"Radical Judaism"

I first met Rabbi Arthur Green in the fall of 1969, at Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Mass. Since then he has gone on to be a leading academic in the field of Jewish Studies as well as a religious leader: first the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Philadelphia, and, recently, the founder and head of a new rabbinical seminary in the Boston area. Nevertheless, I first met him as "Art," and I can't think of him as Rabbi Green or Professor Green. Though we share a last name, we are not relatives.
In 2010 Yale University Press published Radical Judaism, which grew out of the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures, which Art gave in 2006. The book was of deep interest to me for personal reasons - my acquaintance with Art and my admiration for him - and because I have been negotiating and renegotiating my own relation to Judaism throughout my life.
Unlike Art, who made a profession of his personal struggle with the demands of Judaism, I moved to Israel, partially so that I could think about other things and take Judaism naturally - which has turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would.
Radical Judaism is a theological statement by a scholar and thinker who has done the serious work that I never put my mind and heart to. It is a bold and honest book, totally without sanctimonious posing, an effort, as he says toward the end, "to rethink our most foundational concepts - God, Torah, and Israel and Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, and to ask how they might work in the context of what we really believe in our age."
My own difficulty with Judaism has been reconciling a strong emotional commitment to being Jewish with an equally strong (or even stronger) inability to believe in God. I enjoy participating in prayer, and I don't believe a single word. From his writing, it is clear that Art doesn't "believe" the words of the prayers either, though he makes them stand for what he does believe in, something I can't do, because I haven't figured out what I believe in and don't ever expect to.
Art's way of remaining religious is what he calls "mystical panentheism," the belief that God is inseparable from the universe, not exterior to it as a creator, but identical with it, permeating it, and that the Whole, as it were, is greater than the sum of its parts, or, that we have within us a holy place that is connected with the holiness of the entire universe. He also admits that his belief is not one that can be demonstrated philosophically, claiming that theology is more akin to poetry than to rational thought.
I'm not sure I can follow Art all the way in that direction, but I am more sure than ever that pretending to "believe" is no way of living as a Jew.