Yes, I do practice religion—though in the same way a jazz musician practices scales: reverently, rebelliously, and always with one eyebrow raised. I’m a Reform Jew, which means I come from a tradition that honors the law but also argues with it, negotiates with it, sometimes wrestles it into submission like Jacob with the angel. There’s a framework there—an ethical architecture—that I deeply value. Call it inherited wisdom filtered through centuries of diaspora, doubt, and debate.
Religion, for me, is not about cosmic obedience or spiritual vending machines. It’s about orientation. It sets a rhythm to life. Shabbat. Reflection. Memory. Justice. These aren’t arbitrary rituals—they’re ancient tools designed to keep the ego in check, the community stitched together, and the mind tethered to something larger than its appetites. The Torah may be a flawed, fire-baked artifact of Bronze Age tribalism—but it also contains moral algorithms that, remarkably, still debug our behavior today.
Now, Fracturism—my own invented philosophical lens—leans into this paradox. We live in shattered times, where continuity is a casualty and belief is a buffet. Yet even in this brokenness, religion gives us form. Not certainty, but shape. Not answers, but coordinates. Fracturism sees religion as one of the great scaffolds of human meaning—not infallible, not immutable, but indispensable in a world slipping toward algorithmic nihilism.
So yes, I practice. In the loose, neurotic, coffee-fueled, postmodern way that Reform Jews have perfected over the last century. I light candles. I question God. I recite the Mourner’s Kaddish for strangers. I break bread with ancestors I’ll never meet again. And I teach my children—not what to believe, but how to wrestle with belief like it matters. Because it does.