Rabbis For Human Rights - North America

Conferences

"Which is greater, study or action? Rabbi Tarfon spoke up and said: Action is greater. Rabbi Akiva spoke up and said: Study is greater. The others then spoke up and said: Study is greater because it leads to action." (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40B)

We are all Israel: Thoughts of a religious Jew and a secular Zionist (Conference 2008)

We are all Israel: Thoughts of a religious Jew and a secular Zionist (Conference 2008)

Sim shalom tovah u-verakhah, hen va-hesed ve-rahamim, ‘alenu ve-‘al kol yisra’el ‘amekha.

Our ancient prayer for peace and our prayer for Israel are one and the same prayer.  We pray for peace, goodness, blessing for us and for all Israel, Your people.  We know God and address God from within that collective, and we pray for the people as a whole, our extended community, not just for ourselves.  That is Jewish prayer as it has existed since the earliest reaches of what can be called “Judaism,” in the late second Temple era, and from there linking back to the prophets, whose message was generally addressed to the people Israel.

While the pre-exilic prophets may indeed have spoken to a geographically as well as enthnically defined community -= anshey Yehudah vi-Yerushalayim – our experience as Jews over two millennia knows this “Israel” as a trans-geographical community.  ‘Alenu ve-‘al kol Yisra’el ‘amekha this month transports us to Mumbai, among other places, as in other times it has transported us to Buenos Aires, Damascus, Warsaw, Kishinev, and lots, lots more.  It also takes us to Jerusalem, of course, the place where many of us have most fully experienced the sense of Yisra’el ‘amekha, and the undisputed heart of Jewish love and longing, alongside lots of pain and agony.

What is our “Israel,” this human community in whose midst we come into God’s presence?  What does it have to do with ethnicity, race, national identity, political reality?  Can it be sacred and yet somehow partake of categories of human social organization that seem so very problematic?  Does a commitment to Yisra’el ‘amekha, a people as a sacred community, one with a common future as well as a past, have any place in this seemingly borderless new age, one today defined by a president whose identity, which we as Americans celebrate, is precisely about the breaking of onetime borders?

As inhabitants of the post-Darwinian universe, we celebrate the diversity of life and life-forms that evolution has wrought.  While we may not be able to articulate a full theology of it, we understand this process to be sacred, to contain or bear the stamp of the unfolding reality we call God.  God is there in the diversity of species, in the mutations and transformations that carry the process forward.  God is also present in ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity within the human community, present as we transcend all the borders.   We play Caribbean music, we eat Southeast Asian food (or a poor kosher imitation of it!), we travel across all borders, or we stay at home and armchair “travel,” reading literature from around the world.  We feel that this is all good, enriching, even containing sparks of holiness.

But what of us, Yisra’el ‘amekha?  What is left of our distinctiveness?  In what way do we want to go forward as a people?  We post-Holocaust Jews have abandoned the ancient claim that we stand at the center of human history, our redemption serving as the gateway to universal renewal of Eden.  “Choose someone else for a while,” as poet Yankev Glatstein wrote in the early post-war years.  But does anything remain of the uniquely Jewish vision of messiah bringing a more glorious human future?  And is there any special place for the survival of the people Israel, as such, within it?    Is our legitimacy as a distinctive human group just like any other, that of the Roma, the Tutsi, or the Lao, except that it is our own?  Do we still have something we want to offer to the world, or are we just exercising our “normalized,”: as Zionists once said, natural right and struggle for self-preservation, along with everybody else?  In what sense can that be sacred to us believers in a single universal God?

As diaspora Jews, and especially as Americans, where non-racially defined ethnicities seem bound for extinction, what is our vision of the future?  What will it take to survive as a minority group, not just a religious sect, on the American landscape?  Are we willing to pay the price?  Are we out there identifying ourselves as a minority?  How do we go about asserting our minority identity without undercutting the great gains made in acceptance of Jews and the sharp decline in anti-Semitism in recent decades?

Tough questions, none of which I can fully answer here.  All of them are enriched and complicated by the fact that we co-exist as Yisra’el with another entity, Medinat Yisra’el, one that has citizens, Jewish and non-Jewish, borders, customs officials, and all the rest, and to which we are outsiders, non-citizens by our own choice, but to which we are of course closely related by sympathy, pride, and deep if agonized involvement.  How do we begin to sort it all out?

