The calming stability and tranquility of our little village of Anatevka has been somewhat rocked by the personnel changes that will be taking place over the next year.

Rabbi Warshaw's tenure with us as education director will be ending in June after just one year and Rabbi Manewith will be leaving us a year after that. Additionally, in June, we will be breaking ground on our much-anticipated building expansion. Our home life will be at least somewhat interrupted by the construction.

This is, without a doubt, a period of transition. But from sorrow comes healing, and opportunity springs from change. Just as our ancestors sought to peer down the road ahead as they traveled through Sinai toward a Promised Land, we, too, might peer down our own communal road to see where we are going--and not in the mundane sense of whether we have a plan to fill our staff positions. The answer to that is short: we do. I am talking big picture here: Do we have a vision of where we are going spiritually as a congregation? What is our aim? Where might we falter? Where do we begin?

The purpose of our temple is, I believe, to help us live purposeful, moral, joyous and meaningful lives that are blessed by the support of a nurturing community, guided by the wisdom of Torah and deepened by a sense of the sacred.

We achieve our aims only when we feel connected to the community and feel its support, guidance and blessing.

We achieve our aims only when we feel the Micah pull in our lives and, with it, the strength of connection to other Micah folk--a community.

We achieve our aims only when Micah's message of Jewish wisdom emanates to us in a way that makes sense on a personal level.

We achieve our aims only when we have a sense that Micah makes a difference in our lives, in the lives of our children, in the life of our wider community.

These are the goals we should be reaching for. These are the questions that I am asking as I seek to use this period of transition to re-calibrate personally, professionally, communally.

In this sense, I am increasingly taken by questions of Jewish identity. What, at the heart of it, are our Jewish lives about? What are the challenges to meaningful Jewish identity? What are the solutions?

My thinking on these questions, as many of you know, has long been guided by the brilliant, eight-year-old book The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America, by Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen. Now a second book has emerged to further shape my thinking--one I referred to in my column last month, A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor. This is another small link in the master narrative of Reform Judaism, integrating the wisdom of Torah with the wisdom of the age we live in. Now, the sociology put forth by Eisen and Cohen is integrated with the contemporary philosophy of Taylor.

The complexity of what we call "Jewish identity" in our world makes the questions of temple life, the role of the synagogue and the priority of our Jewish commitments complicated --or at least not self evident for many of us. Last month, for our Education Task Force, I attempted to set down "building blocks" or the "component parts" of my own take on modern Jewish identity in an attempt to advance our discussion on Jewish education and curricular goals. My thinking is that if we can arrive at some working understanding of what Jewish identity is about for us, we can not only sort out what we want in Jewish education, we can also create a larger vision for our community.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF JEWISH IDENTITY:

1. Sense of Jewish Peoplehood.

2. Sense of holiness and finiteness of human life.

3. Sense of "universal" ethics and the demands they make on our lives.

4. Sense of the joy and poetry of life--beauty, wonder, awe, love.

5. Sense of deep mystery at the heart of the universe--God.

6. Sense of Jewish culture and literature as the Jewish people's "interpretation" of both our historical experience and the human condition--this is "Torah" in its largest sense, not only the five books of Moses, not only the Hebrew Bible, but the accumulation of Jewish wisdom through the ages.

7. Sense of being Jewish as a social experience--you can't be a Jew alone.

8. Sense of Hebrew as a connecting force in Judaism, to our past, to others today.

9. Sense of the miracle of modern Israel.

10. Sense of the miracle and innate importance of Jewish survival, l'dor va dor.

To what extent is there agreement within our diverse community that this is a representative list of the building blocks for Jewish identity today? To be sure, we each emphasize some over others--and some may be distant and remote. But to what extent do these make a statement about what contemporary Jewish identity must grapple with? To what extent can and do these building blocks shape the very essence of our communal life?

We might consider these as a touchstone for conversation-- a means to create a wider discussion about where each of us is personally and where we might be going communally as we seek to meet our future with commitment, honesty and strength.

I am looking forward to the journey with each of you.