2020 has been a year of chaos.

Last weekend, millions of Jews the world over celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year,

and prayed that the coming year would be better than the one that's just ended.

Of course, for religious Jews, we're now in the midst of the 10-day period between

Rosh Hashanah and the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur.

During this interim period, Yasserit Yemet Chuvah, the days of repentance, we take a step back from our lives.

We reflect on our shortcomings, and we resolve to return to walk a better path in the year ahead.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. With

all that on the mind, I thought we'd dig back into the archives of the podcast and bring you excerpts

from our best conversations on faith, mortality, tradition, and obligation, and sin. Our aim this week is to

bring you occasions to think theologically at a theologically heightened time of year. If you enjoy this conversation, you can subscribe to the Tikva podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and Spotify. I hope you'll leave us a five-star review to help us grow this community of ideas. I welcome your feedback on this or any of our other podcast episodes at podcast at tikfafund.org. And of course, if you want to learn

more about our work at Tikva, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, and follow us on Facebook

and Twitter. We opened with part of a conversation I had with the author Tara Isabella

Burton on her book, Strange Gods, New Religions for a Godless World. Now, you might think from the title of her book that her analysis of the contemporary West

assumes or even corroborates that we're a secularizing culture, but it's the opposite.

And she sees in the very secular pursuits undertaken by women and men who think themselves

to be secular, confirmation of the longing

for God that is sewn into the fabric of the human condition.

When the demands of, in this case Judaism, but one could think in the American context

of Protestant Christianity as well, when the demands of a religious tradition seem to become

so thoroughly liberalized that one can sitting in the pews not hear anything distinctive than

one can hear outside of the pews, then you say, so why do I have to sit in the pews?

...