“Fundamentalism reads texts as if God were as simple as we are. That is unlikely to be true.” So writes, in a typically thoughtful and arresting remark, the former chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. At the heart of his new book is a series of readings of texts, teasing out the hidden moral and theological meanings of several episodes in the Book of Genesis.His own approach to these sometimes mystifying stories is subtle, learned and not at all simple. Yet the larger aim here is to use those stories in order to solve the problem of contemporary religious violence – above all, of radical Islamism. And that project is not without its own troubling simplicity.In his opening chapters, Sacks deals rather briskly with some huge issues: the relation between religion and violence, the