BOOK REVIEW : Makings of a Modern Rabbi : STONES IN THE SOUL: One Day in the Life of an American Rabbi <i> by Ben Kamin</i> ; Macmillan; $18.95, 242 pages

Aman named Herschel Lymon was the rabbi who joined me in marriage to my wife, Ann, and later performed the rites of redemption of our firstborn son.

Lymon had already left his pulpit at a congregation in Culver City, but he was still a teacher, a restless seeker of mystical and spiritual experience, a radiant healer of wounded souls. When he finally despaired of healing his own wounds, the rabbi took his life.

Lymon and the unanswered questions that drove him to suicide were on my mind when I began to read Ben Kamin’s “Stones in the Soul,” the good-natured musings of a thirtysomething rabbi from Cleveland.

Kamin, too, shows himself in moments of torment over unanswered questions addressed to the Almighty, but he appears to remain poised and relaxed even in the face of spiritual crisis. That’s what it takes, Kamin seems to suggest, to make it in America as a rabbi in the 1990s.

“I am more desperately in need of faith than ever,” writes Kamin about one of his bad days in the pulpit. “I need some answers, dear God!”

But, as we learn in “Stones in the Soul,” while the moments of crisis come and go, the real work of the rabbi--baby-namings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, hospital visits, funerals--goes on.

Kamin is the rabbi of a Reform synagogue in the suburbs of Cleveland. His challenge--and the central concern of his book--is to make sense of an ancient and complex Jewish tradition in “this mall culture whose opposite coordinates are Cosby and crack.”

“Stones in the Soul” is a sweeping account of the making of a rabbi in America, and, in a sense, an apology for the separate peace that a modern rabbi must make with God if he is to survive at all. Kamin, it turns out, is one modern rabbi. He uses casual terms of endearment to address his congregants: “Love” and “Babe.” He regards the Bible as “a psychological manual,” and he presents the stories of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, rather like case histories in a pop psychology magazine.

Kamin is capable of some rather-too-noble prose, but he is quick to remind us that he is no guru.

“Rabbis are people, too,” he writes. “The rabbinate seems to give me insight about everybody’s crises except my own.”

And when he dances too close to the edge of sanctimony, Kamin usually pulls himself back with wry good humor--as when he describes a hospital visit during his seminary days to an Auschwitz survivor who had suffered his third heart attack:

“You should preserve yourself for your grandchildren,” the young rabbinical student tells the ailing man.

“Where did you read that line,” the old man retorts, “in a rabbi book?”

The fact is that “Stones in the Soul” is “a rabbi book,” but it belongs to a new genre within the literature. God is an indistinct presence in these pages, and Kamin’s one-size-fits-all theology is strictly off-the-rack. The rabbi himself, by contrast, is very much in evidence; he’s a sensitive guy, and he tells us exactly how he feels .

Kamin is frank about the real-world demands on the rabbinate in contemporary America, “especially in big, urban congregations which are maintained by successful, impatient people who need a rabbi to be as savvy as he or she is pious.”

Kamin perceives what he calls “an indelible loneliness” in his congregants and their upscale lives, but he is careful to keep it light and bright. He points out that the making of a single “enemy” in the congregation can bring a rabbi’s career to an end.

“I confess that rabbis spend too much time waiting for ‘holy moments’ to happen,” he writes. “You may serve God in this profession; you’re much busier servicing people and their egos.”

Kamin’s book--and Lymon’s fate--were still on my mind when I attended Rosh Hashanah services at my synagogue last week.

“On New Year’s Day the decree is inscribed,” we read in the liturgy, “who shall be tranquil and who shall be disturbed, who shall be at ease and who shall be afflicted.”

A rabbi whose afflictions drive him to self-murder offers nothing to sate our moral and spiritual hunger. But neither does a man who is too much at ease.

Somewhere between the despair of Rabbi Lymon and the well-meaning but all-too-malleable good cheer of Rabbi Kamin, I pray, is a more satisfying answer.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “Age of Iron” by Jay M. Coetzee (Random House).