I speak to you as a heterodox religious Jew, a liberal rabbi.  Heterodoxy distinguishes itself from Orthodoxy in that it does not subscribe to a uniform set of beliefs, claim to have answers to the great challenges to faith in modern times, or submit to a firm Shulhan ‘Arukh-based code of Jewish praxis.  I stand on the other side of all those lines, yet I call myself a religious Jew.  My people is not just ‘am yisra’el, but yisra’el ‘amekha, the community in whose midst I stand before God.

The Jewish people to which I belong was forged in what Scripture (Deut. 4:20) already call the “iron furnace” of Egypt, the place of our shared suffering and enslavement.  (This is perhaps an Egypt of collective memory more than of history, but no matter.)  It is there that Israel became a people, one bearing a shared burden; it is there to which God looked down and “knew.”  At Sinai, we are told, Moses, Aaron, and the elders beheld “the God of Israel,” under whose feet was “something like a sapphire brick, bright as the very sky (Ex. 24:10).”  We are told that this brick was brought by an angel from Egypt.  When Pharoah declared the Israelites had to make their own straw, the work hours became unbearable.  Women tried to help their husbands by bringing their meals to the field.  A pregnant woman miscarried in the heat and her baby fell into the mixer that was used to make bricks from the straw.  An angel, seeing the tragedy, brought the brick to heaven and placed it under God’s feet, so that Israel’s suffering not be forgotten.

This is a tale of oppression and human suffering.  It could be told of any suffering, that of black slaves in the American South or child slaves in today’s Southeast Asia.  But it is also uniquely a tale of Jewish suffering, one with which we identify as offspring of a people long oppressed, living in an age when survivors of the Holocaust are still in our midst.  The people Israel is the people that lived through Egypt together, was redeemed together, sang together at the shore of the Red Sea, and has not forgotten.

The other formative experience for us as yisra’el ‘amekha is that of standing together at the base of Mount Sinai.  Together we purified ourselves, prepared, listened to the silence, and received the Torah (again memory, perhaps formulated later, rather than literal history, but that’s what counts).  There was a moment during those days of preparation when we saw it all before us in a flash.  We cried out “We will do it!  Let us hear!” agreeing to be “a holy nation, a kingdom of priests” even before we knew all the details.  As a religious Jew I still feel bound to that declaration, the covenant of Israel.  I do not know that God really promised anything in that covenant, or whether those promises have been fulfilled or broken.  But I know that we, all of us who were/are standing there, proclaimed ourselves God’s people.  I still believe it.

What does it mean to be yisra’el ‘amekha?  It means that our job is to seek always to do what comes after Sinai: to erect a dwelling-place for God on earth.  We Jews are mishkan-builders; that’s what it’s all about.  “From the beginning,” says the Midrash, “the shekhinah sought to dwell below,” on earth, within the natural and human communities.  Our job is to live in such a way, to create a community of such holiness that the divine presence will feel comfortable, at home, dwelling in our midst.

Our dwelling-place for God, described in such loving detail in the Torah narrative, looks very different since the Temple was destroyed and was replaced by the Judaism of Torah u-Mitzvot.  Indeed our mishkan needs to be changed and renewed in each generation, as the early teachers of Hasidism knew and proclaimed so boldly.  But its essential contours are these.  It is a community that loves and accepts every human being be-sever panim yafot, joyously and graciously.  It recognizes the tselem elohim, the image of God, in each person and goes to great lengths to help him or her to share in that recognition.  It is a community that loves studying, commenting on, teaching, and passing onward the texts and cultural legacy it has received, seeking out God’s presence in words and teachings in a most intensive and ever-creative way.  As a community built on a sense of passing forward an ancient legacy, it cares a great deal about children, about the elderly, about the whole intergenerational process of seeing life as devoted to the proposition of dor le-dor yeshabah ma’asekha, each generation sharing its praise of God with the next.  Our mishkan is a community that takes responsibility for God’s world, including the survival of the planet itself, the wonderfully diverse life-forms with which it is blessed, and opening our hands to help the needy and the sufferers, wherever and whoever they are.

I do not believe we are charged with worrying about the question: “Are we God’s only dwelling-place on this planet?”  It is our job to build and to be the best very Jewish and very human mishkan we can be.  Are there others?  Wonderful!  We should rejoice to meet them and call them brothers and sisters.  We should help them to build their dwelling-place for the shekhinah, whatever they may call it, as we might hope they will help and encourage us in building ours.  But we are not God’s gatekeepers and should not be in the business of giving out credentials.

