Perhaps you've heard of Jewish theologian and thinker Abraham Heschel.  If not, let me say that Rabbi Heschel was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century (he died in 1972), writing a great number of books on the virtue of living according to the Jewish way (the derek, the halavah).  For Heschel, living according to the dictates and demands of the Torah was the ideal way to find that which all people, consciously or not, seek:  a deeper relationship with God.

    For a non-Jew, living according to the contents of a nearly 4,000 year old document might seem silly.  In a world committed to the primacy of the so-called logical and rational, at least in the West, submitting oneself to the ideas contained in ancient records of encounters with the supernatural comes off as patently illogical:  how can such things be?

    Precisely, Heschel would respond, for that is the point.  If we continue to seek ultimate meaning, or any meaning at all, in what does not last, in what is impermanent, that is, the material and finite present, we will never find it.  In this present, this accidental and unexplainable present, all we have to know anything is human agency.  It is an agency, however, that is a captive of its circumstances:  it is as powerless as those who wield it.

    If we wish to find the relationship with the meaning which we all seek, Heschel therefore suggests, we must decide to live in mitzvah, the commandments, the righteousness of unity with a personal creator.

    For it is in recognizing our limitations that we find is true power and meaning.