Leila Sales: If You Don't Have Anything to Say

 Leila Sales’ book, If You Don’t Have Anything to Say (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), was seriously considered for the Sydney Taylor Book Award, according to Book Award Committee Chairwoman Rebecca Levitan, although it was not a winner. I think the book is outstanding and important. Its portrayal of an innocent, albeit foolish, mistake, how it destroyed lives, and how the perpetrator learned from the mistake, is timely and, I fear, accurate. 

Politics and Religion

The book review journal Kirkus Reviews is critical of the book because it reflects the experience of a young adult in an ordinary high school, and the main character “never demonstrates a true shift toward understanding microaggressions, systemic racism, and white privilege.” Those seeking a reasonable approach to online shaming and cancel culture in a Young Adult novel, instead of a polemic, should take the Kirkus review as the highest praise.

However, its Jewish content was in my eyes not only limited but misleading.

Jewish Prayer

We read several times that Winter Halperin, the protagonist, attended a Jewish elementary school. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are mentioned in passing, as is the low percentage of Americans who are Jewish. But the only passage I found that includes anything about what Judaism means is the following (p. 142 of 259 in the Nook ebook), which occurs at a residential rehabilitation program for people who have made foolish mistakes like Winter’s:

…praying was not optional, and that was weird; weirder still was the fact that they really did not seem to care what kind of prayer we were doing, to what kind of god, if any. There was a wide selection of prayer books from various faiths, and we could each take whichever one we wanted and pray silently to ourselves—or, in the case of Zeke, just sit still and meditate.

This was so far off not only from my religious practices but even from how Judaism was supposed to work that I could not for the life of me understand it. (emphasis mine)

Prayer, including silent (actually very softly whispered) daily prayer, is extremely important in traditional Judaism—the only kind of Jewish practice that is expanding in numbers in the United States, according to a 2015 Pew Research report. 

Unhappily, I believe that this book gives an accurate portrayal of a common Jewish experience in America. But I think it is unfortunate that the author did not qualify her statement about prayer by limiting it to her branch of Judaism since it clearly is not true of traditional Judaism. 

Where are Jewish Ethics?

The larger problem for me is that this book will be read by many Jews with little Jewish background and by many non-Jews who will come away with the mistaken idea that prayer and ethics have no place in Judaism. Nowhere are mentioned lessons on ethics that one hopes a child at a Jewish day school will learn, or that will be heard in a synagogue or temple sermon. This book is about ethics as much as it is about internet shaming, but the Jewish voice is silent.

I strongly recommend this book to teens. It is a book worth reading and worth discussing with others. But that an excellent, thought-provoking book about a Jewish character who is struggling with an ethical issue should provide no information about Jewish beliefs and ethics saddens me. If all the Jewish references were changed to reflect a Roman Catholic or atheistic experience, nothing else in the book would have to be changed. And I find that sad.