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By Root 456 0

truth I glean from Hasidic teachings, the unity and holiness of all life, even of all existence, is one the world most urgently needs to hear. Having reached that point in my own life where you notice “the day is short,” it is time for me to give a full account of what I have learned along this journey and pass it on to another generation. “The day is short,” however, applies not only to the course of my own life. I believe that we stand at a great moment of transition in human and planetary history. Unless we take drastic steps to change our way of living, our patterns of consumption, and our most essential understanding of our relationship to the world in which we exist, we are at great risk of destroying our earthly home and rendering it a wasteland. Our future, and that of our planet, is in our hands. In this moment I believe that a universalized reading of the Hasidic legacy has much to offer.

While I do not await a God who will intervene in history to save the planet from us, God may be present in another way as we face the crucial challenge of our age. Religion, a more powerful human force in our day than anyone would have imagined, will have a major role to play in this needed transformation. If something we call God dwells within our sacred traditions (Ps. 22:4), we people of faith may indeed find a way to bring forth a ray of what we might call divine salvation. We need to reshape our religious languages in such a way that they will inspire the great collective act of teshuvah, “return” or “repentance,” required of us at this moment. We need to repent of our cavalier treatment of the biosphere in which we live, of our indifferent overconsumption and waste of resources, of our virtual disdain for nonhuman forms of life. We need to repent of the separation we have created between the sacred and the mundane, between the godly and the natural. Without such teshuvah humanity will not survive. Without marshaling the power of the religious and mythic imagination, we will not be able to make the turn we must in order to exist. Read this book as a call to that collective and universal human effort.

Toward a Postmodern Judaism

Chapter 1 of the book centers on a discussion of religion and its relationship to evolution, beginning with the biological evolution of species and leading into an evolutionary approach to the history of religion itself. The battle against evolution in the United States, from the Scopes trial to ongoing media fascination with political candidates’ views of the subject, represents the last great gasp of traditional religion's struggle against the inevitable triumph of modernity. While the modern consciousness was in the making a good century before Darwin, no one defines more than he does the impossibility of going backward and wishing out of existence the great gulf that modernity has opened up between the pursuit of truth and a literalist faith in biblically based religion. It is because of Darwin — and “Darwin” here means not only his evolutionary biology but also the accompanying evidence of geology, astrophysics, and a host of other scientific data regarding the origins of our planet and its life system — that theology has been transformed. Religion's response to Darwin has extended over a century. But, as recent headlines tell us, the conversation is not quite over.

The “new atheists” of the past decade have come largely from the scientific community, convinced post-Darwinians who are shocked at the resurgence of religion in our society. They have emerged from scientific laboratory and university classroom to take on the public fight against religious, mostly Christian, fundamentalism, often feeling that they need to save the entire modern enterprise from medieval Philistines who would bring it crashing down. Unfortunately some of these writers have little sophistication in approaching religion, tending to view it simplistically and paint it all with a single brush. “Religion,” to them, seems to allow for nothing other than literal belief in nonsensical biblical tales and various accruing