ABSTRACT
Theology is only one of the resources an ancient and respected religious tradition can bring to bear on coping with human experience. Religion is much more than theology. Religion also involves a sense of community, liturgy, ritual, and a wide range of institutions. This chapter explores what role these other resources can play in helping us cope with life, and their relationship to the more cerebral role that is played by theology. That doctrine works as long as one accepts all of its theological underpinnings, which require that the believer recognizes God's hand in history, and understands the Torah, God's covenant and the system of Jewish law, to have been explicitly revealed by God. The unraveling of one corner of the Jewish religious myth does not forecast the undoing of the myth as a whole. There is the option that chaos is simply an inherent and persistent dimension of God's creation.
