I approached the best-selling "Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue" with lots of skepticism. As a rabbi, I've been singularly unimpressed with most of the people who have claimed a direct pipeline to God in the past 2,500 years. Nor do I want the Jewish renewal movement, with its intense focus on reclaiming Jewish spirituality, to get identified with the flaky ideas popular in some corners of the New Age. And I was all the more wary when I found that my book "The Politics of Meaning" was one of eight that Neale Donald Walsch was recommending to save the world-shades of the days when the Clintons had championed and wildly distorted the same book. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover myself deeply engaged, challenged and at times even enlightened by the Conversation with God that Walsch presents. You don't have to believe that Walsch is really speaking to God to find in this book a huge amount of wisdom and a perspective on reality worthy of serious consideration, even though it's laced with some distracting and annoyingly irrelevant ideas about souls and reincarnation and simultaneous universes. The central message that God teaches Walsch and his readers is this: There is only one reality, God, and each of us is a part of God, a manifestation of God's being. The highest task for human beings, then, is to recognize Who We Really Are - namely, part of God - and to act accordingly. This message has been a strand in most religious and spiritual traditions for a long time, and Walsch's God frequently points out that nothing in his books is new. Rather, it is the same message God has been giving us for millennia. Reading the book is meant to remind us of what we already know. Only the most sophisticated spiritual thinkers will recognize the implications of "the oneness of all being," so elegantly and accessibly articulated here: "We are All One. There is only One of Us. You are not separate from Me, and you are not separate from each other. Everything We are doing, We are doing in concert with each other. Our reality is a co-created reality." The great teachers of each religion had this very unity in mind. Jesus, for example, didn't win an initial following among Jews because he claimed to be the messiah or the son of God, except in the sense that all of us are. Instead, his message that "I and the Father are One" was a reminder that all of us are embodiments of God. Forgetting that we are God is the root of our problems, remembering and acting accordingly is the solution. Walsch's God has concluded the telling people "thou salt not . . ." simply hasn't produced the kind of world in which people treat each other with love and kindness . By asking people to be true to Who They Really Are (namely, manifestations of God), we may be able to produce a morally viable world - or, in Walsch's language, one that "works" better according to our own goals. Rather than respond to moral codes, Walsch's God tells us that we must tell and live our own truth. Many readers may detect strains here of the ideology of market capitalism, with its insistence on the ultimate autonomy of individual choice as the highest good, its instance that there can be no moral criteria overriding or limiting the desires of the consumer, and its exaltation of whatever feels right at the moment. But the God whose voice I hear still judges the Holocaust and slavery to be wrong, not just ineffective for somebody's goals. Ethical language played a central role in mobilizing involvement in the civil rights and anti-war struggles of the '60s, in the advances of feminism and in the struggles against homophobia. People coming from the place of "no judgments" have not been so able to mobilize themselves or others into actions that decrease the collective suffering of the human race. Still Walsch himself is far from New Age narcissism, and Vols. 2 and 3 of his trilogy contain a powerful critique of a society that does not redistribute its resources to fulfill human needs around the globe. Walsch's God also describes highly evolved beings (abbreviated - dangerously - as HEBs) who freely choose the welfare of every other being and don't believe in ownership of land, resources or each other. There are many points where I hear God's voice differently from Walsch, and you may hear God differently too. But that is exactly what Walsch hopes to stimulate - the self-confidence in each of us to open our ears to God's voice. Walsch takes some of the most complex philosophical, spiritual and metaphysical issues and makes them easy to understand. Taken together, all three volumes of "Conversations with God" turn out to be a brilliant work of spiritual discourse, a powerful critique of spiritually dead versions of contemporary religion, and a challenge to those who imagine themselves secular to rethink the metaphysical foundations of their deepest beliefs. It's all the more powerful because Walsch is consistently modest, allowing that the whole thing may simply be his own fantasy. He takes great pains to insist that we all may hear God's voice in different ways because all of us will hear it through our personal set of filters and distortions. Yet God's voice is there for everyone to hear. Walsch's greatness is that he had the chutzpah to write down the very conversations that many of us have privately had with God but have been afraid to acknowledge. Two million people have already bought the first volume of "Conversations with God," and vols. 2 and 3 are even more enlightening. For all the moments when we feel like yelling, "No, Neale, that's you speaking, not God," much of my skepticism has been overcome. There is something deeply inspired about this work. Neale Walsch has given us an important gift.  — Michael Rabbi Lerner