What Does It Mean to Be Jewish Without God?

(OMG, I spelled “God” with a capital “G”. That‘s not a respect—I am simply capitalizing the words in the title.)

Moment magazine, which says it is the largest independent Jewish magazine in North America, recently announced a contest for the best essay to enter the question of the year, What does it mean to be Jewish without belief in God? They chose to entitle this contest “The Elephant in the Room”. This reminded me of a story I read on the Internet, which illustrated that belief in god cannot be shaken. I googled it, and it seems an invisible pink unicorn is used more often nowadays to illustrate the same idea. Both borrow, or at least mirror, Bertrand Russell's invisible teapot allegory.

Basically, you cannot disprove that there is an invisible pink elephant (or unicorn, or whatever) in the room, because it can be magical, invisible, unwilling to be seen, etc.  Kind of like Yahweh.