A funny story happened on the way to the library, just not to me.
My sister was loitering near the donated books at the Baruch College library. In the library’s trash pile, next to the donated discount books, she spied a brand-new shrink-wrapped book and went for it. Books are very important to my family, free books even more so.
Salvaging the book from the trash, she finally got a good look at it: An Introduction to Scientology Ethics by L. Ron Hubbard.
“So, that’s why it was in the trash,” she surmised aloud.
And then thanking the Christians and their Easter holiday for the leisure time to look through books even the library would trash, my sister, the former Wiccan, shook her head and returned the book to the trash bin.
Later it would occur to us: one man’s trash is another man’s religion.
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 
This post reminds me of the book that is in a box in my garage while I try to figure out what to do with it. My evangelical Christian cousin sent it to me and my husband. The book is about how the Book of Hebrews “proves” that Jesus is the messiah. Ironically, it arrived in the mail not long before my formal conversion to Judaism. My cousin would probably not like to hear that a quick glance at it reminded me of something that I had long ago forgotten: the main reason I rejected Christianity as a teen was that I could not accept the Christian concepts of salvation and damnation and what that would imply about the nature of God. So it actually helped me to affirm my choice of Judaism.
I wrote back a brief email saying that I received the book and “appreciate your thinking of us” and then switched to topic to saying that I was looking forward to seeing him at my other cousin's wedding the next month. At the wedding reception, my family was seated at the same table as his, but he didn't say anything about the book. But then he was kind of busy with his four kids.
Anyway, I don't know what to do with the book. The idea of putting a new hardback BOOK in the trash just makes me cringe. I was going to send the book back to my cousin, but my husband convinced me that the best thing to do is to drop the subject because my cousin may now feel that he has done his duty to try to save my soul, but will not press further. Maybe in the garage it will mildew and then I won't have trouble throwing it away.
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Throw it, down it to the library. Really weird: I ordered a book on conversion to Judaism from a place off Amazon.com and they sent a book about Jesus with it. Huh? My husband says it was to dissuade me from converting.
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