One thing I always liked most about having been brought up in a conservative Jewish home, was that the religious services I was forced to attend were conducted in Hebrew. Therefore, I was able to sit beside my father for hours, daydreaming and braiding the long tassels of his prayer shawl between my fingers while he mumbled incomprehensible moral precepts in a language I didn’t understand.

This enabled me to grow up guilt-free, since other than the Ten Commandments, I never had the faintest idea of what any of it meant. As far as the Big Ten went, I got the points about stealing, killing and lying with relative ease. The Commandments dealing with God never seemed particularly relevant to me, and as for “coveting,” who knew what “covet” meant anyway? I had never gone down to breakfast and heard either parent tell me not to “covet” my sister’s pink party dress. Nor was adultery a big problem with the pony-tailed pygmies in my Girl Scout troop.

So in a strictly moral sense, my religious upbringing, although time consuming, was intellectually non-intrusive.