"The Rabbi and the Atheist" sounds like the title of a hasidic story. But it actually describes some of my High Holy Days reading and hints at the kind of religious-secular dialogue that is possible at a moment when dogmatism and arrogance tend to be the rule.

Jonathan Sacks is Great Britain's chief rabbi. He is a Cambridge-educated Orthodox Jew, and his frequent attempts to straddle the university and the yeshiva sometimes make him a target for both sides. So it goes in his new year's message in the London Jewish Chronicle, in which he takes aim at "New Atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens — and perhaps a few of his coreligionists.

Lawrence Bush is the editor of Jewish Currents magazine, which became the standard-bearer for the Jewish secular left — or at least what remains of it — when it recently merged with the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring. Later this year, Ben Yehuda Press will publish his book Waiting for God: The Spiritual Reflections of a Reluctant Atheist. I got an advance copy; you can preorder the book at Amazon.

Bush's parents were members of the "radical left," he writes; they "were not in the least interested in the progressive renewal of Judaism, but in making all religion obsolete through the humanistic uplift of the world." As a baby boomer, however, Bush came of age in a culture soaked in spiritual searching. He quotes a 2000 New York Times poll in which 70 percent of Americans say they are as observant or more observant than their parents.

Caught between the atheism of his parents and the religion of his peers, Bush writes from what he calls "my own peculiar perch as an atheist who has nevertheless worked intimately in Jewish religious institutions as a writer and editor for much of my adult life." As a result, he writes about non-belief with an empathy for believers missing from the works of the New Atheists.

The usual debate between believers and atheists is conducted with all the subtlety and mutual respect of a mixed martial arts match. "Religion poisons everything," Hitchens declares in the subtitle and introduction to his book God Is Not Great. Says Harris: "Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of a virgin or that the Koran is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying."

The atheists' religious critics don't exactly raise the level of discourse either, not when they assert that atheists must lack morality or when they fall back on the tired phrase, "There are no atheists in foxholes." (Would any of us want to live according to a faith that only speaks the loudest at the point of a gun barrel?) And I'll say this: If the atheists are arrogant, it is an arrogance earned from an understandable disgust with the uses to which religion has recently been put (recently defined here as the last 2,000 years or so) and the skepticism that seems natural when weighing the scientific evidence against the "evidence of things not seen."

What's needed, and what both Bush and Rabbi Sacks provide, are voices that reach across the divide, that credit the other side's strengths and acknowledge their own weaknesses.

Bush, for example, finds himself with an admiration for "liberal faith communities" that would shock his parents. "Far from providing a mere prettification of reality, these communities offer tools with which to cope with life's challenges, celebrate the most meaningful moments, and aspire to virtues of discipline, generosity, humility, joy, mindfulness, and more," he wrote in a column for Jewish Currents. "And rather than merely supporting ‘the system,' these communities actively embody ethical, social, and economic perspectives that strongly dissent from the status quo."

Sacks, meanwhile, asserts that religion has much to learn from dialogue with "the great secular disciplines of our time." He sees such a dialogue generating a "new, richly textured sensitivity to the daunting problems that confront us," from poverty and environmental crises to "the clash of cultures that threatens the future of freedom throughout the world."

Acknowledging the other side does not mean capitulation. Bush may be reluctant, but he remains an atheist: "No matter how therapeutic religious observance might be for individuals, no matter how beguiling the symbols, metaphors, ceremonies, and community spirit, there is something about the surrender to God and to a prescribed worship tradition that simply offends my arrogant soul."

Sacks accepts one of Hitchens' premises, but only up to a point. Hitchens' book "does not prove that God is not great," the rabbi writes. "What it shows is that those who claim to be acting for the sake of God are not always great. But then, we knew that already."

Sacks absorbs the lessons of the New Atheists and calls for a renewal of the Jewish prophetic tradition of self-criticism and a tempering of the impulse, among religious and secular alike, to seek "utopian solutions to the human condition." (Some of his readers, if the blogs are any indication, see a critique of fervent Orthodox Judaism in his essay.)

"What we need, instead, is constant vigilance and active self-criticism," writes Sacks. "That is what the High Holy Days are about."

It's interesting — or perhaps inevitable — that the most probing voices in the current religious debate belong to atheists. In a world torn apart by religious violence, they are forcing believers to examine their own first principles and to demand correctives to the deadly, life-denying course fundamentalists have embarked upon.

Sacks, the rabbi, and Bush, the atheist, suggest how the debate can become dialogue.