My August column, in which I raised the question about what makes us Jewish, elicited a great deal of response--mails, phone calls, comments. I was happy. People were asking themselves the question I had posed. Yet i was challenged with an impossible question: "What about God?" Here, i had written an entire column about what comprises Jewish identity, but I had not included God.

Round II: Bringing God into the equation. Judaism begins with God. God is the third word of the Torah:

1. "In the beginning" (one word in Hebrew).

2. "Created" (terribly awkward and incorrect English word order here putting verb before subject as Hebrew does).

3. "God." The universe, all creation issues forth from God. Judaism begins with God in Genesis 12, when God calls on Abram to leave his ancestral homeland and travel to a land that God would show him.

The great saga of liberation of the Jewish people begins with God appearing to Moses in a burning bush.

Sinai begins with God's revelation. The first of the Ten Commandments, "I am Adonai thy God...."

How, then, can we be Jewish without including God in our calculation?

As I said in my August column, Judaism might be viewed as an ongoing conversation--in some ways an argument, a discovery about what Judaism is. So, on the one hand, we have always had within our ranks Jewish dogmatists, those who insist on a set of beliefs that define what Judaism is about and, with it, the requirements for being a "true Jew." Faith in a defined view of a commanding God is central to their thinking. On the other hand, we also have a strong strain within Judaism that teaches that action, rather than faith, is the primary expression of a Jewish religious life.

I believe Judaism teaches that God is, by definition, beyond human comprehension, yet real nonetheless. We cannot see, feel, touch, taste or hear God in any ordinary sense of those words. Our access to God is "spiritual." The reality of God is what guarantees that our lives and the world have a purpose and that our actions are not meaningless in an ultimate sense.

Our own congregation is named after one of our people's earliest and greatest theologians, the ancient prophet Micah. His words are enshrined in the frieze of the wall of our sanctuary above the quiet room. "it has been told you, what is good and what God requires of you: only to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." We moderns instinctively understand and relate to the justice and mercy. What, we ask, does it mean to "walk humbly" with God?

Micah's great teaching is the reason that I personally have to be a believer and not a Jewish humanist, while being sympathetic to humanists' aspirations. I cannot allow humankind to be the standard against which all is judged. My religion, as Micah taught, requires humility. As a human being, i am required to "walk humbly with my God." That means I need to hold at bay the kind of ego and conceit, ambition and greed, that can drive national agendas and lead to oppression and war. People often say that religion is the source of the world's bloodshed and violence. Why are these more basic human traits not seen as the culprits? True religion, true faith, comes to help us control these baser instincts within ourselves--the dark cup that is within us. Judaism requires each of us to measure ourselves against God's demands and not against a more fallible human standard. That is why I try to live my life as a person of faith. Faith does not mean certainty. That is why it is called "faith" and why I am a religious liberal. I need to be open to doubt and challenge.

This Jewish God is very complicated. We are called "Israel," or "the ones that wrestle with God." This is where our faith begins.