In Religion as We Know It, Jack Miles, a renowned scholar of comparative religion, notes that modern Western notions of religion, and of the difference between the sacred and secular, have been “profoundly shaped by Christian assumptions.” Miles traces these assumptions specifically to early Christianity’s experience with persecution. But, writes Elaine Pagels in her review, his story of how this conception of religion came into being has a major flaw:

While Miles’s account apparently selects data through the lens of the “history of ideas,” a clearer sense of the social and political dynamics in the historical conflicts he mentions could add depth to his analysis. Historians of Judaism, for example, have shown that before the time of Jesus, many Jews throughout the world, forced to accommodate to domination by foreign armies—Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman—sought to separate their sacred practices from the demands of occupation forces. From the first century of the Common Era into the second, Jews, including many of Jesus’ early followers, benefited from an “atheist’s exemption” to demonstrate loyalty to Rome by paying taxes and offering sacrifice for the emperor’s welfare in their own temple.

In the same review, Pagels examines another recent book—Believers, by the anthropologist Melvin Konnor—about the permanence of religion:

Noting that the death of religion, so long predicted, has failed to arrive, Konner asks “what it is about the brain . . . that has made this so.” . . . [N]oting that “theorizing about religion’s origins is now a cottage industry,” he dives into scientific and social-scientific papers that investigate related questions, and offers a series of marvelously readable chapters to summarize the research they present.

Best of all, Konner refrains from offering a simple answer, which people asking questions about religion often expect. Instead, like Charles Darwin, he notes that “such a huge dimension of life must serve many functions.” Some readers may take this to mean he is ducking the question; yet the energy and passion articulated in the book belie that charge. In his final chapters, he clearly states his conviction that religion is “a part of human nature,” and so “very persistent, and, in my view, will never go away.”

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.