I started writing this post the day after Yom Kippur, which I spent Zooming services from my favorite virtual synagogue family, New York City’s Romemu congregation.

It was profoundly emotional for me, for reasons I’ll soon make clear.

First understand that I’m all for profound emotions. I believe being in touch with one’s deepest feelings spurs emotional maturity. But there was also a downside. The various post ideas I had contemplated doing lost all immediacy.

Why, I thought, write yet another post detailing news coverage of China’s miserable treatment of it’s ethnic religious minorities? Or coverage of how insular religious communities — such as ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel and New York — still refuse to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, causing its spread in their midst?

Perhaps the unnerving knowledge that, as I sat down to write, the first 2020 American presidential campaign debate was just hours away also colored my mood. (And how godawful did that, unsurprisingly, turn out to be?)

Then there was my agitation over a loved one who is fighting debilitating physical pain, daily, resulting from a life-threatening disease. Couple that with the soul-crushing realization that there’s nothing I can do about it.

So I fell into an emotional maelstrom. I needed more uplifting post material. And then I found this story by way of The Washington Post. Its headline read: “A Nigerian boy was sentenced to 10 years for blasphemy. Then people started offering to serve part of it.”

I grabbed it. A news story spotlighting compassionate people — of indeterminate faith — jointly working to make lemonade out of the most sour of religious lemons offered hope. Here’s the story’s top, which is long, but essential:

DAKAR, Senegal — After a religious court in northwest Nigeria sentenced a 13-year-old boy to 10 years in prison for blasphemy, the head of the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland publicly offered to serve part of that time, invoking the memory of the Holocaust's youngest victims.
The Polish historian said he received dozens of emails over the weekend from people around the world who wanted to do the same thing.

For High Holy Days coverage, consider a look at major Jewish thinker -- Leon Kass

If you’re scouting for a feature pegged to Judaism’s High Holy Days that begin at sundown Sept. 9, consider a high-end piece profiling what they used to call a “public intellectual,” now often thought to be a dying breed.

The Religion Guy is thinking of Jewish philosopher Leon R. Kass and his recent book “Leading a Worthy Life: Finding Meaning in Modern Times” (Encounter), certainly a timely Holy Days theme. These essays are lauded in National Review as “a crowning achievement” that caps this polymath’s decades of reflection. Topics include love and courtship, friendship, the Internet, biotechnology and scientific peril, death and mercy-killing, and of course religion.

The 72-year-old retiree long taught at the University of Chicago’s elite Committee on Social Thought, where he pursued the book’s title mostly through analyzing literary classics. Though he’s not a credentialed Bible scholar, he added years of informal student seminars and then a not-for-credit course on the biblical Book of Genesis. His approach is unorthodox, indeed un-Orthodox.

The result was “The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis” (Free Press, 2003), praised by Kirkus Reviews as “wonderfully intelligent.” Rather than focusing on matters of faith that are central for Bible believers, Kass’s philosophical approach asks us to ponder what ancient Jewish tradition provides for modern-day justice, sanity and contentment. That feeds into his other writings that seek human happiness through recovery of the West’s old-fashioned values and verities.

Kass says he was raised in a Yiddish-speaking but “strictly secular home without contact with scripture.” There’s considerable unexplained turf an interviewer could pursue regarding Kass’s own personal belief and practice, and whether and how the specifically religious aspect of the Jewish heritage might remain relevant in the 21st Century.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) posts a good essay about Kass that can guide journalists. A bit of the basic bio: Kass earned bachelor’s and medical degrees at the University of Chicago, where he met his late wife and intellectual collaborator Amy, and then migrated to Harvard for a second doctorate in biochemistry.