Book on Sweetness of Belief : Judaism: A former atheist who is now a rabbi makes the case for how God matters.

When David J. Wolpe, a self-confessed ex-atheist, tells Jewish groups that God is Love, “I can see the shivers, palpable, running through them,” he says. “They think that Jimmy Swaggart came to speak.”

While Wolpe is hardly a stem-winding preacher of the Louisiana school, his message can come as a shock to audiences who expect a rabbi to talk about politics, ethics, ancient history and foreign affairs--anything but God.

“I grew up in a Judaism that didn’t emphasize God at all,” said Wolpe, 32, director of the library and a lecturer at the University of Judaism on Mulholland Drive.

But his recent book, “The Healer of Shattered Hearts: The Jewish View of God,” quotes the Bible and the fables of the ancient rabbis (God braiding Eve’s hair before her marriage to Adam, for example) to make a case that “the idea of God addresses the central questions of human life.”

A rabbi and the son of a rabbi, Wolpe said he wrote the book “not to prove God to people, but to show that it mattered.”

He was surprised by the response, which included a post card from “a woman in New Jersey who said that she’d seen God and that He looks like (British actor) Basil Rathbone.”

Beyond that, “some of them were missionary letters but a lot of them were from perplexed and anguished people who want a comforting vision of God, and some of the letters were from Christians who were surprised to find it in Judaism,” he said.

Despite a lack of reviews in mainstream newspapers or magazines, the 192-page book, whose title comes from Psalms, has gone into a relatively uncommon fourth printing, said Greg Hamlin, vice president for sales and marketing at publisher Henry Holt & Co.

And despite Wolpe’s links to the Conservative wing of Judaism, Rabbi Abner Weiss of the smaller more strictly observant Orthodox movement recommended the book to his Beverly Hills congregation.

“I love it,” Weiss said. “There seems to be a spiritual searching and he deals with that problem. He mediates the search for other people. And more than that, he also is gifted with a very facile pen. . . . He is able to look at sources which are well-known and draw new insights from them.”

Drawing on the teachings of rabbis who argued 1,800 years ago, Wolpe said that English often poses a barrier when he talks about the ideas that were formulated in Hebrew and Aramaic, a related Semitic language.

“I mean, English is not a Jewish language,” he said. “When you say God is Love, it has Christian overtones.”

Indeed, he said, many Jews have an idea of God as “very harsh,” but he blamed that on distinctions drawn by Christian theologians.

“If you don’t know yourself, you open yourself up for others to define you and you’ll believe them,” he said.

“I tried to draw out the side that Jews don’t always see, the God of Love. It says that explicitly over and over again in the Bible.”

It was not until he was well into his studies at rabbinical school that he found his own belief, said Wolpe, who is now working on a Ph.D. in Jewish history at UCLA.

“Addicted” in his high school years in Philadelphia to Bertrand Russell’s arguments for atheism, Wolpe remembers his surprise when a rabbinical colleague of his father’s said he was glad to hear it.

“He said, ‘I would rather you grew out of him than grew into him,’ and it was a great line,” Wolpe said. “And it proved to be true. That’s exactly what happened.”

The change came after a year of Hebrew teaching, political speech-writing and rejection slips as he tried to establish himself as a writer after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, Wolpe said.

It was then that he spoke with Elliot Dorff, provost and professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism, who says he spotted Wolpe’s “sensitivity about the human situation . . . his real knack for articulating that and drawing it out,” and acted as a sort of clerical recruiter. “So we talked it out, and I tried to show him that his interest and his talents were something that he could accommodate in the rabbinate,” Dorff said.

Even so, “it wasn’t a sudden conversion . . . I didn’t fall off my horse,” Wolpe said. “It was being surrounded by people and texts and an atmosphere of concern about God that made me take it seriously . . . it was very much like learning a language. There was no one point where all of a sudden you say, ‘Ah. I can speak now.’ ”

While he praised “The Healer of Shattered Hearts” in a recent review for a Jewish magazine, Dorff said he had his problems with it because “it’s not an intellectually neat book.”

“If you describe God in personal terms, you’re in effect limiting God,” Dorff said. “But if you say that God does not have personality, then you lose the heart of Judaism. The Bible describes a God who does have anger, and so on. So it’s a question of how to have your cake and eat it too. David mentions the issue but he doesn’t really deal with it.”

Still, he said, Wolpe was not really out to solve that problem. “It does speak to people, and that’s what it’s intended to do,” he said of the book. “It’s for lay people who don’t generally read Jewish theology and, as such, it’s a very good introduction.”