation (a lakefront cottage in Maine, in case you were wondering):

My 8-year-old daughter and I are having a little bit of a God problem lately.

It’s not that we’re unsure whether or not to believe in him; I’m satisfied with leaving it unresolved by being agnostic, and Ellie’s OK with that as well.
It’s not even the “why do bad things happen to good people” issue, because, while the world is outrageously unfair, I don’t think God, if he exists, is micro-managing the daily lives of the world’s almost seven billion people.

When the Ron Rosenbaum was researching his upcoming biography of Bob Dylan—to be published as part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives Series—he came across an obscure quote. In the mid-‘60s Dylan had written an experimental novel almost impossible to read. But being a diligent journalist, Rosenbaum muscled through the novel (“Tarantula”) and found a poem that included these lines: “hitler did not change / history. hitler WAS history.”

That was all he needed to stake a provocative new interpretation of Dylan. 

In the latest round of the Religion Vs. Science Wars, religion comes out punching. 

In case you missed it, The New York Times snagged a quick but worthy Q&A with Woody Allen today, a week before his new film comes out.  Allen told the Times' Dave Itzkoff that his film, titled "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and featuring Josh Brolin, Naomi Watts and Anthony Hopkins, was his way of exploring the nature of belief.