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The other day my two year old, Louie, said something to his grandmother in Hebrew that she explained to me was pretty much untranslatable into English. And I was delighted. For this seemed to me an indication that he wasn鈥檛 learning Hebrew by translating words over from the English - as I am clumsily trying to do. Instead, and mostly from his mother and out skateboarding with his cousins, he was learning Hebrew in its own terms and, as it were, from the ground up.

And the same seems true about his nascent understanding of the different religious traditions with which he is surrounded. As the child of a priest, he hangs around church enough to pick up quite a lot of the grammar of Christianity. But he鈥檚 also Jewish, and so here in Israel, where we鈥檝e been living with my wife鈥檚 family over the past few months, Louie has been exposed to all the recent religious festivals - Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and now, Sukkot. Over the weekend he was helping his mum decorate our newly erected Sukkah, and learning about how these distinctive shelters remind Jews of the story of when they were living in temporary accommodation whilst wandering in the desert after the Exodus.

And I鈥檓 delighted Louie is becoming as bi-lingual about religion as he is with language. Because one of the great mistakes often made when thinking about religion is to presume that religions are easily translatable into categories recognised by another. And that鈥檚 simply not the case.

The distinguished Talmudic scholar Daniel Boyarin, for example, explains that when the British conquered India they assumed that the religious practices they encountered there would operate on roughly the same basic pattern as the religion they grew up with 鈥� that it would have a central canonical text, that it would be administered by a hierarchical religious authority, that it would involve certain core/doctrinal beliefs and so on. After all, that鈥檚 what religion looks like, right? Well no, not necessarily. As Boyarin claims, the people who lived in India didn鈥檛 think of what they did as - quote unquote - 鈥渞eligion鈥� until the British explained to them that it was one. In other words, even a term as so seemingly basic as religion can be loaded with cultural assumptions that reflect what has been the dominant world-view 鈥� i.e. that of Christianity.

The great thing about experiencing different traditions as young as Louie is that these dominant assumptions are not pre-loaded into the way he experiences reality. So whereas I, inevitably, experience Judaism through my own Christianity, my children operate under no such restriction. And it is a joy to watch them participate without projection and without anxiety. Louie treats religion like he treats skateboarding. He鈥檚 not interested in how it works in theory. So whilst his Dad is labouring away on sabbatical trying to figure out the knotty complexities of Jewish/Christian theology, Louie just gets on and does it. And he makes the whole thing look so easy.

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