For many Jews, the High Holidays are an annual encounter with a question they spend much of the rest of the year avoiding: Why have a religious life at all? 

These Jews may not be regular synagogue-goers, or particularly sure what they believe, but for a few days each autumn they sit in a sanctuary, open a prayer book and wonder whether they should bother with any of it — especially if they find belief in God difficult, or question why they should believe in the first place.

Rabbi Noa Kushner has a provocative suggestion for those Jews: Stop asking whether you believe in God. Instead, pretend you believe in God, and see what happens. 

In her new book, “Pretend You Believe: How to Enter Religion,” Kushner asks readers to bracket their doubts long enough to enter the religious world on its own terms. The goal of “chosen naivete,” she writes, is to “make a dent in your unspoken assumption that religion is vapid, useless, at best decorative, and at worst dangerous and destructive.”

But her idea is not “fake it ‘til you make it.” Her book argues against one of the most familiar ways contemporary Jews talk about religion: as a means to an end, something they do because it gives them community, makes them more ethical, and helps them grow or otherwise improves their lives. 

Kushner considers this a “consumer mentality,” and too close to self-help, which she explicitly rejects. “If we always start and end with our personal responsibility and perspective and never with the tradition’s” perspective, she writes, “then the system simply buckles.”

That is the radical claim of “Pretend You Believe”: Judaism is not ultimately a technology for making better people. Ethics matters enormously, Kushner argues, but it cannot be the ultimate purpose of religion. As she puts it in the book, Judaism exists “for the sake of God. To have another end, even one as well regarded and critical as our ethical behavior, is to misunderstand the religious project and our role in it.”

Kushner is the founding rabbi of The Kitchen, an independent Jewish congregation and institute in San Francisco that she launched in 2011. The Kitchen has become known for its embrace of Jewish prayer, ritual and tradition, as well as for bringing Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions together. Ordained at Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary, she studied religion at Brown and served as a Hillel rabbi at Stanford. Kushner, 56, is the daughter of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, the prominent Reform rabbi and author.

I spoke with Kushner in the week before Yom Kippur about God, doubt, the limits of self-help, and what she hopes happens when skeptics decide, at least temporarily, to pretend they believe.

Full confession here: I’m a regular synagogue-goer. Judaism is probably the center of my life, personally and professionally. But when I talk about why I do what I do, my answers are invariably........

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