I used to think people read the Bible for the wrong reasons: merely to win arguments, or curry divine favor, or manufacture pious feeling. Now I think people don’t read the Bible at all. Who has the time and patience? Who with an I-Pod wants to be bored by so much…text?

A few, of course, do pull the Good Book off its shelf. And when they find their reading at once satisfying and productive, it may be for reasons the rabbi knew.

A rabbi, so the story goes, is in prison, in Russia, awaiting trial. One day, a high official of the police stops by and poses some questions about the Bible. In the end, thinking of the Garden of Eden, he throws out a theological puzzle.

"What," he says, "shall we make of a God who knows everything, but nevertheless said to Adam, ’Where are you?’"

To the police official it seems like a contradiction that an all-knowing God would have to ask.

The rabbi replies with his own question: "Do you believe the Bible addresses everyone in every era?" When the official says Yes, he continues: "In every era God says to every person, ’Where are you? How far have you gotten in your life?’"

Now the rabbi looks at his visitor with breathtaking gravity. "God says something like this: ’You have lived forty-six years. How far along are you?’"

Forty-six, it turns out, is the exact age of the police official, and when he hears these words, he inhales deeply, then lays his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder and exclaims: "Bravo!"

But his heart, or so it is said, trembles.

This appears, at the start, to be a case of reading the Bible for the sake of argument. The high official is interested in theory. But the rabbi shifts attention from the theological puzzle to the quest for a better self, a better mode of being. The Bible is to be read for renewal: you look for perspective on life—your own life, and on how to live it.

This story came to me by way of Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian. And it does seem, now that I think about it, that Jewish piety is resolutely practical. What is more, it seems that Christian piety veers all too often into other, often unsavory, preoccupations—the sort of preoccupations I mentioned before: merely winning arguments, or currying divine favor, or manufacturing pious feeling.

But on these matters the Christian Scripture is—if I may state the obvious—thoroughly Jewish. We must be, as James chapter 1 declares, "doers" of the word. The last quiz, as Jesus says in the Judgment Parable of Matthew 25, is about practical compassion. The New Testament itself, it turns out, is resolutely practical.

What if our Bible reading became more Jewish? What if we saw the Bible as a human (and divine) story, not just a book of theories or doctrines? What if we took the story to be a record of people who struggle—struggle with faith and doubt, success and failure, argument and counterargument? What if we saw it, in other words, as a thoroughly practical guide, a book honest about human imperfection, a book about the quest—mine, yours, ours—for a new and better mode of life?

Bible reading could still, I suppose, be a bother. It’s natural to cave in to job pressures. It’s easy to slouch on the couch. It’s scary to ask where you are—where you really are—in life.

But now, with this more Jewish perspective, Bible reading would truly matter. Instead of being a merely religious or intellectual exercise, it would be about…life. It would be about the flourishing of the self, and of how the common life from the self draws sustenance.

Bible reading would be, in a word, about abundance—the abundance Christ came to give, and Christ alone is able to give. And from this perspective couldn’t the Bible compete even with the I-Pod?

I think so, but it would still be…by God’s grace. Of course it would.

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