The sabbatical is a true gift for which I am deeply appreciative. it allows time for reading, studying and thinking. It enables distance and perspective--the opportunity to consider the larger forest, relieved of the worries for particular trees. At my instigation, my rabbinic study group has decided to spend an afternoon simply listing what we consider to be the great issues confronting American Jewish life today. What are the challenges that we face? We are hopeful that a commonality of themes will emerge from our discussion that will then set an agenda for our future study.

When I consider the many challenges of our time as a Jew and a rabbi, two seem to subsume all the rest:

1. We do not feel an intimacy with God; faith is a question for us.

2. We do not feel a strong sense of Jewish Peoplehood.

The challenge of our faith. I think it is fair to say that connection to God, faith, reverence and holy awe do not animate the religious lives of most American Jews in any rigorous fashion. We are not, to borrow a phrase, by natural inclination a God-intoxicated community. We are Jewish, to be sure--but our lives, on the whole, do not include God in any active, ongoing way.

As I consider this reality, I think back on that section of the book of Exodus where the Israelites, in the wilderness, constructed the tabernacle to be God's holy abode that they would carry with them wherever they traveled. Our ancestors' prior experience of the Divine had been of the Creator, God of the universe, who made Himself known through grandiose acts: plagues hurled against the Egyptians, pillars of smoke and fire, parted seas and thunder and lightning amidst the revelation at Sinai. Now the Israelites were building a "house" where they could visit God and worship Him within their midst. To put it another way, the powerful, creator God of nature was being domesticated. This represents a great theological revolution in Jewish history. God was radically reinterpreted before our eyes and was made approachable. The God metaphor was redefined--recreated, so to speak, to meet a new situation.

We, too, need to learn from our ancestors' theological boldness. We, too, need to rediscover how to connect to God in a way that speaks to our situation in the here and now. I have been giving this question a great deal of thought and even have some tentative ideas as to what we might do. One notion emanates from the present crisis of global warming and our need to view preserving the environment as a sacred mitzvah. We need to reconnect to the God of nature and see our world as God's gift.

Peoplehood is no less a challenge. Being Jewish is about ritual, prayer, God, study, mitzvot. Being Jewish also is about family, history, land and even, to use what is perhaps a non-PC word, tribe. in other words, peoplehood. I have a strong sense that something in the very nature of the American experience challenges our sense of peoplehood. The early leaders of Reform Judaism in this country sought to downplay Jewish Peoplehood by minimizing the importance of the rituals and customs that define it--the dietary norms, Hebrew language, distinctive dress such as kipah and tallit. This departure from peoplehood is evidenced by the early documents of our movement in America. Already, however, by the 1930s, during the rise of Hitler in Germany, Reform leaders were seeking to recover from their early radical misthinking. They came to realize that Jewish Peoplehood was essential to Jewish identity and not secondary or optional.

David Ben Gurion perhaps captured it best when he wrote:

"There is no precedent for the history of the Jewish People...There is no parallel to the relationship between our People and this land. it is unique. People usually think in analogies and when they are faced with a new phenomenon, they prefer to deny the existence of what they do not understand. But it remains a fact, nevertheless..."

Our undeniable challenge is to find a way to recover that sense of Jewish Peoplehood that is fundamental to our identity. Visiting Israel is one way to connect to that part of ourselves. We also need to find ways to grow that identity in America and to pass on that sense of uniqueness to our children.

We are a faith. We are also a people. We need to find ways to strengthen both.