The Jew­ish Expe­ri­ence by Rab­bi Mark N. Wildes, the founder and direc­tor of the Man­hat­tan Jew­ish Expe­ri­ence, is an invi­ta­tion into the soul of Judaism. Writ­ten by a Jew­ish pro­fes­sion­al who has spent decades in the field of out­reach and edu­ca­tion, this book speaks to read­ers who may feel uncom­fort­able with tra­di­tion­al obser­vance but sense that Judaism still has some­thing vital to say in their lives.

The Jew­ish Expe­ri­ence explores six core areas of Jew­ish life: God, Torah, prayer, kind­ness and char­i­ty, Shab­bat, and tikkun olam. The chap­ters bring togeth­er clas­si­cal sources and prac­ti­cal guid­ance with ques­tions for reflec­tion, sug­ges­tions for intro­duc­ing the theme into every­day life, and a guide for fur­ther study.

In the first chap­ter of this book, the author con­sid­ers two ways to seek God: his­to­ry and sci­ence, which Wildes calls ​“from with­out”; or a spir­i­tu­al approach, ​“from with­in.” Wildes offers argu­ments for both meth­ods while acknowl­edg­ing the lim­its of pure log­ic and sug­gest­ing that both rea­son and inner expe­ri­ence are need­ed to nour­ish faith. The author brings togeth­er Jew­ish sur­vival, the order of the nat­ur­al world, and the inner stir­rings of the soul to show that belief in God best under­stood as a response to mul­ti­ple kinds of evi­dence, exter­nal and inter­nal. The chap­ter ends with the rec­om­men­da­tion to recite the She­ma as both ​“a way to express our belief in God but also a way to feel con­nect­ed to the entire Jew­ish peo­ple, who have recit­ed this dec­la­ra­tion under the most chal­leng­ing of circumstances.”

Wildes’s dis­cus­sion of tikkun olam opens with the sto­ry of how an Israeli rab­bi vis­it­ing New Jer­sey was helped by a Hait­ian immi­grant whose neigh­bor­hood had been res­cued by IDF sol­diers sent to sup­port Haiti after the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake of 2015. Wildes then offers four sources that sup­port what he calls the ​“meta-eth­ic” of ​“bet­ter­ing the world.” These sources are com­ple­ment­ed by vignettes that demon­strate how con­tem­po­rary peo­ple make this ​“meta-eth­ic” a real­i­ty. At the same time, the author stress­es that con­cern for the broad­er world should not replace core com­mand­ments but should emerge from them.

Wildes’ read­er is one who lacks a con­nec­tion to Jew­ish life, not nec­es­sar­i­ly a lack of under­stand­ing of Jew­ish prac­tice. The book makes Judaism feel liv­able and appeal­ing. Over­all, The Jew­ish Expe­ri­ence is an expo­si­tion on Jew­ish out­reach. It will res­onate with those who are seek­ing a rea­son to estab­lish or deep­en a con­nec­tion to Judaism.