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The media can't resist this fast-talking rabbi with his string of one-liners on everyone's favorite subject. Recently, on tour for his characteristically kitschy new book, "Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments," he has debated pornography with Larry Flynt on Judith Regan's talk show and bantered with TV hosts Matt Lauer and Charlie Gibson. He has made the rounds of the network morning shows giving dating advice to singles, and he obliged Time magazine with romantic tips for Monica Lewinsky. He has shown up at a popular Manhattan synagogue with pal Michael Jackson in tow and appeared on Howard Stern's radio show making sympathetic noises the day after the host announced he was splitsville with his long-suffering wife. New York magazine reports that he's even about to launch an online dating service called LoveProphet.com. Topper: Jay Leno handed a copy of Boteach's relationship book to Dennis Rodman when he and Carmen Electra hit the skids.

Kosher Sex By Shmuley Boteach Doubleday, 286 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments By Shmuley Boteach Doubleday, 285 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Boteach is immediately recognizable, with his full beard, intense blue eyes and black yarmulke. He's also known for his corny humor, polished last year in his bestseller "Kosher Sex," and the way he's always elbowing for the spotlight. (In recent press releases he has bestowed his "blessing" on oral sex, the film "American Beauty" and attending synagogue.) Mainly, however, he has made his name introducing Jewish "relationship values" to a worldwide audience ("Kosher Sex" was translated into 10 languages), emanating a kind of '60s-style version of universal love in an Orthodox Jewish context.

Sound like a contradiction? In many ways Boteach is. In his personal life, Shmuley, as he likes to be called (it's a diminutive, like Bobby or Mikey), follows Jewish law to the letter and believes that this path -- in all its rigor -- is "the truth for the Jew." On the other hand, he has made a career of reaching out to the nonreligious, Jews and non-Jews alike, who are part of a new wave of seekers looking for tradition and a more spiritual life.

For 11 years at Oxford, as outspoken director of the L'Chaim (as in "Drink up!") Society, Boteach built the second-largest student organization in the history of the strait-laced university. L'Chaim created a come-as-you-are Jewish environment to which students (more than half of them not Jewish) flocked. They came for the scraps of wisdom delivered by Boteach and a legion of celebrity guests (Mikhail Gorbachev, Boy George, Stephen Hawking, among them) speaking on spiritual and religious themes. But mostly they came knowing that they could open their hearts to relationship guru Rabbi Boteach and he would give them nonjudgmental religious advice. (According to Boteach, at Oxford hundreds of non-Jews asked him to convert them to Judaism as well.)

"I have seen my purpose as bringing godliness to places it has never reached," Boteach said, explaining his universalist message "to bring values and godly teaching to the widest possible public, Jew and non-Jews included."

That openness has made Boteach's public career, transforming him, at age 33, from an author of little-read books on Judaica into the spokesman for a universally accessible Judaism. But with his quick tongue and warm spirituality, he has also lost his place in the Orthodox communities that fostered him. Lubavitch, the ultra-Orthodox community that educated and ordained him, balked at his outreach to non-Jews and severed the relationship in the mid-1990s. Then, with the hoopla around "Kosher Sex," published in England in 1998, the conservative British rabbinical establishment accused Boteach of dishonoring his office with his public sex talk; in May 1998, he resigned his synagogue pulpit there. Now, with a new book under his arm and a fledgling chapter of L'Chaim in New York, Boteach is starting anew in the kind of city that can match his brassy ambition.

There is something refreshing about Boteach's willingness to throw some color onto the black-suited, buttoned-up mores of the Jewish establishment. "One of the reasons so many Jews view Judaism as insipid and oppressive," he says with typical bravado, "is that there isn't any inspiring leadership." But as Boteach frankly admits, his efforts are part sincere, part shtick, a song-and-dance routine that will pull in the audience. That's what nabbed him a huge following at Oxford. And that's what gave him instant access to the American media. According to L'Chaim's mission statement, "We regularly host world leaders lecturing to young, impressionable audiences on the values that underpin Western civilization."

Celebrity speakers. Impressionable young people. Boteach has his scholarly finger on the pulse of the nation. And at a time when Americans appear to be embracing religion (in one recent poll, 45 percent of teens said their religious beliefs are "very important" to them), he also has a ready-made audience.

So what are all these listeners hearing? Boteach has made sure to offer something for everyone, and it's all connected by one impulse: to appeal to the spiritual seeker by putting the rosiest glow on even the most severe of Jewish laws.

His "Dating Secrets of the Ten Commandments" sounds more like chummy advice than the divine "shalts" and "shalt nots" of the original Ten. In a chapter on the Seventh Commandment (the one prohibiting adultery), for instance, we get tips on "preserving your mystique" and "look[ing] intently at your date." But you can rest assured that behind the sympathetic tone, there are some pretty strong strictures, and they're written in stone.

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