After ideology : recovering the spiritual foundations of freedom /

Can Judaism survive its ongoing encounter with modernity? Can a religious Jew be a whole-hearted feminist? Can havurot (""participatory congregations"") relieve the stagnation afflicting so many synagogues? Can the heavy setbacks suffered by Labor Zionism in Israel and the traditional Jewish liberal consensus in America be overcome and their secular-spiritual humanistic vision preserved? To these hard questions and others like them Waskow (a history Ph.D., former congressional aide, and professor at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia) gives a hopeful yes. Waskow thinks and dreams on the grand scale: the renewal he's calling for in this impassioned manifesto would amount to nothing less than the third world-historical era of Judaism--after the Biblical and Talmudic eras (assuming the latter to have ended with the Holocaust). In pleading for this inchoate transformation, Waskow inevitably treats much of the Jewish religious establishment rather harshly: by 1960, he argues, ""Jewish learning"" was almost totally sterile and futile, Reform rabbis were taught simply ""how to give a bombastic sermon on a magazine article or on the social issues of the day,"" organic communities where Torah, tzedakah, and the old ideals of gemilut hassadim (now translated into impersonal social-service agencies) and pidyon shevuim (now = concerted defense against anti-Semitism) were still integrated had practically ceased to exist. Then came the upheavals of the '60s--and Waskow's own conversion from classical secularized liberal to Utopian-activist Jew. From this individual-cum-generational standpoint Waskow makes an eloquent case for such things as a self-governing ""place"" for the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza; new, non-sexist, freely structured forms of worship; process theology, Jewish style; ""Torah therapy""; a strong, Jewishly-oriented assault on the nuclear build-up; and so forth. In his earnest headlong fashion, Waskow races back and forth across an immense spectrum from midrash to the social sciences, and not surprisingly he often slips into naivetÉ and contradictions (glorfying the Sinai experience, forgetting the subsequent catastrophic let-down). Still, this is a vigorous, stimulating book for anyone debating what it means to be a Jew today. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.