These two formative memory experiences of Jewish peoplehood, Egypt and Sinai, are the bedrock on which we stand.  They may be augmented by later tales, “how our family came to America,” or “how we survived the Holocaust,” but should never be replaced by them.  There are imperatives coming out of these core experiences that have helped to shape our mishkan.  These include welcoming and loving the stranger, keeping our ears open to hear the voice within the thunder, redeeming captives, resting and letting the soil rest, and lots more.  All of these are part of that collective priesthood to which I believe we, all Israel, are called.

For those of you seeking the footnotes to this talk, the name of Franz Rosenzweig might leap to mind.  The assertion of ongoing covenant, though without claiming specific speech-content for our covenantal Partner, will seem familiar.  So too will the notion of non-exclusive covenant, although I do not join Rosenzweig in giving a distinctive theological role to Christianity.  As I said, we should not let ourselves be God’s gatekeepers. Had I shared with Franz Rosenzweig the luxury of living and dying before 1933, I too might have shared his distance from political Zionism, questioning whether Jews should abandon their trans-temporal sacred calendar-based identity for one that grapples fully with the reality of history.  I probably would have seen myself as a cultural Zionist, partaking fully in the revival of Hebrew language and Jewish culture, but not seeing the need for its fulfillment in a Jewish state.  Suspect as I am of nation states and their motives, and an internationalist by inclination, I would have supported another path.  I would have shared the concerns of Judah Magnes, Martin Buber, and others for the rights of the Palestinian Arabs in their own land, as indeed I still do.  
But the realities of history did not offer that luxury.  After Hitler came to power and the world avoided responsibility for the gathering storm, it became clear that we Jews needed both the protection and the pride offered by having a state of our own.  The political Zionists were made right by the history we all dreaded.  Israel as a place of refuge and the ingathering of exiles became a necessity after the war, and it is still unthinkable to me not to have Israel as a Jewish state, which means on the most basic level a defender of the Jewish people at the international forum and a refuge for Jews facing persecution.  I accord the state no theological meaning.  I am a religious Jew and a secular Zionist, which is to say that I do not believe the founding of Israel to be “the first flowering of our redemption,” as the chief rabbbinate’s prayer puts it.  I accord no messianic or proto-messianic meaning to the existence of a Jewish state.  The scourge of anti-semitism, a deep blight on the Western, mainly Christian, moral conscience, reached a point at which Jewish life in Europe became impossible.  The Zionists were right in seeing this crisis coming well before 1933, a reality hotly denied by others at the time.  Jews needed to create a society of our own.  We did so both for both negative and positive reasons: as an escape from prejudice against us and as an opportunity to develop our own language, culture, and tradition in a society where they would be fully at home.

In both of these matters, Israel has been a tremendous success, one in which I take great pride.  Jews around the world hold our heads higher because of Israel.  We know there is a voice against anti-Semitism in every world forum, and the world knows that Jews do not take it lying down.  Israel has absorbed huge groups of immigrants, struggling under the burden of their integration.  Jewish communi9ties once threatened with extinction now contribute to the future of the Jewish people.  On the cultural side, Israel has succeeded tremendously in the revival of Jewish  arts, knowledge, and creativity, in ways that we diaspora Jews rarely appreciate sufficiently.  Full, comfortable, Hebrew literacy is the key portal to that richness, and I am sorry to say that even we diaspora rabbis seldom achieve it.   As a non-Israeli Israelite (go explain that to people from Southeast Asia!)  I visit Israel frequently, I read Israeli literature and I struggle to keep up with the endless productivity of my scholarly colleagues there.  Some of my own books are published there in Hebrew translation, and one of my greatest privileges in life is that I feel myself a distant participant in the new stirrings of Jewish spirituality taking place in Israel.

To say that I accord the state no theological or messianic status does not mean, however, that I refuse to find meaning in the fact of its existence.   Here I need to say a more general word about my attitude toward history.  I am not a believer in traditional views of providence, meaning that God consciously rules over the historic process and causes certain events to come about.  Once confrontation with the Holocaust caused me to lose that faith, I was not able to resurrect it for the sake of Israel or its rather astounding victories in 1948 and 1967.  I mostly find the attempts of others to do so rather shallow and jingoistic.  But my disbelief in a God who causes these events to happen does not free me from seeking God in them when they do occur.  If God is present in each place and moment, as the Ba’al Shem Tov teaches, God is present too in the events of history.  It is our task to find these events meaningful, to find challenge within them as to how to better direct our lives in the face of them, which is to find God – or the Presence - or the divine spark – within them.

