2 September—The big news from Cambridge—the one in Massachusetts—is that Harvard’s and MIT’s 40 chaplains, representing more than a score of religions, have unanimously chosen a new chief to coordinate whatever it is they do. More than 20 religions, even in Cambridge, is big news. Forty chaplains agreeing on anything is bigger news. “Jesus!” you’ll probably exclaim.

The bigger news still is that the new chief of chaplains is Jewish. And the biggest news is that he’s not only Jewish, but a Jewish atheist. That certainly merits a wholehearted “Jesus Christ!” Hopefully, the Rapture is not upon us.

Come again? Say what?

First off, the Anglican communion, primarily in the UK, is well-known, if not notorious, for tolerating—some say encouraging—priests who may have problems with God with a capital G. Something like 15 percent of active, practicing Church of England clerics are uncertain about God and at least two percent believe that God is nothing more than a human construct. But the Jewish communion? Didn’t Jews invent the god concept as it’s preached and practiced today?

Anyway, second off, rabbis aren’t really priests at all. Jewish priests—kohanim—are supposed to be descendants of Aaron, Moses’ big brother, who was a prophet and high priest back in the day. It’s not terribly unusual for orthodox Jewish men nowadays to adopt the name Cohen (or something like it, kohen being the singular of kohanim), to give the impression they’re priestly, which in truth they can be only by birth. There are others who simply claim to be descended from Aaron. There are self-serving reasons for this purposive misrepresentation, which we won’t go into here. Who’s to know? Who really cares, anyway? And a kahuna isn’t the same as a kohen.

Then there are the Levites (after Levi, one of Jacob’s dozen sons), who were essentially servants to the priests—musicians, guards, what have you. Levys and Levines hark back to them and have some privileges denied to commoners, but are nowhere near as special as kohanim.

But, to drum it in, rabbis aren’t Jewish priests at all. Unless they have the right ancestry, of course. Rather, rabbis are teachers and spiritual leaders. The word itself means my master, as in my teacher. Rabbis are ordained within their sects—and there are lots and lots of those—only after what’s normally pretty rigorous courses of study.

Ordination in most societies serves the primary purpose of permitting rabbis to perform marriages and do things only clergy and other authorized people can do. But kohanim—Jewish priests—can’t do those things unless they’re ordained, like ordained Christian priests. On the other hand, a learned Jew may be a rabbi—rav, in Hebrew, which is also an honorific—but not necessarily ordained, in which case, he (or she, or even they, these days), has no special secular competence.

Thanks to the First Amendment of the Constitution, by the way, virtually anyone can found a religion and ordain whomever and do whatever they bloody well please—and get away with it.

That finally takes us to Greg Epstein, the atheist rabbi and chief chaplain in Cambridge, who is not abusing the First Amendment. Greg calls himself a Jewish humanist. The humanist part is nice but irrelevant. What’s relevant to his being a rabbi is his degrees in theology and lots of study. He likely found No-God the same way others thought and think they’ve found God. And he’s ordained in the bargain, of course, so he can do the dirty.

What does it all mean, then? Greg Epstein maintains that you don’t have to be religious to be spiritual, a step in the right direction, to be sure. But what’s so great about being spiritual? Reading between the lines of Greg’s bestseller, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, we can infer Rabbi Epstein knows full well that religion was created as a means of political control, with an omnipotent god merely as the ineluctable enforcer.

And then there’s Ethical Culture, a rational, secular, humanistic moral tradition, that many thoughtful godless Jews and gentiles espouse because they feel they must belong to something. It’s a religion without a god, if you will. Thus, you’d expect Greg Epstein simply to have become an ordained leader in the Ethical Culture movement. But you’ve got to give him credit for becoming a godless rabbi instead . . .