THIS BOOK is a memoir, a history, a religious tract. It is an indictment, a lament, and an appeal. It records the shattering of a core belief of a major faith, and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of that faith have allowed one of its key pillars to be undermined. This tree has fallen during the last few years not in a deserted forest but in the midst of the madding crowd, yet the multitudes of observers somehow imagine that it continues to stand.

Since the religion in question is my own, I do not write as a dispassionate observer. I write, rather, with the hope that this account will awaken believing Jews from their torpor, alert them to the catastrophe that has befallen their faith, and inspire them to take the simple yet difficult steps needed to transform this moment from a turning point into an episode. To adapt a formulation originally applied to the abortive European revolutions of 1848 and 1849, we still have the opportunity to make this the turning point where Judaism failed to turn. If we do not seize this opportunity, a nearly irrevocable transformation will have been effected, and by the time the truth sinks in, it may well be too late to act.

As I write, two propositions from which every mainstream Jew in the last millennium would have instantly recoiled have become legitimate options within Orthodox Judaism: