At different moments in my life different passages have spiritually defined and pushed me to grow. In these days of nasty religious polarization and culture wars, the passage that most animates my life is a passage from the Talmud, the classic Jewish wisdom text, describing the intense debates between two ancient philosophers and theologians Hillel and Shammai, who lived during the time of Jesus.

Each had his own academy and approach, much like contemporary think tanks or schools that differ philosophically, religiously, and politically. The schools of Hillel and Shammai disagreed on just about everything – from how to ensure economic justice to the nature of our deepest, most committed and loving relationships, from how to treat the other to what it means to sincerely be part of a community, from how to transform ordinary time into sacred time to how to increase light and meaning in the world.

One might think that clear decisions would be necessary given the weightiness of these matters but rather than provide answers or simple rules to follow, the Talmud invites us into the debates and reveals the multiple and contradictory perspectives at the heart of all genuine disagreements.

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Mother Teresa’s passionate expression of doubt is a reflection of the profundity of her faith and places her firmly in the lineage of the great spiritual figures of every tradition who were shaped by the exquisite anguish of finite human beings genuinely, fiercely and unconditionally yearning for the infinite. This window into the agonizing spiritual darkness Mother Teresa felt and the wrenching doubt she experienced about God, Jesus’ love, and prayer should invite not only deeper respect for her spiritual depth but greater reflection into the character of authentic faith, especially in these days in which faith is confused with certainty and doubt with weakness. These letters remind us that any faith that is certain is no faith at all just as any love never doubted is very shallow love.

How undermining Mother Teresa’s letters are to all fundamentalist faiths be they religious or secular. She was not some God-intoxicated mystic confidently empowered to sacrificially offer her life in service to the poorest people on this planet. Yes, we might have liked her to have been in ecstatic union with God as it would allow us to get off the hook by either idealizing her as someone with extraordinary faith, the sort of faith we normal human beings could never possess, or by seeing her as massively psychologically deluded, the sort of delusion normal human beings ought never suffer. But it appears there is no escaping Mother Teresa’s challenge.

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The answer to the question how does God allow disasters like hurricane Katrina depends on what kind of God we believe in. The question assumes a God living high up above, a Divine Puppeteer or Shepard of sheep who rewards and punishes as he sees fit.

This conventional and most common God image of the Axial Age monotheistic religions, founded in the time of the great city-states with their kings ruling from on high, is simply one very limited and partial image of God. Using this puny, patriarchal, and punitive attempt to describe our experience of God (one I admit still works for me at times) leaves us with a number of explanations of the “problem of evil” each of which captures a partial truth about our experience of Reality and therefore does speak to us at different moments.

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The difference between a cult and religion is more often than not a group's staying power. Most religions were considered cults by the dominant religious or political authorities in their early years and many founders of religions were seen in their day as dangerous charismatic leadership. Cults that make it over the long term earn the label religion sort of like how disruptive religious innovations that make it are eventually called sacred traditions. The question, what is the difference between a cult and religion tends to arise in a time of cultural (scientific, technological, political) turmoil and ferment when old ways of understanding what it means to be human are dying and new ways have not yet been born. Human beings crave assurance and meaning and at these times new religions - always permutations of and mixtures of inherited religions - arise to make sense of the new age.

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After close to three decades of profound experiences sitting with people who are dying and with their families, I am very pragmatic about the question of life after death. Rather than worry about intellectual consistency or religious dogma, or simply adhere to a scientific or secular materialist view or to one of the many spiritual and religious “truths”, my criteria is simple: Does your view – whether that there is no life after death and this life is all there is, or the many after-life intuitions, e.g., immortality of the soul, the next world, resurrection, reincarnation, rebirth, heaven, hell, the bardos, Kabbalistic mansions – create less or more fear around death? Does your view support you as you fight for life until you’re ready to die? Does it allow you and those around you to be more honest, more hopeful, more compassionate, more present, more loving and even more joyful in the face of death? Does it allow you to grasp the truth of the Ecclesiastes poet who wrote that there is a time for birth and a time for death?

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Albert Einstein said it best, “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. Einstein understood what today’s “leading” scientists (at least those who write anti-religion best sellers) and today’s “leading” public religious figures (at least those who proclaim to know precisely what God wants with regard to public policy) sadly prove in their dismissal, denial, and rejection of each others truths. It seems like the responses to the question of the relationship between science and religion, that take up the most oxygen these days, are either fundamentalist scientific views (Dawkins and Hitchens and co.) that claim religion is a superstitious relic from the past or a survival trick that nature uses to reproduce the species or the religious fundamentalist view (Dobson and Perkins and co.) that science is part of the fallen world and has no access to the Real truth. As entertaining as the fight between these two fundamentalisms is it has led to an impoverishment of public conversation – a disenchanted, flattened experience of the world on the one side and an anti-science literalism that claims dogma and mythic beliefs as truth on the other.

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I am one of the people interviewed in the PBS series and hope people will watch what I believe is the most nuanced and sophisticated telling of the Jewish American story to date: a story that has wisdom for any American because it is a story as much about being American as it is about being Jewish. So I will be sweet and allusive.

We do not know what Jewish identity meant in the past because there was no one Jewish identity to be known. There were Jewish identities. There were many different expressions of Jewishness that, as with any religious culture, were products of interactions between people, their times, their inherited tradition, the larger cultures in which they were embedded, and their personal biographies and biologies.

Jewish identity in the first century in Palestine was very different than Jewish identity in Poland in the seventeenth century which was very different than Jewish identity in Spain in the twelfth century which was different than Jewish identity in New Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century which is different than the many kinds of Jewish identities on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the twenty-first century. In fact, when one studies the Jewish past one discovers that identity is really a verb and not a noun.

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