"America is the model of modernity, and the American Jewish experience of modernity is in some ways paradigmatic of that of modern man. One dilemma of modernity is: What of tradition? Of the experience of the past? For the Jew it is this: how to mediate between the claims of classical Judaism, the work of ages of faith, archaic, supernatural, sacred, and the equally ineluctable demands of contemporaneity, secularity, unbelief, and worldliness? What happens to religion beyond the age in which men take ritual for reality and myth for granted, tell as fact the stories meant to convey the essential structure of being in highly symbolic form and to reveal the truth of life? What happens to their imaginative life? How do they mediate between the claim of contemporaneity and the demands of their vast inheritance of institutions, rituals, myths and theologies, social and cultural patterns, derived from the archaic age? Clearly, that inheritance remains very present in the modern world. But what of that presence? Is it a wraith or an augury?"-From the Preface.