One day a couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful summer afternoon, I got together, as I often do, with a rabbi friend of mine for a chat.  A Conservative and Reconstructionist Jew, Jonathan has an intense loyalty to his tradition.  For him, the Torah is everything, the foundation and frame of all that he thinks, says, and does.  Without the Torah, the eternal law, he is lost.
     At one point in our conversation, Jonathan suggested that whereas Christianity has but one commandment (presumably, to believe in Jesus as Messiah), Judaism has six hundred and thirty-five.  "We have 635 ways to love God," he said, "you Christians only have one."
     Ah, but what a difference this one commandment (if it is indeed the only one) makes! From a Christian standpoint, it is the only one we need.  Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.  In him, he insisted, the Torah is complete.
     Back to our conversation.  "I could never be a Christian," Jonathan then remarked. Why?  Jonathan could never become a Christian because, "Christianity asks me to make a unreserved commitment of faith."  For Jonathan, belief in God is about, by following the Torah, creating one's destiny, striving to obey the commandments, doing what we need to do.  It's about control, not necessarily letting go.  Though he doesn't always understand God (for instance, the Holocaust), Jonathan is sure that he should believe in him.  But he believes by doing, always keeping his head afloat, pursuing what he thinks he needs to do.  Christianity, he says, believes by letting go, submerging oneself in the puzzle of a indecipherable faith.
     True enough.  On the other hand, if we try to control or dictate belief by doing, we'll never learn what it means to believe by faith.  And isn't faith--reasonable, rational, trusting, and evidential faith (no contradiction here:  what is faith if it has no basis?)--what belief is ultimately about?