I continue to be both intrigued and animated by questions about community, sacred community, the search for an American Jewish narrative and the role that Temple Micah plays in our lives. The more I consider the question, the more I believe that we have not yet found the formula for true Jewish flourishing in this country. I believe that only now, six decades after the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel, are the questions we face becoming clear.

My thoughts regularly return to the challenge of creating the kind of sacred Jewish community that we dream of for Temple Micah. The most puzzling part of that, oddly enough, is the Jewish part, because more and more I think that we don't have an easy answer to the very basic question: Why be Jewish? What is the purpose and value of Judaism in modern times?

These are the questions that we struggle to find compelling, inspiring answers to. This is the predicament I allude to when I say that we lack a meta-narrative that binds us or that we live in an age of a fractured narrative. The narrative of our parents and grandparents, so closely linked to emigration from Europe, no longer works for us. Intellectually, we understand it, but emotionally, we don't respond to it. It is not our story.

The immigrant generation of American Jews and the generation that followed instinctively understood their Jewishness to be intimately tied to their European roots. The Jewish narrative that informed their lives was essentially a narrative of ethnic survival. Having escaped the horrors of Nazi Europe, they knew their mission was to save the Jewish people. Wherever Jews were threatened--in the former Soviet Union, for instance, or Ethiopia--our parents and grandparents dedicated themselves to the task of rescue. They understood instinctively their responsibility to build and support the State of Israel. They built the major Jewish institutions of this country, dedicated to perpetuating Jewish life.

Their narrative cannot be our narrative because their experiences are not our experiences, their lives are not our lives, their memories not our memories. We need to create a new Jewish language so that we do not simply feel that we, as Jews, are going through the motions, living by someone else's agenda. We need to create a new language that speaks to our children and to the future.

The narrative that served our parents was, as I said, one of ethnic survival. Admittedly biased, and a rabbi to boot, I believe that the root of our new narrative must be religious if it is to resonate and find traction in our culture. I say this because I believe that the search for meaning in our time is real, that the sense of emptiness that pervades our culture gnaws at all of us. I believe that even the most successful among us, or perhaps especially the most successful among us, sometimes lie awake at night asking "what for?" Do we have a Jewish answer to "what for?" Perhaps if we can answer this, we might have the beginning of a narrative, our narrative.

The Mishnah instructs us: "In every generation, each person must look at themselves as if they went forth from Egypt." We are the best fed, best educated, wealthiest, most successful generation in all of Jewish history, yet we are commanded to look at ourselves as one step removed from slavery. This text calls us to lives dedicated to using our resources, power and influence to assist in the unfolding work of creation. Being God's partner gives our achievements a purpose. It gives us a response to "what for?" Jewish sacred communities commit themselves to that story.