Why religous dogmas? Without the home of religious dogmas, Tocqueville proclaims, there can be no real freedom, because people are paralyzed by doubt. As for the example of Jewish religion, the only dogma is that God has a special relationship with the people of Israel, and that he exists. Many of the Jewish habits and practices  that perpetuate and express the Jewish narrative, and mediate between the individual and God, make it seem as if there were a lot of dogmas. However, the narrative is flexible enough to adopt to particular perspectives once they have accepted the most basic dogma, that of God's existence and his relationship to the (individual) Jew, which provides a sense of security and direct engagement without much mediation.
    Why do Jews wear a skull cap? They are supposed to remember that there is a higher order above them, echoing Tocqueville's observation that "Every religion places the object of man's desires outside and beyond worldly goods and naturally lifts the soul into regions far above the realm of senses."  It deflects attention from the material world, and provides one with the opportunity to reflect on the larger order of things, and not get lost in the secular "passion for well-being" of democratic ages. "The main business of religions is to purify, control and restrain that  excessive and exclusive  taste for well-being... they may be able to induce (the people) to use only honest means to enrich themselves." Judaism has shown a great potential for adapting to specific historical circumstances, never letting loose of the core of universal religious principles, yet allowing for assimilation to a particular environment.
    And what about mysticism? "The soul has needs which must be satisfied. Whatever pains are taken to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, restless, and anxious amid the pleasures of the senses... I should be surprised if, among a people preoccupied with prosperity, mysticism did not soon make progress."  In other words, there is a natural occurrence of "enthusiastic spirituality", and religion is a natural form to address it. In the very days this paper is written, the yellow press reports that the movement of "Kabbalah" is finding more and more friends in Hollywood, among them singer Madonna and actress Elisabeth Taylor. Kabbalah-places are also springing up on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Kabbalah is the part of Jewish religion which has a very powerful appeal on the imagination of people, often providing them with beautiful metaphors and images that explain why a certain behaviour is desired.  It seems to me indeed that one of the best features of a religion that entails mysticism is, that it makes intelligible that which bewilders us, that we cannot explain, and thus encompasses our wonder and encloses it within an order that provides a way to deal with that wonder and the questions that cannot rationally be answered.
    Might the problem of a secular and democratic world be the loss of God? In other words, has the loss of religious narratives robbed us of institutions and patterns of thinking that were vital to the survival of human beings? The Czech President and writer Vaclav Havel, echoing much of Tocqueville, suggests so. At the end of this paper on narratives, the reflections of this East European champion of 'civil society', understood as the absence of governmental power in the creation of people's true lives ("Living in Truth" being Havel's motto) deserve to be discussed:

"Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world - be it the logging of rain forests, ethnic or religious intolerance or the brutal destruction of a cultural landscape that had taken centuries to develop - somewhere at the end of the long chains of events that gave rise to the problem at issue I have always found one and the same cause: a lack of accountability to and responsibility for the world... could the fact that humanity thinks only within the limits of what lies in its field of vision and is incapable of remembering also what lies beyond, whether in the  temporal or spatial sense, not be the loss of metaphysical certitude? Could not the whole nature of the current civilization, with its shortsightedness, with its proud emphasis on the human individual as the crown of all creation - and its master - and with the boundless trust in humanity's ability to embrace the Universe by rational cognition, could it not all be only the natural manifestation of a phenomenon which, in simple terms, amounts to the loss of God? Or more specifically: the loss of respect for the order of existence of which we are not the creators but mere components."

Thus speaks the latest son of democratic and liberal revolutions. He then proposes:

Perhaps the way out of the current bleak situation could be found in the search of what unites the various religions and cultures, in the search for common sources, principles, certitudes, aspirations and imperatives, a purpose-minded search; and then, applying means adequate to the needs of time, we could cultivate all matters of human coexistence and endeavor, and at the same time the planet on which it is our destiny to live, suffusing it with all the spirit of what I would call the common spiritual and moral minimum... What does dominate is the similarity in what various religions ask of us human beings, or how they perceive us."