"As a critic," declares Harold Bloom, "I have learned to rely upon [Emerson's] apprehension that our prayers are diseases of the will and our creeds diseases of the intellect."
Thus did Emerson anticipate the current public conversation about the role of faith in American life. His point of view is nowadays embraced not only by Bloom but also by such contemporary figures as Christopher Hitchens ("God Is Not Great"), Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion"), Sam Harris ("The End of Faith"), Julia Sweeney (in her one-woman show "Letting Go of God") and the movie-making team of Bill Maher and Larry Charles in their upcoming "Religulous."
Now a new David has picked up sling and stone and taken aim at the critics of religion. He is David J. Wolpe, senior rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and author of six previous books, including "Making Loss Matter," a book inspired by the health crises in his family. (Wolpe and his wife are cancer survivors.)
Wolpe, who recently turned 50, is an articulate, credible and even endearing spokesman for his cause -- he was named the No. 1 pulpit rabbi in America by Newsweek this year, and he is a frequent contributor to newspapers and news broadcasts on the subject of religion.
Wolpe is no Bible-thumper, however, and here he is clearly not preaching to the pews. Indeed, "Why Faith Matters" appears to be addressed to the secular reader and sets out to repudiate the arguments of bestselling authors such as Hitchens and Dawkins.
Significantly, Wolpe never calls on the reader to accept religion out of true belief; rather, he asks us only to keep an open mind on the subject. "I do not believe our choice is either an absence of God or an over-zealous embrace of God," he writes.
". . . All of our culture is built on the assumption of free will; it is the teaching of great religions that such will is God's paradoxical gift to us -- to do good, or to do ill."
Personal crisis of faith
Thus, for example, Wolpe recalls his own crisis of faith when, at age 12, he saw "Night and Fog," the Alain Resnais documentary about the Holocaust: "Spirit suddenly drained from the world," he writes. "Surely if there was a God, this would not be permitted." Although his father was a rabbi, Wolpe became what he describes as "a strong, self-confident atheist in a world of weak, credulous believers." He returned to a belief in God only when his adolescent self-confidence slackened and he entertained the possibility that he might be wrong.
