Rob Schlaff's Website

I’m writing this for one particular friend, but thought the rest of you might enjoy it.

As an atheist, you probably think of religion like Richard Dawkins. He talks about religion this way. Imagine someone tells you there’s something incredibly important hidden in your backyard. You start digging. When you don’t find anything, they say you’re not digging deep enough. You keep digging. Still nothing appears. Eventually, the hole gets so big and destructive that you’ve ruined the entire yard. Yet you’ve convinced yourself that digging is virtuous.

The problem is that Dawkins views religion in a particular way. He sees it as an end in goal—a claim about what’s literally true about the universe. And a lot of people think of religion that way. But that’s not what religion is, at least not for me.

Here’s my short answer: Religion is a means to an end. What end? The end of being a better person. It’s a framework for asking the right questions about how to live, a way of making the ordinary sacred, and a path toward holiness that neither science nor art alone can provide.

Let me explain.

What God Is (To Me)

As Rabbi Harold Kushner often said, when someone told him they didn’t believe in God, he would ask them to describe the God they didn’t believe in—and usually found he didn’t believe in that God either.

For me, God isn’t a man in the sky who created the world in seven days. I believe in Rabbi Kushner’s God —a God who represents the best of what we can become, who calls us to be better.

You know that old story where several blind men encounter an elephant for the first time? Each touches a different part—one feels the trunk and thinks it’s a snake, another touches the leg and thinks it’s a tree, another feels the ear and thinks it’s a fan. Each has grasped part of the truth, but none can see the whole.

That’s how religion works, because god is literally impossible to fully understand. But it does a good job of helping us grasp at least some of the pieces, like feeling the elephant’s foot here, its trunk there. It’s not God, but a representation of God.

God is the sacred beauty we encounter in the world. It’s the courage that shows up when life gets hard. The kindness we didn’t know we had. It’s the connection I feel to my grandparents, even though they’ve died—that transcendent feeling, that awesome sense of having my grandparents inside me. When I read that God brings life back from the dead, it’s not about resurrection but this amazing ability for our essence to live inside others.

God Is Not Science. God Is More Like Poetry.

I once had a conversation with a wise high school Principal. I asked him what the most important thing for high schools to teach was. I thought the answer was obvious: the ability to read and analyze things, to think critically and move ideas forward. This would help people make money, make good decisions, and be productive members of society.

He had a different answer. He said the most important thing was for kids to read books and understand other people’s points of view—to get inside other people’s heads.

That’s the core difference between Dawkins’s view of the world and mine. Science tells us what we know. Poetry tells us what has meaning. Religion gives us a path toward holiness—a way to get there that neither science nor poetry alone can provide.

Camus wrote that “fiction is the lie that tells the truth.” He meant that fiction helps us build empathy, showing us what it’s like to be someone else. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a “me” as well.

Religion works the same way. The stories may not be literally true—the world wasn’t made in six days, and Noah didn’t actually gather every animal on earth. But these stories are doing something more important than conveying facts. They’re helping us understand how to live, how to connect with each other, how to find meaning.

Just knowing the facts is different from really understanding them. Acquiring wisdom is putting your facts together in the right way. That’s where religion comes in. Religion helps provide a framework and a way of seeing the world that goes beyond the facts. It helps you expand what it means to be a human being.

What Religion Does (That Nothing Else Can)

Religion offers things that neither science nor poetry can. Poetry is still individual. Religion is about groups of people coming together.

One of the most important things religion provides is a framework for the most important lifestage events—births, deaths, marriages, and coming-of-age ceremonies. These are essential to being human, and you really can’t find them anywhere else.

I saw this firsthand at Ari’s bar mitzvah a few months ago. What could have been just another birthday party became something sacred. When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—a holy joy. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.

Harold Kushner sums it up nicely when he says, “The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time. To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.

Religion also carries wisdom that endures. Yes, there are principles and rituals and things that seem silly and traditions we’ve inherited across millennia. You might ask, “Do we really need all of this stuff? Can’t we just keep the stuff that matters?”

The problem is, that as hard as we try to do this, it just doesn’t seem to work very well. Take Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis from 2006. It’s a great book that tries to link the wisdom of the ages with modern psychogy. Even though the book is only 20 years old, the wisdom of the ages stays constant but many of the views in psychology have been upended.

In Judaism, we’re constantly revising and changing and arguing. That’s the core of the religion—the endless debate, the wrestling with text and tradition and each other. It’s not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions, together, and trusting that the tradition carries wisdom even in the parts we don’t fully understand.

What Really Matters

So what do we do? Last year, I was sitting around thinking and remembering those wonderful college days when we would just sit around and have these profound conversations—the kind that stretch late into the night because you never want them to end.

Then one Shabbat, while Abigail and the kids were busy, I went to shul alone. I planned to meditate, reconnect with friends, and recharge. I ran into my friend Joe, and we started talking.

When they kicked us out after lunch to clean up, we kept going on the street. I didn’t want it to end, so I offered to walk him home. “Otherwise you’ll never get there,” I joked.

At his apartment, Joe invited me up for a drink. We talked for hours—exactly the kind of conversation I’d been craving.

We talked about how many people view religion as a burden rather than a benefit. Many people view religion as a burden, something they can only do “when they have time.” They are running around, working, or going to the kids’ soccer game, but they never quite have enough time for religion.

Yet when you really examine it, going to shul matters deeply. These are the things that really matter in life. Religion is about getting closer to God every week—pausing, thinking about becoming a better person, seeing friends, and engaging in the wisdom literature. These are the things that actually matter.

