Ana Levy-Lyons was in her 20s when she found out she was Jewish. During her childhood in Tenafly, New Jersey, her family never spoke about what her mother would later call her “Jewish heritage.” Classic “nones” (what Pew calls the “religiously unaffiliated”), the family observed no religious rituals other than an Americanized Christmas and Easter.

Nevertheless, or maybe inevitably, Levy-Lyons was drawn to matters of the spirit. After a brief career in tech and the music business, she enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School, eventually eschewing its dryly academic approach to religion in order to train as a Unitarian Universalist minister. She served for 18 years in “UU” pulpits, including the First Unitarian Universalist Congregational Society in Brooklyn. Now 52 and no longer working as a minister, she is enrolled in the Jewish Renewal movement’s ALEPH Ordination Program to become a rabbi.

Levy-Lyons might have told a “coming home” story, but her new book takes a different direction. “The Secret Despair of the Secular Left” is less a celebration of Judaism (although there is that) than a searing critique of modern secularism.

As a church without a creed —UU’s pulpits and pews are open to believers and nonbelievers of any stripe — Unitarian Universalism came to represent to Levy-Lyons a “self-assured nothingness” that she sees among “nones” of all backgrounds. Without religious and traditional structures, she asserts, community bonds erode, people become detached from the natural world, and their souls become alienated from their bodies.

“I have come to believe that this is not just my story but the defining story of our time,” she writes. “It’s the story of disembodiment, disconnection, and dislocations. It cuts across class and race.”

She offers religious tradition, especially Jewish traditions, as an antidote to a pervasive sense of grief and longing for deeper connection and meaning. She writes from the left but also against the left, frequently challenging liberal orthodoxies when it comes to feminism, abortion and gender identity.

In an FAQ feature on her Substack, she writes that the book is neither progressive nor conservative — or rather, both progressive and conservative. “I’m hoping that this book can help elevate our discourse beyond today’s political polarization and engage our deeper cultural and spiritual struggles,” she writes. “From my perspective, despite how much the two ‘sides’ hate each other right now, in terms of these struggles we are more similar than different.”

Levy-Lyons, whose previous book was “No Other Gods: The Politics of the Ten Commandments,” recently taught a course on Jewish environmental ethics for My Jewish Learning, JTA’s partner site. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her husband and their 14-year-old twins. We spoke Tuesday about what she thinks is ailing the secular left, the alternative that Jewish tradition offers and why at least one reader had trouble squaring her liberal bona fides and some of her heterodox views.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book is about a break with UU and what you felt able to do and not do as a minister, and by contrast what drew you to reclaim your Judaism. And a big part of that difference is a denomination that doesn’t impart any obligations or “shoulds” on its members, compared to what Judaism knows as mitzvot, which are commandments or obligations. Did I get that right?

Yes, that’s part of it. My first book is about the 10 Commandments, and it’s very much about the liberating power of mitzvot. In the secular-left world, obligations and rules and commandments are seen as oppressive and restricting, and they are in certain ways, but I feel that they actually liberate us from what otherwise is subtly guiding our lives, which is a consumerist culture and the hidden values of secularism, where freedom itself becomes the ultimate good.

You quote your supervisor at a UU congregation in the Midwest: “The most important thing,” he said, referring to your congregants, “is to never make them feel guilty.” Was that the UU ethos?

Yes, freedom and self-determination are much more important than any obligations we might have to somebody else. This is a story I didn’t tell in the book, but I remember when I was in search for what ended up being my Brooklyn pulpit I was interviewing at a congregation, I think it was in Rhode Island. They asked me to put together a workshop or a little class for the search committee. And I asked them to imagine that if they were really, really religious Unitarians, what would that look like? What would they eat and not eat? What would they allow their children to do and not do? How would they dress? How would they spend their time?

They just looked at me like I was from outer space. “There’s nothing that we wouldn’t eat,........

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