No piece I have ever written generated as much feedback as my essay replying to David Brooks’s “The Shock of Faith.” It turns out that writing about Brooks touches many nerves, not just the ones I might have expected to touch; I got multiple emails from people angry about Brooks’s columns from a decade ago, delighted to have a fellow Brooks critic to vent to. It’s an honor to publish five very smart critiques of my piece, by thinkers I have long admired: Josh Feigelson, Susannah Heschel, Shaul Magid, Jay Michaelson, and Lauren F. Winner. For the most part, I am happy to let their critiques, which have taught me so much, stand. But on specific points, for the sake of the conversation—machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of heaven—I’ll push back.
First, as a preamble, let me re-state that I don’t care what religion Brooks identifies with. It’s not my business. If he showed up at my synagogue and wanted to be counted as a Jew, I would not question him. I go on the honor system; you tell me you’re Jewish, Native American, left-handed, vegan, whatever, I’ll take your word for it. You do you. I’m not checking foreskins. I’m not “policing” Brooks’s identity, as several correspondents accused me of.
Rather, as I wrote in my original piece: “Ultimately, Brooks’s religious identity should not matter to anyone but himself (and his Creator, he might add)…. The problem, however, is that he is not writing as a mere Christian; often, he is writing as a conflicted Jew. And in doing so, he keeps getting Judaism very wrong. The more Brooks writes, the more it becomes clear that he is not particularly interested in Judaism, except as some sort of nostalgia trip, familial obligation, or cover for his own discomfort at having left it behind. He should stop writing about Judaism, now.”
A number of readers were troubled by my insistence that Brooks “should stop writing about Judaism”; who was I to decide what topics a writer may choose? I am sensitive to this critique, because I passionately believe that no writer has to “stay in their lane,” to use a stupid phrase. Straight people may write about queer people, black people about white people, men about women, the native-born about immigrants, and so forth. Indeed, as I read Shaul Magid’s catalogue of Jews interested in Christianity, and vice versa, I had the self-serving thought, “Hey, I should be on that list!” My graduate studies were in American Protestant history, with a heavy dose of Christian philosophy (for the philosophy nerds among you, I got deep into Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston). I have spent most of my career writing about Christians. If there were a Jeopardy! category called “Obscure Protestant Denominations,” I’d crush it. It is not the case that, as Magid writes, “Oppenheimer is … asserting that there is no affinity whatsoever between Judaism and Christianity.” There’s affinity, big-time.
But when I make generalizations about any group, I try to do the research and get the facts right—and not just the facts, but the mood, the tone. And I don’t think Brooks did. In other words, I am criticizing Brooks not as a Jew, but as a writer. As a writer, he should be more precise. As a writer, he should be more candid. As a writer, he should do better.
Let me illustrate my point by turning to Jay Michaelson’s defense of Brooks. Michaelson writes: “Brooks didn’t say he believes in the New Testament…. [T]he rest of the essay isn’t about belief in the resurrection or baptism of Christ…. It’s about finding inspiration in Christian as well as Jewish sources, going to church (again: not belief), and wrestling with some of the tensions between these two traditions.” I think this is a misunderstanding of Brooks, one for which Brooks, with his deliberate vagueness—bad writing—is responsible. For as Brooks writes, “The process [of becoming a man of faith] felt more like an inspiration, as though someone had breathed life into those old biblical stories so that they now appeared true.”
“So that they now appeared true”— Brooks’s “appeared” notwithstanding, I take that phrase to imply that he now believes that they are true. That the miracles Jesus performed, the walking on water and the resurrecting of Lazarus from the dead, happened. That Jesus’ resurrection happened. In my piece, I also pointed out that Brooks told a Christian audience, in 2022, that the Christian stories, for him, at some point “went from beautiful to true.” Now, I am well aware that there is a rich debate in religious studies and theology about what “true” is; he could mean “true” in a way that doesn’t mean “literally true.” But come on!
This kind of confusion—over whether Brooks believes in Christianity, or just takes solace in, and inspiration from, its teachings—could be resolved if Brooks came out and said, explicitly, what his faith consists of. Does he believe Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected as part of a triune God? And if so, has Brooks been baptized? Does he take communion? These are questions that he raises, by virtue of his own writing, and he never gives clear answers to. He commits what, to me, is an author’s cardinal sin: he plays coy with his readers. Our job is to be as clear as possible, and to anticipate readers’ questions and answer them. The fact that some smart, curious people are having debates over what Brooks really means shows that he has not done his job. He has failed—not as a Jew, but as a writer.