The Jewish people’s return to Zion and the creation of a Jewish state in the aftermath of the Holocaust and at the very moment of the breakup of the colonial era in world history surely calls upon us to think about its meaning, all the more so as we hear undeniable echoes of ancient prophecies in the return of Israel to our ancient land.  The coming together of these events first tells us that a society created by Jews in what we believe to be a holy place needs to be built on the universal values of Judaism.    Our faith and the legacy of our history cannot permit a Jewish society to act as a colonial society, one in which a self-defined “superior” population imposes itself upon, and appropriates the resources, including the land, of a “native” human group, whom it then deprives of freedom.  If it sounds to our ears as though Israel’s founding might be too close for comfort to that description, it is our job, as Yisra’el ‘amekha, to make sure that is not the whole story. Perhaps we did not fully realize how deeply we would be put to the test in   bringing forth a new social and political reality.   But Israel the State has indeed become the greatest test to our values and heritage.  The Talmud describes Jews as bayshanim, rahmanim ve-gomley hasadim, “bashful, compassionate, and bestowing kindness.”  The “new Jew” of Israel is certain not bashful.  But are we still “compassionate and bestowing kindness?”  Can we create a real state, one with diverse populations and deep inner tensions, that treats every human being as God’s image?  To the extent that we do not, the failure is all of our failure, the failure of Judaism, not just that of Israel as a political entity.  That is why we are, and need to be, so deeply involved in this question.  We are active stakeholders in these questions, not only defenders of the state’s reputation or consumers of hasbarah.  Not only may we not permit Israel to be called a “racist” or “apartheid” society; we must not allow it to become a racist or apartheid society.  We need to stand up for this with our voices, our wallets, and the volunteer efforts of ourselves and our children.

Any discussion of this subject has to be marked by compassion for all the sufferers and awareness of the historical context.  A third of our people were destroyed in a series of horrific events that came to define the term “genocide” for the entire human community.  Those European Jews who were left after 1945 wanted more than anything to leave that blood-stained continent and to go to the Land of Israel, to build a state or community of our own, free from gentile domination.  Who could oppose such a morally justified will?  As Elie Wiesel used to say, Europe was glad to get rid of the survivors, so as not to have to look them in the eye and be reminded of its own guilt.

History put us in an untenable situation.  How could anyone expect the Jewish refugees from Hitler, soon to be joined by a mass flight of Jews from Arab lands, to stop and consider that their new homeland was being built at someone else’s expense?  The myth that the Holy Land was “a land without a people,” waiting to receive these “people without a land” fit the needs of the moment too well.  Unfortunately, it was not true, as the Jews already living in the land knew quite well.

For more than four decades now I have stood on the critical left flank of Israel’s supporters, urging peace with the Palestinians, negotiated return of territories, and a viable two-state solution to the problems of the Middle East.  I am fully convinced that there is no long-term future for Israel without a two-state solution.   Those who try to create such “facts on the ground” as will prevent a two-state solution are enemies of Israel’s survival, indeed “your destroyers ands spoilers from within your midst (Is. 49:17).” Those on the left flank who have given up on “two states for two peoples” are also playing with fire.  Above all, we need to recognize the full humanity and dignity of the Arabs with whom we are fated to share a land.  The indignity with which Arabs have been treated lies very close to the root of our problem.  It costs nothing to treat the other with respect.  This means accepting their legitimate right to their narrative, even as it conflicts with our own.  It means recognizing their pain and loss, as we want them to recognize ours.  I also firmly believe that this is the religious “message” we need to find in our current difficult situation.  At a time of terrible inter-ethnic conflicts throughout humanity, in an age when the nuclear threat means that we can no longer afford to take such hostilities lightly, the Jewish people, this “kingdom of priests and holy nation,” returns to its ancient homeland and becomes party to the seemingly most intractable of all these conflicts.  What is the message in this situation?  We have the opportunity here to teach our truth in the most powerful way ever.  We can do so by generosity, by seeing the humanity, including the pain, of the other, and by concluding that the only way to live in a Holy Land and a holy city is to share them with their other inhabitants.  This will be our word, perhaps even God’s word spoken through us, to Indians and Pakistanis, Bosnians and Serbs, Tutsis and Hutus, Turks and Kurds, and all the rest.  If we cannot find it in our hearts to do that, even in the face of real obstacles and sometimes atrocious behavior by the other side, we and our tradition will somehow have failed their vital test.

