This is a book I wish I had read two decades ago. As a sci­en­tist, I have always felt some­what schiz­o­phrenic when I walk into a syn­a­gogue. My brain splits and I leave the part of me that under­stands the phys­i­cal real­i­ty of the uni­verse at the door. I do this so that I can enjoy the tra­di­tion, the spir­it and the com­fort that comes from attend­ing ser­vices with my com­mu­ni­ty. I also do this know­ing full well that the metaphors for God that I learned in Hebrew school are not ful­fill­ing to me. Apart of my under­stand­ing of how the uni­verse works has not had a place with­in Judaism since I took sci­ence class­es in high school. 

David Nelson’s trea­tise Judaism, Physics and God: Search­ing for Metaphors in a Post-Ein­stein World is pow­er­ful ton­ic for some­one who has felt split down the mid­dle by sci­ence and reli­gion. Nel­son is a rab­bi, not a physi­cist, but he has an ele­gant sense and sub­tle under­stand­ing of phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples. He takes an unflinch­ing look at the lessons that physics has taught us about the uni­verse and then uses these ideas to inform a pow­er­ful under­stand­ing of God. Fur­ther, he uses these new metaphors for God and demon­strates how they can be inter­pret­ed in light of Judaism. His ideas reflect phys­i­cal prin­ci­ples, which are based on the Big Bang, quan­tum mechan­ics, chaos the­o­ry, frac­tals, spe­cial and gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty and string theory. 

Ques­tion after ques­tion that I have often felt would be irre­li­gious to ask, giv­en my sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of the uni­verse, Nel­son asks. The answers he pro­pos­es are fas­ci­nat­ing and enlight­en­ing, and rather than con­tract­ing the role of Judaism in one’s life, they present new, more pro­found ways of think­ing about it. 

I con­fess that when I agreed to review this book, I was slight­ly dis­grun­tled, but I decid­ed that I could slog through a hard-core non­fic­tion text for the ben­e­fit of Jew­ish Book World. When the book arrived, I was fur­ther daunt­ed by the text­book-look­ing cov­er with the impos­ing title and sub­ti­tle embla­zoned across its face. In fact, Nelson’s writ­ing is con­ver­sa­tion­al, descrip­tive and flu­id. Each chap­ter reads like the kind of high hol­i­days ser­mon that you want to dis­cuss over and over with your fam­i­ly and friends.