My column this week is adapted from an earlier version. Sometimes, what you have already written about a subject or issue is worth repeating rather than rewriting.

This Wednesday, Feb. 8, is Tu Bi-Sh’vat, aka the New Year for Trees, Judaism’s millennia-old “Earth Day.” Less than a week later comes Feb. 14, aka Valentine’s Day; Saint Valentine’s Day, to be precise.

It is a safe — and sad — bet that more Jews will celebrate the former than the latter. As one person pointedly explained to me, Valentine’s Day “is an American holiday that celebrates love.” The inference, of course, is that Judaism has no such glorious day on its calendar.

By right, I ought to thank Rabbi Immanuel Schochet for banning my book “Kosher Jesus,” because doing so further propelled it up the international bestseller lists, even in pre-publication. Bizarrely calling his own views “authoritative,” Schochet declared my book to be heresy, banned anyone from reading it, banned me from speaking about it, banned others from inviting me to speak about it, and refused to offer a single reason or explanation as to why.

This dictatorial edict follows a growing wave of religious fanaticism hitting the world Jewish community all at once with right-wing reactionaries seeking to impose a primitive dogmatism on those who believe Judaism can be Orthodox yet informed, Torah-based yet educated, true to halachic sources yet fearless in the marketplace of ideas. The Jewish community is not Iran and its rabbis are not the Revolutionary Guard. Let the ayatollahs burn books and condemn authors. Jews are the people of the book, not the people who ban books. We have all too much experience with the medieval practice of outlawing books. Schochet’s attack deserves to be pasted on a wall of Meah Shearim, not sent by mail, as it was, to Chabad emissaries around the world.

In 1948, two social scientists published the first scholarly study of religious group voting patterns in the United States. According to the authors, Catholics, Jews, and Baptists identified as Democrats by margins of two to one or better. Five denominations that we would classify as mainline Protestants were Republican by equally lopsided ratios. Although the authors did not report on black Protestants, most of whom were still forbidden to vote by Jim Crow laws, data collected at the time showed African-Americans evenly split in loyalty between the two parties.

Sixty years later, the exit polls from 2008 show that almost nothing is the same. Baptists have swung across the spectrum; they and their fellow Evangelical Protestants now constitute the single most pro-Republican religious bloc. Catholics and African-Americans have traded places, the former now divided almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and the latter overwhelmingly favoring Democratic candidates. Once the core of the Republican vote, the shrinking body of mainline Protestants increasingly sits out elections or, while still identifying as Republican, tends to favor Democrats by small margins.

Three forms of religious extremism confronted me recently. The first occured in England, when I lectured at Limmud, a studies conference attended by fully one percent of all Jews in Britain. Every Jewish group was represented — except for the Orthodox rabbinate, which boycotted the event because of the presence of Reform and Conservative (Masorti) rabbis.

The second and more insidious example of frightening religious intolerance hit me as I landed in Israel a few days later for the press launch of my book “Kosher Jesus.” I discovered a country up in arms because a small group of charedim spat at and cursed an Orthodox eight-year-old girl for her “immodest” dress (she was wearing a knee-length skirt with shoulders and elbows covered), and because a charedi man called a female Israeli soldier a “whore” for refusing to move to the back of a bus (he was arrested).

One of the most unusual fasts on the Jewish calendar fell out on Thursday of this week — the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet.

Most Jews are not even aware of it nowadays, but once upon a time, it was considered so significant that an exception was made for it, so that it may be observed even on the eve of Shabbat.

With the exception of Yom Kippur, fasts are prohibited on Shabbatot and on the day that precedes it, meaning Friday. For that reason, calendar adjustments were made 1,800 years ago to prevent any statutory fast from occurring on a Friday.

There was only one non-family member whom I highlighted under my daughter’s chupah eight weeks ago. His name is Shneur Zalman Fellig. When I was a boy of 10, from a broken family with a broken heart, he helped me heal and inspired me in the ways of Chabad. I ultimately became a rabbi because of him. From there, everything followed. The late Chabad-Lubavitch leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, chose me to help found a Rabbinical College in Sydney, Australia, where I eventually married my wife, and my daughter chose to marry a young Chabad rabbi from California.

I have dedicated books to Shneur Zalman, and constantly speak of his contribution to my life. I do so because, in the spirit of Hillel’s dictum, “that which you hate never do unto others,” I know what it is like to feel forgotten. I never wish to inflict it on anyone who has been kind to me.

I admit it. The seemingly never-ending shift to the right within Orthodox Judaism is a source of great personal anguish for me. It is not because I find something evil in the desire of people to be more scrupulous in their observances. It is because right-wing shifts focus on form, not substance, and the truth of Torah gets buried in the minutiae of ritual.

In fact, the Torah does not care for shifts in either direction — left or right. It is very clear on this. There are no ambiguities here, no between-the-lines hidden meanings. “Do not turn aside to the right or to the left: Follow only the path that the Lord your God has enjoined upon you, so that you may thrive and that it may go well with you….” (See Deuteronomy 5:29-30.)

The patriarch Jacob, of whom we have read in the Torah the past few weeks, is the most maligned of our forefathers. With his seeming deception of his blind father to gain the firstborn blessing from Esau and his commercial manipulations of his father-in-law Laban, anti-Semites see him as the prototype of the wily, cunning, dishonest Jew who will do anything for profit.

Jacob is the forerunner of Shylock, who mourns more for his lost ducats than his lost daughter. In modern times, the State of Israel, named for him as well, is accused of engaging in questionable moral tactics and losing its soul to fight off its enemies.

And yet, we Jews celebrate Jacob. We call ourselves the children of Israel, the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with, and defeated, an angel. Why celebrate a man of seeming deceit?