So far we are not doing too well.  Arab intransigence and the horrors of the intifada years have weakened the vision of a humanitarian Zionism.  We who believe in it, both in Israel and the diaspora, have been too easily demoralized, too ready to allow it to fade.  Most of all, we have reason to be concerned that our people  not be overwhelmed by a Holocaust-dominated view of the world.  Ever conscious that we did not take the Nazi threat seriously enough, too many Jews now tend to put all our enemies in the same category as Hitler.  We take seriously anyone who talks about destroying the Jews, pushing us into the sea, or wiping Israel off the map.  How could we do otherwise?   But we cannot allow this needed vigilance to paralyze us, to render us unable to trust or to move forward.  Sometimes one has to take risks for the sake of peace, for the possibility of co-existence, especially so when the alternative, living forever within the bunker and behind barbed wire, is unacceptable.  “The Arabs are not Hitler,” we of the left have insisted.  Despite the worst of some of their mosque preachers’ rhetoric, most Palestinians are waiting for accommodation to reality and are as frightened as we are of apocalypse.  A two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict must be possible, and we (that “we” includes Israel, the United States government, and world Jewry) need to be doing much more to make it happen.  Israel will not be able to long survive only as a garrison state, both because garrison states do not have a good track record of survival and because such an existence is ultimately a betrayal of the best of Jewish values.

I write these words as a Jew who has chosen to live outside the land.  I fully realize that their moral power would be infinitely greater had I chosen otherwise, and if my own life and that of my family were on the line each day, as are the lives of my fellow-Jews in Israel.  Some would say that my choice not to become an Israeli makes it illegitimate for me to express these views, which are vacuous when offered by one who lives abroad.  But I cannot keep silent.  All of us Jews, wherever we live, inherit the same name of Israel and the same tradition.  We have the same prophets’ words thundering in our ears.  As our long history has shown, we also share a common fate.  A threatened Israel threatens us all.  I deeply hope not to live in an era in which there is no State of Israel.   There is no going back to life before 1933.  We Jews have chosen to enter the realm of history, and it is here that we have to live and face the test.

We diaspora Jews differ essentially, and sometimes even in loud argument, with the Israeli point of view.  Zionism has long viewed the figure of the wandering Jew as a tragedy of history, one to be overcome by the return to our ancient homeland and by the forging of a “new Jew” that was to emerge from that transformative process.  Diaspora Jews are proud of our cosmopolitanism.  We are sometimes depicted by Israelis – and from our point of view there is a good deal of internalized anti-Semitism in this stereotype – as physically unable to defend ourselves, overly mercantile (and therefore trying to buy freedom rather than earn it honorably), living too much in the mind and too little in body and soil.  The experience of building a new Jewish society, including that of fighting to defend it, was supposed to redeem us from these anomalies and bring about a new health and “normality” in the Jewish people.

This is not the place to debate the relative successes and failures of Zionism in creating a “new Jew.”  Israel is clearly no longer a society based on the agrarian idealism that saw the new Jew formed by working the land.  While secular Israeli values were largely shaped by a sharper and more clearly defined break with religion than took place among Jews who migrated westward, in recent years there is a reawakened interest in Judaism among thoughtful Israelis.  It has become increasingly clear to Israeli and diaspora Jews that we are indeed a single people, sharing both a past and a future as well as a cultural and spiritual legacy we are struggling to reclaim. There are issues that divide us, to be sure.  Diaspora Jews’ tendency toward optimistic liberal universalism, so soon after the Holocaust, drives many Israelis crazy.  They see our worldview as apologetic and naïve, one that refuses to look at the precarious position of the Jew.  Their blatantly higher regard for Jewish life and Jewish rights over those of others, a kind of “compensatory damages” view seeking to make up for so many centuries of Jewish victimhood, often deeply offends what we diaspora liberals see as most sacred to our own Jewish values.  This is especially true for us American Jews, who live in a society deeply scarred by the legacy of mistreating a minority.  The analogy to America, however accurate or not, never leaves us, and we find ourselves quite horrified that Jews could create a society in which we privilege ourselves over others.  Nevertheless, despite these and other differences, we know that we are one people, bearers of a single legacy, and that we will have to find a way to live with one another as a family.

