"The denial of our uniqueness," notes Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Director of L'Chaim Society, "is ultimately the source of all human misery and unhappiness." In this collection of over 50 letters, he shares his ideas and experiences with Uri Geller, a 52-year-old Jew and paranormalist. Each man has a distinctive sense of his own uniqueness. Geller lives with his gift of being able to bend metal with his mind while Boteach revels in his vocation of being a mettlesome rabbi who constantly stirs up the Jewish establishment.
In one of the early missives, Boteach tells his mentor: "Your immense talent in bending hard metal with the soft grey matter of the mind teaches us that the most precious things in life are actually those that cannot be seen, touched, heard, tasted, or smelled. Like love itself, the world's most powerful forces are those which are so infinite that they cannot be limited or constrained by the flesh."
The two Jews discuss their childhoods and the effect of their parents' divorce upon them, the scourge of war, murder and suicide, parenting, the lure of fame and celebrity, the possibility of intelligent life outside this planet, and the nature of goodness. On the latter, Boteach propounds: "The greatest sin in the world is to rob someone of their dignity, their uniqueness . . . And the greatest mitzvah is to help a person find themselves." The paranormalist and the contentious young rabbi prove that in these sound-bite times, it is still possible to consider the philosophical dimensions of public and private life.