Mrs. Michaelson (who, in a shrewd bow to Midwestern customs, is called Mrs. Michaelson throughout the book), is in every way a typical Michigander. Sheltered and suggestible, she has carted Jeremy and her husband on the Millennium Marathon 2000 mission in the hope that the Holy Land will inspire some vaguely conceived transformation in them. She hopes that the trip will help Jeremy, who may or may not have tried to kill himself a few months earlier, find happiness through faith and family, and perhaps miraculously erase the emotional distance between her husband and herself. But, in cruel yet revealing blows to her illusions, Mr. Michaelson flies home early, Jeremy keeps disappearing to cruise Arab boys in Independence Park, and Mrs. Michaelson discovers she can’t resist the advances of Rabbi Sherman, the aforementioned hirsute letch.

Jeremy’s cruising isn’t casual. It’s desperate. He’s searching for his own version of salvation—something akin to obliteration—through sex and drink and drugs. What he finds instead is a deaf Palestinian boy named George who leads him out of fear and self-loathing, across the Israeli-Arab divide, toward a bedroom where he discovers more compassion and love than has existed in any of the dogmas he’s been offered. What he finds is a human being to care about—the first viable alternative to self-destruction he’s been offered in his adult life. This being Israel, he also finds himself in an explosive political situation that will require both his mother and him to do that thing that’s so hard for people to do: change. For this they will need more than belief can offer.

That Aaron Hamburger takes on issues of Jewish and gay identity at all is not, in itself, notable. What’s notable is that he does so in such a hard-nosed way. American literature is presently full of Jewish and gay stories, but most of them are pander to the sentimental, presenting Jews and gay men as they wish to be, noble and kind and heroic, rather than as people with complicated, often contradictory and sometimes problematic personalities. Most current fiction that takes on cultural identity is in the business of pandering, of catering to the myths people want to believe about themselves. This book is a tonic to that sort of easy uplift. It’s a book about being Jewish that is in no way pious. It’s a book full of characters who might be gay but who are defined by more than just their sexuality. It's, at root, simply a book about people—people searching for God and disliking all the ways they've been allowed to carry out that search, a book about the difficult path toward faith.

Belief might provide solace in times of fear, but to have faith demands courage. Faith doesn’t allow sentimental piety; it demands a recognition of the limits of knowledge and then demands more: the will to engage the world, even though it will forever remain uncertain. Let’s call that grace. By the end of Faith for Beginners, both Helen and Jeremy Michaelson have taken their first steps toward attaining this grace and Aaron Hamburger prods at least this reader toward renewed faith in the continued possibility for complex fiction, even in our current pious and self-congratulatory age.

[1]       2 Image: Andy Alpern

Joshua Furst is fiction editor of Zeek.

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