I turn back now from Israel to our North American Jews and from issues of pure principle to a question partly of strategy.  History rolls forward more quickly than ever in our age of rapid change.  Young people in our community are now mostly fifth and sixth generation American Jews.  By no means all of them are descendents of Jews who looked or sounded like my ancestors.  They have no idea of what a Yiddish accent sounds like and if they know what Gefilte Fish is, they think it was born in a jar.  Immigration, Holocaust, and 1967 are history for them, nothing more.  They share only vague traces of the natural Jewish ethnicity that I imbibed from my East European grandparents who were raised in the 19th century.  It is unreasonable to expect 21st century Jews to behave as though they had lived through 1945 and 1948.

Yet we call upon them to go on, struggling to define themselves in the 21st century as a distinct cultural and ethnic group.  This will not work without a sense of higher purpose, of mission, that makes such existence meaningful.  Otherwise it will not be worth the effort.  For us rabbis that sense is strongly defined.  We share a loyalty to Egypt and Sinai; we are affirmers of the Jewish covenant.  But what of the many in this generation who cannot fully share that language?  Those who are not sure if they “believe in God,” however they understand that phrase, or those for whom the poetry of Sinai is just too lofty or remote?  What can we say to them about why to remain identified as Jews?  Such a “why” is needed; all the Birthright trips in the world will not take its place, and we should not delude ourselves into thinking that they will.  The supposedly transformative experience will wear off with the years, unless reinforced by a framework of meaning, not just by renewing the sense of threat to Jewish existence.

It is the essential content and values of Jewish life, even if secularized, that will stir Jews to remain involved over the long haul.  I propose that we see ourselves as proponents of two essential truths: the unity and interdependence of all beings and the unique sacredness of each human life, the creation of each person in the image of God.  The first of these is that which we proclaim in the Shema’: Yisra’el ‘amekha are also called ‘am meyahadekha, “the people who proclaim Your oneness.”  The oneness of God means the oneness of existence, the fact that we are all limbs of the same cosmic body, here to share and to help one another flourish.  Yes, we celebrate diversity and difference, but we also see through it to the truth that there is only One.  This truth can be taught or affirmed with or without the word “God.”  The same is true for our faith in Tselem Elohim: Judaism has a deep and unswerving commitment to human dignity, justice, and all that emerges from our faith in the sacredness of each human life.  Continued Jewish existence has to align itself with a demand for these and the expanding concerns they bring forth.  The Jews are a people devoted to these truths, still inadequately recognized in our world.  We need to exist in order to teach them and to serve them, all the more so in this era of rapid change, one that bears great potential for dehumanization and loss of essential values.

These are the values of young Jews attracted to AJWS, to RHR, and to many allied causes, both those with and without a Jewish banner.  They are still the values of many of the 78% of Jews who voted for Obama, despite many efforts, including some rather nasty ones, to peel them away.  They are deeply Jewish values, rooted both in the religious tradition and in our long history of suffering.  As our young people stand before a decade that may look more like the 1930s than the 1990s, the emphasis here on collectivity and shared human responsibility may serve us well.

Of course our ongoing struggle over universalism and particularism is not overcome by any of these assertions.  How much energy should we be devoting toward the engine of just keeping the Jewish people going, and how much to the higher values with which that existence is charged?  How much should the synagogue become more of a bet Midrash, teaching, discussing, and expanding our own traditions, and how much a homeless shelter or a matrix of broader community organizing?  I like to think that our best moments will be those in which these goals converge, and in which we can teach their links to one another.  But that is far from always obvious as we muddle through our daily existence.

We live in an age when the old categories of “religious” versus “secular” no longer apply to most Jews, if they ever really did.  Jewish humanists want synagogues, secularists call themselves “seekers” and are open to a touch of the sacred, though perhaps more readily in Buddhist than in Jewish garb. No matter; we can be patient.  The restatement of these essential values in more widely acceptable language may eventually bring some Jews back to the foot of Sinai and the memory of Egypt.  Meanwhile, to have a Jewish existence that carries us forward under banners of caring, responsibility, and compassion for the world and for humanity hardly feels like a betrayal of our mission.  In some deep and perhaps mysterious way – dos pintele yid - Jews still want to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, even those who cannot let themselves say those words.  It is our privilege, as rabbis, educators, and community leaders, to help bring forth that desire, cultivate it, and to make it real.