Understanding the worldview that Gelernter would bring to the White House—grasping both its appeal and its flaws—requires reading a short, remarkable book he published in 2009, called Judaism: A Way of Being. Gelernter claims that Judaism, despite its well-known prohibition of “graven images,” is in fact a faith “passionately attached to images; they are its favorite means of expression.” Gelernter intended his book as a summation of the kind of modern Orthodox Judaism that he practices (as well as an accessible introduction for secular Jews like me), but it is something rarer than a book of theology or doctrine.

The images that matter most for Gelernter are not so much the striking scenes of the Hebrew Bible as they are the concepts and half-formed notions that take shape in the minds of the faithful, just below the level of conscious thought, as they live inside of a faith. Judaism is an attempt to give these notions some concreteness, to catalogue some of the central images that emerge over time in the mind of a practicing Jew.

A case in point is the image-theme of “separation,” as it appears in the separation of kosher from non-kosher food, of the Sabbath from the days of the week, of the elements in the Torah’s creation myth, and so on. The distinctiveness of Gelernter’s approach is its perception that each of these kinds of separation entails the others, not in the sense of logical necessity, but in the sense that one visual motif in a painting can entail another. Jewish law, he writes, “transforms Jewish life into a richly symbolic artwork whose theme, separation, recurs in countless variations and whose ultimate subject is sanctity and the struggle of joyous life against cruelty, decay, and death.”

The struggle is exactly the point. Ritual practice—carving out exceptions in space and time, again and again and again—is a kind of dissent against entropy. “Judaism is against nature … It is against entropy. It opposes the inevitable unraveling of the universe”—even as it acknowledges that the opposition does nothing to dent the inevitability. In other words, religion has no bearing on scientific truths—but it can condition our normative response to those truths.

Gelernter is not a literalist or a fundamentalist, and what he understands about religious faith is that it isn’t something one is liable to be argued into or out of. It’s something far more free-associative, prone to is own kind of fuzziness, an “emergent system” that can exhibit the coherence of art without the coherence of logic. I read a passage like this and am convinced that, if Terrence Malick made books rather than movies, he’d make something like Judaism:

Imagine a man in synagogue holding the Torah wide overhead, one handle in each hand. (This is the ritual called hagbah.) You see him there onstage with his back facing you, scroll towards you, his muscles tensed and arms braced. Now imagine the façade of a great nineteenth century synagogue like Central Synagogue in Manhattan, framed by two identical towers. These two images occupy the exact same space and blend together: the Torah scroll’s two uprights blending into the two towers of the synagogue … Now imagine the Red Sea split apart to allow the Israelites to escape Egypt into the distance, a wall of water to each side—and let all three images blend together, one water-wall coinciding with each tower and each upright of the Torah. Watch the Israelites passing between the two water-walls. They are walking straight into the Torah.

For Gelernter, this is just what religious thought looks like, or the closest he can come to approximating it in print.