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November 21, 2003/Cheshvan 26 5764, Vol. 56, No. 9
Road trip drives writer to search for God in America
CINDY SHER
JUF News
Growing up on the East Side of Manhattan, Tom Levinson knew the guy who ran his neighborhood deli better than he knew his own rabbi. Sure, Levinson celebrated his bar mitzvah because it was the thing to do, but he knew very little about Judaism.
A history of religion class during his senior year in high school, though, piqued his curiosity and altered the course of his future. The class interested him so much that he became a religion major during college. Though Levinson was fascinated by all religions, including Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism, he found he wanted to delve deeper into Judaism. So much so that this "doubting Thomas," as he labeled his childhood self, even considered becoming a rabbi. Instead, he opted to attend Harvard Divinity School to learn more about other faiths as well as his own.
But Levinson yearned to take his learning outside of the classroom. "I (wanted to) learn how people practice and why people practice," he recalls.
Now 29, Levinson - a second year law student at the University of Chicago - has a new book out called "All That's Holy: A Young Guy, An Old Car, and the Search for God in America" (Jossey-Bass, $23.95). This is the story of Levinson's three-month road trip when he drove his beat-up, old Nissan around the country looking for conversations with people about faith.
His trip took place in the summer and fall of 1999. The world picture was rosier then: the economy was still robust, it was pre-9/11, carnage in Israel and the "new anti-Semitism" had yet to poison the atmosphere, and the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal hadn't yet been revealed.
Age 25 and living in Boston at the time, Levinson traveled the country, going from mosque to chapel to synagogue, conversing with the faithful, seeking to understand their beliefs.
Along the way - in big cities and small towns - he met Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, neo-Pagans, witches, Native Americans and practitioners of voodoo and Transcendental Meditation.
"There was a romantic idea of the road trip," says Levinson. "In America, we love the idea of getting up and going, getting up and driving - Lech l'cha (go)."
Some of Levinson's interviews were planned; others were spontaneous. The first stop along his journey was a halal (set of dietary restrictions for Muslims) market in Dayton, Ohio. He hadn't sought the market out, but had simply spotted the Arabic writing on the storefront. The discovery seemed almost providential to Levinson.
There, he met an Iraqi named Hayder Almosawi, who had fled to southern Ohio with his brothers in 1992 after the first Gulf War.
One of Levinson's most powerful conversations occurred in Raleigh, N.C., with a death-row prisoner nine days before his execution. Convicted of a 1983 double murder, Harvey Lee Green became a born-again Christian while on death row. Levinson's interview with Green took place during the Days of Awe, the reflective 10-day period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The author says he felt power in sharing his Jewishness with this man, "discussing the idea of redemption with a man who faced his own imminent execution."
This was a turning point for Levinson. At the onset of his trip, he classified his project as an oral history of other people's religions. In the end, he realized the story was more autobiographical. Discovering faith in America was intertwined with revealing his own beliefs.
During his journey, Levinson began to face his insecurities of why he needed to take this trip in the first place. "If Jewishness is so much about community," he wondered, "why am I so focused on doing this solo trip and finding community in places that are so distinct and disparate from my own community tradition?"
To Levinson, the trip felt safe. "It felt comfortable professing my questions, my inquisitiveness to people I didn't know, who I didn't have to have an ongoing conversation with," he says.
During his journey, Levinson discovered why he had been raised in such a secular Jewish environment. His relatives - like so many - had fled to America to escape pogroms in Eastern Europe during the early part of the 20th century. When they arrived, they found that as Americans they didn't have to live in the shadow of their faith, a realization that caused them to distance themselves from their Judaism.
"But just as America affords an unprecedented opportunity to leave behind the traditions of your homeland," says Levinson, "it also affords the opportunity to reclaim those traditions." On the road, he seized that opportunity.
Today, Levinson takes his Judaism much more seriously than he did in his earlier years. He and his wife now are members at a Chicago-area synagogue, something Lev-inson hadn't considered before his trip. And on Friday nights, they invite friends over - both non-Jews and Jews along the religious spectrum - to celebrate Shabbat.
Levinson doesn't claim to be an observant Jew but, to him, being Jewish is about balance.
"For American (Jews), there is the idea of holding on to a tradition that's millennia old and living a very contemporary modern life. It's partly about balancing these opposites."
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