What do you do when it's late on a Friday afternoon, you're a practicing Orthodox Jew, and your father lies dying in a hospital?

This is the dilemma that opens "With An Outstretched Arm." The directive to "honor your parents" and the injunction to "guard the Sabbath" become metaphors for the conflict between the author's lifelong desire to please her father and her more recent commitment to ancient traditions that he disdains.

With "An Outstretched Arm" recounts the author's journey from the liberal, southern Reform Judaism of the 1940s and '50s to the warm embrace of a more...