In Putting God Sec­ond, Rab­bi Don­niel Hart­man tack­les one of mod­ern life’s most urgent and vex­ing ques­tions: Why are the great monothe­is­tic faiths — Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty, and Islam — chron­i­cal­ly unable to ful­fill their own self-pro­fessed goal of cre­at­ing indi­vid­u­als infused with moral sen­si­tiv­i­ty and soci­eties gov­erned by the high­est eth­i­cal standards?

To answer this ques­tion, Hart­man takes a sober look at the moral peaks and val­leys of his own tra­di­tion, Judaism, and diag­noses it with clar­i­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty, and eru­di­tion. He rejects both the sweep­ing denounce­ments of those who view reli­gion as an inher­ent imped­i­ment to moral progress and the apolo­get­ics of fun­da­men­tal­ists who pro­claim religion’s moral per­fec­tion against all evi­dence to the contrary.

Hart­man iden­ti­fies the pri­ma­ry source of religion’s moral fail­ure in what he terms its ​“autoim­mune dis­ease,” or the way reli­gions so often under­mine their own deep­est val­ues. While God oblig­ates the good and calls us into its ser­vice, Hart­man argues, God simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and inad­ver­tent­ly makes us moral­ly blind. The nature of this self-defeat­ing con­di­tion is that the human reli­gious desire to live in rela­tion­ship with God often dis­tracts reli­gious believ­ers from their tra­di­tions’ core moral truths.

The answer Hart­man offers is this: put God sec­ond. In order to ful­fill religion’s true vision for human­i­ty — an uncom­pro­mis­ing focus on the eth­i­cal treat­ment of oth­ers — reli­gious believ­ers must hold their tra­di­tions account­able to the high­est inde­pen­dent moral stan­dards. Decen­cy toward one’s neigh­bor must always take prece­dence over acts of reli­gious devo­tion, and eth­i­cal piety must trump rit­u­al piety. For as long as devo­tion to God comes first, respon­si­bil­i­ty to oth­er peo­ple will trail far, far behind.

In this book, Judaism serves as a tem­plate for how the chal­lenge might be addressed by those of oth­er faiths, whose sacred scrip­tures sim­i­lar­ly evoke both the sub­lime heights of human aspi­ra­tion and the depths of nar­cis­sis­tic moral blind­ness. In Putting God Sec­ond, Rab­bi Hart­man offers a lucid analy­sis of religion’s flaws, as well as a com­pelling resource, and vision, for its repair.