We traditionally respond to cultural freedom by rejecting it, or embrace it and cast off our Judaism, argues Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand. But a third way is gaining ground: passionate pluralism.

What happens when a couple of Jews sit down with an evangelical Christian, a Hare Krishna monk, a Muslim activist, a secular humanist, and a Catholic priest to discuss how moderate believers should respond to the appeal of religious extremism? It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it actually happened last summer when I was privileged to host a round-table discussion with an unlikely group of participants. Despite our many differences, we shared a common concern that extremists have hijacked religion, to the detriment of our society as a whole. The purpose of the discussion was to develop a strategy for each of us, within our own faiths, to understand and address fundamentalism's appeal. At its conclusion, I walked away feeling that we had addressed only one half of the problem. Fundamentalism doesn't exist in a vacuum. The need for certainty, and the willingness to accept that certainty from a higher authority, is influenced by a number of factors. The rapid pace of change in modern daily life fosters uncertainty, as do the isolation and lack of rootedness that our overly mobile society encourages. Another factor is the impersonal presence of technology in just about every aspect of our lives.

We are becoming disconnected from such basic human essentials as family, nature, community and faith. But uncertainty, isolation, depersonalisation and technology - all of which help to produce a fertile ground for fundamentalism - are merely symptoms of the issue; the root cause of the return to fundamentalism is modernity itself. Fundamentalism is a response to modernity (or post-modernity), as is its opposite - religious apathy. Fundamentalism and apathy are simply the flip sides of the same coin, one which began spinning when Napoleon tore down the ghetto walls just over 200 years ago. Before then, Jews could not engage significantly with wider society. But, once out of the ghetto, Jews were presented with two possible, broad responses to the modern world. The first entailed metaphorically rebuilding the ghetto walls, rejecting modernity and maintaining Judaism in its traditional form. The second possibility was to embrace modernity wholeheartedly, reducing (or ignoring) the demands and obligations of Judaism, and surrendering to the forces of wider secular culture. The first choice led to Jewish religious extremism; the second resulted in assimilation and apathy.

Peter Berger, in his classic book, 'The Heretical Imperative', describes these two responses as the "deductive" (protecting Judaism by fencing it off from modernity's pressures) and the "reductive" (reducing Judaism's demands in order to adapt to the wider culture). Today, certain segments of the Jewish community still live in a virtual ghetto, walled off from the rest of the world by a sense of certainty about what God demands of them. They live passionate Jewish lives, detached from secular values. At the opposite end of the spectrum, assimilated Jews are immersed in the secular world, with the result that their Jewish lives have, at best, shrunk into superficial expressions of Jewish culture. Neither fundamentalist nor assimilated Jews, however, have truly engaged with the complexities of the modern world. These include globalisation, multiple identities, radical choice, and permeable boundaries between communities and faiths. Both sets of respondents have made an either/or choice, rather than create a dialectic between them. But is there not a way to remain committed to authentic Jewish life without turning our back on modern complexities and opportunities?