I sat quietly several rows back, playing the respectful atheist. My young cousin blushed and simpered on the bema--the wide, raised platform at the front synagogue. This was her day.

The rabbi called out my mother's name in Hebrew. She rose from her seat beside mine and ascended to the bema. Two more honored relatives took their places at either side of a curtained cabinet embedded in the wall--the Holy Ark of the Torah. As they drew back the curtains, the congregation rose and began to chant reverently in Hebrew. Few of us understood the words. Translated to English, they plead, "Arise, Lord! May your enemies be scattered, may your foes be put to flight.'"

The rabbi then reached into the Ark and withdrew the sacred Torah, two massive scrolls of parchment trussed in velvet and silver. He held it up lovingly like a trophy or the urned remains of some revered ancestor.

"One is our God, great is our Lord, holy is his name," sang the congregation in Hebrew. Then the rabbi placed the Torah gently into my mother's arms. As she paraded it slowly around the room, the congregants reached out to touch it with prayer books or pieces of cloth--never bare hands--and then reverently kissed the item that had come in contact with the holy Torah.

After the procession, the rabbi undressed the Torah and lay it face up on the podium. A series of honored guests approached the bema to read portions from the naked parchment, kissing it gently with the corner of a prayer shawl before each reading. Last came my cousin, the bat mitzvah girl. She read the ancient Hebrew words haltingly, having been trained just well enough to complete the ceremony.

During the reading, most congregants sat quietly with their thoughts, ignorant of the content. I read the English translation. This is what it said:

If there is found among you, in one of the settlements that the Lord your God is giving you, a man or woman who has affronted the Lord your God and transgressed His covenant turning to the worship of other gods and bowing down to them...you shall take the man or the woman who did that wicked thing out to the public place, and you shall stone them, man or woman, to death. (Deuteronomy 17:2)

I worship no god, so perhaps I am innocent of this offense, but that's small consolation to an atheist like me, whose heresy would surely have earned me expulsion or worse in the old days. My father and brother are atheists too, and I thought of my mother parading those sacred scrolls that would piously condemn her entire family.

Much of the Torah portion that day addressed the rules of warfare. After a military victory, it commanded, women and children must be spared, and trees must be left standing. Unfortunately, such laudable proscriptions did not apply to subjugated tribes within Israel's God-given borders: the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. In those cases, the Torah commanded,

You shall not let a soul remain alive...lest they lead you into doing all the abhorrent things that they have done for their gods. (Deuteronomy 20:16)

After the Torah readers finished their portions, after the scrolls were re-dressed, re-blessed, re-processed, and fondly returned to the Ark, my cousin stood before the congregation to deliver her bat mitzvah speech. In accordance with custom, she spoke to us about lessons she had gleaned from her Torah portion. It was important, she explained, to protect the trees. She made no mention of stoning infidels or slaughtering children.

Such is modern Judaism. Even the rabbis avoid discussing the many offenses for which the Torah prescribes stoning: blasphemy, idolatry, wizardry, fraudulent virginity, working on the sabbath, or having sex with someone else's fiancee. Nor do they advertise brutal passages like the one from Judges in which eleven tribes of Israel make holy war on the twelfth, torching its cities and slaughtering the inhabitants, including women, children, and animals.

But some ugly passages are hard to avoid. For instance, the festival of Passover famously celebrates the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. According to the story, God slaughters every first-born Egyptian son--a large percentage of the population--in order to persuade the Pharaoh to release the Israelites. Worse, God is said to have "hardened Pharaoh's heart," forcing him to refuse the Israelites' passage so that God would have an opportunity to dazzle the world with his miraculous killing.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorra offers another famous example of holy brutality. In the story, God obliterates two "wicked" cities, killing all the inhabitants. Were such killing performed by mortals, we would call it genocide. We would demand sanctions, air-strikes, and U.N. condemnations. But we do not condemn God or his Torah; we praise them.

Even the founding myth of Judaism is shocking from a modern vantage point. God commands Abraham, legendary forefather of the Jewish people, to prove his devotion by sacrificing his beloved son Isaac. The obedient Abraham binds his son over a woodpile and prepares to slit his throat. At the last second, God stays Abraham's hand and retracts the command, satisfied that his disciple is faithful to the core.

Some interpret God's salvation of Isaac as proof of his glorious mercy. Some mercy. What kind of monster insists that devotees be willing to sacrifice their own children? And what kind of deranged zealot obeys him?

I once attended a Torah study session in which the rabbi strained to answer these questions. The story, he argued, is about faith and trusting God, not killing or being willing to kill innocent children.

That is how we modern Jews rinse the blood from Torah. If we do not ignore the ugly bits outright, then we de-emphasize them or turn them into metaphors. We refashion the brutal stories that resonated in older, crueler eras and remake the Torah into something new, something that we are proud to parade around the synagogue and teach to our children.

But in that case, why do we need Torah at all? Rather than carefully emphasize the good commandments and neglect the bad ones, why not just teach morality to our children without using scripture as a crutch? We don't need explicit instructions from God to know that it's wrong to lie, steal, and kill. We don't need an obscure biblical passage about sparing trees after a siege to teach our children to value life or to protect the environment.

Some defend the Torah on the ground that it was enlightened for its day. In an era when people really did sacrifice children to the gods, a religion that forbade human sacrifice was progressive, even revolutionary.

Perhaps it was. But we can recognize and celebrate the Torah's advances without treating it as a contemporary authority, just as we can celebrate Aristotle's scientific brilliance without subscribing to his theory of physics. We can and should continue to study the Torah for its contributions to history and culture, just as we study the Iliad, the Tempest, and the Magna Carta.

But when it comes to morality, let us treat the Torah as we would a long-dead visionary, someone whose ideas were once groundbreaking but which were meant for a different world to which we cannot and should not return.

Let us dress the Torah in its finery, bury it in its Ark, sing a prayer for the dead, and let it rest in peace. The children of Israel already left our old teacher behind long ago. We just won't admit it.

Michael Wolraich is the author of Blowing Smoke: Why the Right Keeps Serving Up Whack-Job Fantasies about the Plot to Euthanize Grandma, Outlaw Christmas, and Turn Junior into a Raging Homosexual