heists have launched a full-frontal attack with books and media appearances by confirmed non-believers such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. As Lisa Miller wrote in Newsweek, they give us this choice: “Either you don’t believe in God or you’re a dope.”
Robert Wright is not as virulent in The Evolution of God (Little Brown, cloth, $25.99). Exploring how humans came to believe in God, he offers more understanding of those who do believe while making his lack of belief clear.
Starting with “primordial faith,” Wright moves to shamans and chieftains, through city-states and up to the “Abrahamic” faiths in his close examination (563 pages) of God-evolution. His sources are scholarly drawn from history, anthropology and sociology. Ultimately, he says he’s “unqualified to answer” the question of whether or not “Yaweh” exists, but admits that the moral structure provided by the “Abrahamic” faiths is a good thing, if used for good. He even concludes that the “awe and wonder” of religious and spiritual experience might be part of human nature, although he thinks it has more to do with our weirdly evolved brains than any external force beyond our ken.
But: maybe it’s not an external force. Just ask Jay Michaelson who has written Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Trumpeter, paper, $18.95) with its Kabbalistic, super-esoteric approach to God. Nondualism is the idea that everything is God: You, me, the chair, the Internet, the earth. Dualism is the more common, Western idea that God is other, something up “there,” far from us.
We might associate Nondualism with Eastern religions, but Michaelson, who has a law degree from Yale and is completing a doctorate in Jewish thought from Hebrew University, argues that it has Jewish roots, particularly in Kabbalistic teachings. After all, in the Sh’ma we assert that “God is One.” After grounding the reader in the concepts, Michaelson turns to practice and how to incorporate meditation, prayer and acts of love into our lives — not unlike what you would hear in synagogue, even if the packaging is different.
About 1,000 years ago there was another man who had a lot to say about God. His name was Rashi, and his goal was to make the Torah comprehensible for everyone to grasp. As a young yeshiva bucher (student), Elie Wiesel became very fond of Rashi and he writes warmly about their relationship in Rashi: A Portrait (Nextbook-Schocken, cloth, $22).
This is a 21st-century book. It’s short, to the point, well written and broken down into segments. It also engages the reader in dialogue (of course you’ll have to answer in your head) and Torah study. Wiesel sketches Rashi’s life and times, and makes them relevant to today — the brutality of the Crusades and violent Islamic fanaticism both arose when Rashi lived.
To delve imaginatively and more densely into Rashi’s life and times, there is Rashi’s Daughters by Maggie Anton. The newly published Book III: Rachel (Plume, paper, $15), picks this historical fiction up where the second book left off. (Readers new to the series should start with Book I.)
Anton’s research is thorough and thoughtful. She delivers a picture of medieval French life in Troyes so detailed and intricate that we ought to be grateful smells are not included. Rachel’s husband is a merchant who travels to Spain, so we also get a portrait of Jewish life in Sepharad contrasted with northern Europe. In the north, women have more rights and more is expected of them, and while northern scholars cling to Torah study, their southern counterparts are more interested in math, science and poetry.
There is a sense that Anton is trying hard to get all possible details into the book, the last of the promised trilogy. It is in Book III that we get to the crushing and faith-testing Crusades. Anton has derived her fictional accounts directly from eyewitness reports. They are painful to read, but the author notes that she felt obligated to include them. Rashi’s family survives, we know, because though he had no sons, he had grandsons, some of whom became renowned Torah scholars in their own right.
Faith in contemporary America is what Mitch Albom examines in Have A Little Faith (Hyperion, cloth, $23.99), his first non-fiction book since Tuesdays With Morrie.
Asked to write a eulogy for his dying childhood rabbi, Albom travels back and forth from Detroit to New Jersey to get better acquainted with Rabbi Albert Lewis. At the same time, Albom is reporting on Pastor Henry Covington, a reformed drug addict and criminal trying to run an impoverished downtown Detroit church as a city falls down around him.
Yes, it is sentimental, but also moving as Albom, a professed non-believer and non-practitioner, moves between these different worlds of faith, questioning his own beliefs and giving us the opportunity to ask ourselves how we would meet the challenges presented to the men profiled here.