At some point, we both said at the same time, “This is living!” Not excelling at sports or getting a promotion. We’re conditioned to think those activities were more meaningful, but they’re not. This—sitting together, wrestling with big questions, connecting deeply with another person—this is what really matters.

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Ari’s bar mitzvah. Words can’t really capture the feelings I have about it. Watching my son become an adult, surrounded by family and friends—there’s nothing like it. Yes, we had a fun party. But a bar mitzvah is more than that. It’s a spiritual life event.

This transformation—from ordinary celebration to sacred moment—is the heart of Jewish practice. As Rabbi Harold Kushner says in his book To Life!: “Everything in God’s world can be holy if you realize its potential holiness. Everything we do can be transformed into a Sinai experience, an encounter with the sacred. The goal of Judaism is not to teach us how to escape from the profane world to the cleansing presence of God, but to teach us how to bring God into the world, how to take the ordinary and make it holy.”

Ari’s Moment to Shine

First of all, I need to give Ari all the credit in the world. He stood in front of everyone—family, friends, our entire community—and led the service, read Torah, and delivered his d’var Torah with a voice that was loud, clear, and thoughtful. This was his moment, and he owned it.

For his d’var Torah, he worked with our friend Doron. They studied together for many sessions as Ari figured out what he wanted to say. Doron pushed him, as his study partner, to dig deep and find his own meaning. His Torah portion, Nitzavim, was almost impossibly perfect for the occasion. “You are all standing today,” it begins—and there was Ari, literally standing before us, taking responsibility for his own Jewish life. He taught us that the Torah “is not in heaven”—it’s not distant or unreachable, reserved for angels or scholars. It’s here with us, in our mouths and in our hearts, in the way we walk, think, and act.

He illustrated this lesson with his own observation. At Camp Ramah, he noticed that the song during the Torah procession was much faster than at Habonim. At first, he thought it was just a different tradition. Then he realized: at Habonim, you walk all the way around the shul, so you need a longer song. At camp, with a smaller space, the song had to be faster—like how the Jeopardy music is exactly 30 seconds because contestants have 30 seconds to answer.

He owned this whole line of thought—taking the general lesson that we need to adapt Judaism to our context and making it his own, all within the framework of Jewish tradition. He was proud of his thinking, and everyone was impressed. The Cantor even cried. This is the kind of thinking of an adult.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched Ari take responsibility for this work. He studied hard for his Torah portion, showing up week after week to prepare. He volunteered for his mitzvah project, packing care packages and writing cards for American soldiers overseas through an organization honoring Stu Wolfer, a Jewish American soldier killed in Iraq who worked with my wife. As Ari pointed out, real tzedakah costs something—it comes from the prime hours of your day, not just leftover time or money.

Ari’s best moment happened at an unlikely point. The Rabbi made a joke during the service. It was kind of an awkward joke, as he’s a new Rabbi and didn’t know the community that well. In fact, this was his first large event. He said, “I’m going to tell you a secret. You became a bar mitzvah when you turned 13.” Ari, genuinely surprised, did this very physical double-take—hands to his head, “Oh my God, you’ve blown my brain!” The whole crowd cracked up. That humor, that ease in front of everyone, helping the Rabbi co-lead the congregation—it was pure Ari.

The Power of Ritual

What does it mean for a 13-year-old to become a man? He still can’t drink, vote, or drive. But rituals serve a purpose—they take ordinary events and make it holy.

I used to scoff at the idea of birthday parties: “Why celebrate? It’s just another day.” But I’ve realized that a birthday is an opportunity—it’s a vessel, an opportunity you fill with meaning. It becomes a moment for people to focus their energy on you, to make it special.

A bar mitzvah is a birthday party on steroids. It’s one of the few times in life when friends and family will fly across the country to mark an occasion.

When God comes to your party, something shifts. What was merely fun becomes a simcha—joy with purpose. It’s about sanctifying life itself. Everyone came not just to have a good time, but to witness an important milestone: Ari’s sacred transition from boy to man in Jewish tradition.

The Gift of Presence

In addition to having God’s presence, we also had the presence of all the people who came to celebrate. Those who traveled from out of town, those who participated in the service, and even those who simply woke up on a Saturday morning, rolled out of bed, and came to shul.

This collective energy is what fuels a simcha. As William James wrote, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Each person who shows up is making a choice about where to direct their time and attention—and that choice matters.

The pandemic taught me just how much. Suddenly it became easy to “attend” a bar mitzvah or funeral virtually. You could drop in on an event without changing out of pajama pants, maybe playing Angry Birds when things got boring. No travel required, no time lost, no real inconvenience.

But something essential was missing. These virtual gatherings felt hollow, and it wasn’t just the technology’s fault. What makes occasions like these special isn’t the logistics or even the food—it’s that people feed them with something vital: their time.

This is when I finally understood something I’d always dismissed as a cop-out. In the days of the Temple, we gave animal sacrifices. Today, we’re told, the sacrifice we bring is our time. I used to think this was just a convenient excuse for the absence of ritual offerings. But now it makes perfect sense.

Time is the most valuable thing we have. We each have limited time on earth, and how we spend it defines our lives. When people gather to celebrate together, that collective sacrifice creates something sacred. As William James also wrote, “The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”

To really create a wonderful simcha, everyone must give part of their life to it—their presence, their energy, their attention. Each person becomes a contributor to something larger than themselves, breathing life into the celebration until it becomes truly alive with shared joy and purpose.

I went into Ari’s bar mitzvah expecting to feel proud, but I experienced so much more. When my friends and family give their time—the most precious thing they have—to sanctify a moment in Ari’s life, something shifts. I’m not just throwing a party. I’m participating in something ancient and sacred, bringing God into the world one shared moment at a time. No wonder words felt inadequate.