I am criticizing Brooks not as a Jew, but as a writer. As a writer, he should be more precise. As a writer, he should be more candid. As a writer, he should do better.
My old friend Lauren F. Winner writes that I was unfair to Christianity, which need not demean Judaism as insufficient in the way I described. According to her Christianity, Judaism is indeed “‘sufficient’—sufficient for the repair of a damaged world, which is the same thing Christianity is sufficient for.” What’s more, “everything Jews do as Jews is an exchange of intimacy with the God who is in covenantal relationship with them.” I couldn’t agree more. And yet: if it’s true, as she believes, that Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected, would I not be better off realizing as much? Does she not believe that David Brooks, on this point, has realized something I, and all my fellow Jews, would do well to realize, too? And is my soul not at risk if, having been offered this knowledge, I harden my heart to it?
I am aware that Christianity has had a searching, profound, well-meaning debate over these questions, one that gained vigor after World War II and has never let up. Many Christians believe that there is a special place for Jews in God’s plan, that Judaism and Christianity are complementary traditions, that neither has to vanquish the other. I’ve read some of this work, and I understand its internal logic.
And yet…
Here I’d like to turn to the work of the late philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003) and his concept of “one thought too many.” Briefly summed up, Williams offered this thought experiment: There has been a shipwreck. Two people are drowning, and a third person, a man, is in a position to save one of them. One of the people drowning is his wife. Is the man permitted to choose to save his wife? Many philosophers, Williams suggests, would have the man, in deciding whom to save, turn to philosophical theories: the man might consider the Kantian categorical imperative, then weigh it against a utilitarian point of view, wondering whether saving the wife or the other person would create more happiness. But the whole debate, Williams argued, is misguided: any normal, sane human would recognize that, as between saving your spouse and somebody you don’t know, you save your spouse. Any debate over the matter is misguided, weird, monstrous. (For more on “one thought too many,” see Susan Wolf’s article, Nicholas Smyth’s, or this quick summation by Pranay Sanklecha).
I’d like to take Williams’s insight in another direction. One way of restating his argument (although I don’t think Williams ever put it this way) is that there is a certain kind of misguided argument that only an intellectual could make. Only a philosopher could even wonder whether to save your wife or a stranger; a normal person, working with normal common sense, does not think there is a debate to be had. In reading the defenses of Brooks’s “whole shebang” theology, I thought to myself, “these guys are having one thought too many.”
Thinkers like Michaelson and Magid, with their professional (and personal) interests in syncretism, mysticism, and so forth, have ways of explaining how someone can be Jewish and Christian, and much more besides, at the same time. But try asking your average jamoke on the street, “Can you be Jewish and Christian at the same time?,” and he’ll answer, “What are you smoking?” Because it’s the kind of strange, counterintuitive, obviously wrong thought that only an intellectual can have. The intellectual can take a plain insight—that the two religions have diverged, have separate theologies, have separate practices, and live as distinct communities—and have one thought about it too many.
Now, I enjoy those thoughts too many, the debates that push beyond everyday understanding, taking an argument to its limits and asking, “What if?” I am also aware, with Magid, that at all points in the past two millennia a quirky, eccentric minority have been having such debates—Brooks is not the first. And I am aware that the ranks of religious seekers, drawing on multiple traditions, are growing. But Brooks nevertheless is writing as if he is not denying the lived reality of millions of people, not just Jews but Christians, who experience the traditions as different. He does not acknowledge that any attempt to merge or synthesize the traditions will trouble people, for understandable reasons.
I got dozens of emails from Jews (and some Christians) expressing a profound sense of hurt caused by Brooks’s column. Some found it disrespectful, because he quoted important sources sloppily. Others found it willfully obtuse, oblivious to how it would come across (as the work of a Christian, milking Jewish heritage for street cred). And others still were in my camp: they felt disrespected as readers, by an author as muddled in describing his Christianity as in describing his Judaism. He is intentionally (I believe) vague in characterizing the content of his Christian faith, raising questions that he does not answer; and he reduces Jewishness to clichés like “the sight of a rabbi laughing uproariously” and the “badass” Jewish Jesus.
As I wrote at the end of my essay, “The job of journalists is to report true things.” And I think Brooks is not being fully truthful about his Christianity, or about the Judaism he left behind. The reason Brooks shouldn’t write about Judaism (or write “as a Jew”) isn’t because he is a Christian. Nor is it because he forgot to get a permission slip from me. No, the reason he shouldn’t write about Judaism is the same reason I shouldn’t write about iguanas, bulgur wheat, or Millard Fillmore: I would do it badly, in ways that would rightly offend those who take the topic seriously.