Regardless of where you stand on the Divine, this is what spirituality in Judaism looks like: It’s less a pursuit of once-in-a-lifetime highs, and more a series of routine practices, the effects of which build slowly over time.

And I love this declaration from Buber: “If to believe in God means to be able to talk about him in the third person, then I do not believe in God. If to believe in him means to be able to talk to him, then I believe in God.”

The Torah is best read not as a book of scientific truths, but as a book of moral truths. You can embrace the moral truth in the Torah’s claim that human beings all descend from the same ancestor (Adam)—that we’re all part of the same human family—while still firmly believing in the scientific theory of evolution.

God is not a being, but rather the process of being. Connecting with this kind of God is less about addressing an entity and more about simply being present with what is. As Rabbi Alexander Schindler described it, “The closer I feel to life at each lived moment, the closer I feel to God.”

As for the Torah not necessarily being the word of God, neither are the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. And I don’t value those founding documents because of who wrote them, but because of certain ideals enshrined within them. I think something similar can be said of the Torah, which can be understood as Judaism’s founding

God tells us just once to love our neighbor, but insists no fewer than thirty-six times that we care for the stranger.

We are each unique.

We are all equal.

We are all infinitely worthy. According to the teaching Rabbi Greenberg cites, “Anyone who destroys a life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed an entire world; and anyone who saves a life is as if he saved an entire world.”