PORTRAIT OF YAHWEH AS A YOUNG GOD

Sometimes God isn't very easy to like, even though one may love him wholeheartedly. Miss Wets-Schon's book is devoted to explaining not how to solve that dilemma, but how to avoid it--""how to get along with a God you don't necessarily like but can't help loving."" The key, of course, as the author amply demonstrates, is to be able to keep one's sense of humor in dealing with God, to be able to laugh at his apparent foibles as readily as one does at those of a human whom one loves. Thus, one comes to accept what appears to be divine whim and arbitrariness (not to say cruelty and injustice) as the amusing (because, at least to human intelligence, incongruous) exercise of the divine prerogatives of omnipotence, ubiquity, etc. The moral: just because something doesn't make sense to you doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to God. Miss Wels-Schon doesn't say anything new, of course, but what she does say is said in such a delightfully new, clever and engaging way that Portrait will undoubtedly become a little classic in that emerging genre, theology-with-a-smile. It is for everyone, Christian and Jew.