"We can open up the question of financial incentives" for organ donations "without worrying about undue coercive pressures," says medical ethicist Robert Veatch of Georgetown University.

An interactive museum in Brooklyn teaches children and their families the universal values rooted in Jewish tradition.

"As the mind becomes a little more quiet, the sacredness of everything, within and without, becomes clear," says Norman Fischer, a practicing Jew and a Zen Buddhist priest who has been teaching meditation for over 30 years.

"There's no such thing as a hermetically sealed religion or culture. We human beings have been talking to each other since the beginning, and every time we talk to each other we change each other."

"The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them," said artist Mark Rothko.

Benyamin Cohen wrote a book about his year-long exploration of Christianity, and he used what he learned to reflect on the meaning of his own Jewish faith.

At the center of Judaism, writes Yale University scholar and critic David Gelernter, is "a thread of ecstasy…the whole world, space and time and suffering and all, pulled together by triumphant jubilation."

Light, says the reggae-loving rocker, "is really a central theme in my music in general, in the story of Hanukkah, and in the spiritual process in general."

Set in 1967, the storyline of the Coen brothers' new film centers on Larry Gopnick, a Jewish physics professor in the Midwest who looks to his faith to make sense of his personal and professional tribulations.

Read and watch more of Kim Lawton's interview with religion columnist Cathleen Falsani, author of “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.”