Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had offered a scathing critique of American religious life: “Religion declined, not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.” “What young people need,” he wrote, “is not religious tranquilizers, religion as diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, the power of defiance!” I resonated deeply with that call.
