Review - Caplin - Confessions

Book Review:

Sarahbeth Caplin’s

Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

 

Sarahbeth Caplin’s book Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter is a memoir describing her journey from being a young Jewish girl, to a spiritually interested teen seriously pursuing the vocation of rabbi to a college student who experiences a gradual conversion to an Evangelical form of Christianity. The book is easy to read, tells an intriguing story, and also encourages us to think about a number of life’s issues.

It seems to me that a good memoir shares characteristics of all good narrative literature. Ideas may be presented in an unfolding narrative story, but ideas should flow from the stories themselves and not be an interruption to the story being told. I believe the author did that well. Her story is one that by its nature presents thoughts and ideas but she does not belabor her points, simply presents a statement fitting to the story’s context and moves on to the next event and tells her story. I admire that in good writing because I studied history and philosophy and virtually everything I write ends up taking the shape of an essay. I am an ideas sort of person and there are plenty of ideas expressed in this book but they are always part of a context rooted in the narrative of her memoir.

We readers get to take a journey that begins in a little girl’s life within a Jewish family in a predominately Catholic suburb. She describes her friends, some who become life-long and some that lead to heart break as temporary friendships. We journey along as a girl gets her first kiss. She describes how her spiritual desire begins to become a more prominent part of her life following her bat mitzvah. Along the way we begin to get a feel for her story as we face with her joy, pain, sorrow and change.

I started reading this book imagining how I would learn from her because of the diversity between her background and my own. But I discovered that I may have learned as much from her in regards to things in life that we shared in common. We both experienced a “coming to faith in Jesus” story and as I read her story it seemed to remind me of my own experience and actually she described it sometimes better than I had understood my experience. So yes I learned from diversity but I also learned from similarity.

Conversion stories can be framed around how one was delivered from a horribly empty life and discovered the one story that could make life worth living. Sometimes the one telling such a story is telling the honest truth. But this book does not present that sort of story. This book tells the story of someone who experienced a decent life in a decent community in a decent faith community but discovered one day that despite all she had there was this intriguing story of the life of Jesus to which she was deeply attracted. She describes aspects of this on page 100 of her book, where she has written:

 “While it is far more difficult to explain why Judaism is lost without Christianity, there is a whole world of reasons why Christians would be lost without Judaism – reasons I never discovered until I actually became one. Christians everywhere are in awe of Jesus the Savior, but first and foremost, I am inspired by Jesus the Jew. Jesus without Judaism is no Jesus at all.” This is not a person who rejected the community and the faith in which she grew up. Rather, she is someone who discovered a calling in this Jesus she discovered.

Caplin points out at times that she left some things behind in Judaism which she wishes she could have brought with her into the Christianity in which she entered. She especially misses how in Judaism there was a general expectation that even believers would experience doubt and ask difficult questions. But within Evangelicalism an expression of a lack of certainty, or asking of difficult questions might lead a person to be viewed with suspicion or as a dangerous influence to the spiritual community.

I suspect that my boomer generation of Christians contributed much of that to Evangelicalism. My generation was a generation that yearned for certainty and security in our faith. We tended to gravitate to answers giving us such certainty and when such answers were threatened by someone scratching at the surface with unanswered questions it could upset us more than we wished to admit. Evangelicalism will likely have to change because many of the millennial generation don’t mind questions or lack of certainty in their exploration of faith. They do not crave certainty to the same degree my generation did. They desire wholeness, integrity and authenticity. Evangelicalism in my opinion will either learn to give space to those with questions and doubts or will lose its ability to be relevant to a generation more willing to question and doubt than to let go of their sense of living a life lived in unified wholeness.

This book was not written to teach us what we need to know about ministering to Jewish people. It was written so that one woman, Sarahbeth Caplin, could tell us her story of her journey to faith in this person we know as Jesus. That as it turns out is a wonderful story that I hope is read by many other people. Along the way of my reading it I discovered jewels of thoughts that ministered to me and even to my worldview. But those are stories I will tell in a follow-up blog. For now let me simply hope others will enjoy Sarahbeth Caplin’s story entitled Confessions of a Prodigal Daughter as much as I have.