I’ve spent most of my adult life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the reigning deity is liberal politics, and in Miami Beach, where the locals worship sun-bronzed physical perfection. Not that there’s anything wrong with either one.
But there came a point — amid an array of midlife disjunctions, including an empty nest, an unraveling relationship and my mother’s terminal illness — when I realized I was feeling a certain spiritual malaise. I had always thought of myself as an agnostic, not an atheist. Still, I’d been completely uninterested in organized religion of any kind. My suburban New Jersey family was what I can only describe as secular Protestant; we didn’t go to church, but my mother had us baptized “just in case.” I had been married for a decade in my 20s to a secular Jew, and my children were raised in that tradition: bageltarians, basically.
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