We suffer less from lack of belief than from inadequate language to express it.  How can we believe what we do not even know how to say?  Conversations about belief often make honest people feel guilty for doubting that they think everyone else knows for sure.  We can confirm or deny belief in “God,”, “revelation,” and so forth only by asking first what these might mean rephrased for modern ears.

Consider the Sh’ma and its blessings, the daily liturgical staple that affirms our faith in one sole God Who (a) creates all things, (b) reveals Torah to Israel, and (c) promises redemption.  What modern metaphors capture best this threefold insistence on creation, revelation, and redemption?

My metaphor combines time, space, and history.  What astounds about the universe is the aesthetic and scientific miracle by which the finely tuned network of natural law accords so beautifully with mathematics.  For modern Jews, the doctrine of creation is the affirmation that the universe has design.  Revelation describes our faith that purpose has a place within this cosmic order:  in touch with ultimate wisdom, we humans can matter in a grand scheme of which we know almost nothing but into which we have been thrust.  Redemption is the realization that, over the long run, purpose within pattern gives us the right to hope.  Pattern, purpose, and hope are the contemporary equivalents of creation, revelation, and redemption.  They sustain us on the tiny bridge of time called history.

If the age of just the earth (never mind the universe, which is four times older) were a line in space equal to the distance from New York to Los Angeles, Jewish history since Abraham and Sarah would cover only a few feet, and human existence, prehistory and all, would encompass only part of a single span of the Golden Gate or the George Washington bridge.  The Holocaust, therefore, in all its unspeakable horror, is insufficient to shatter optimism.  It is, as it were, a blip on the screen of cosmic time.  The state of Israel is a similar, albeit positive, tiny step in time, an outpost of hope we must defend, but hardly a sudden sign of imminent messianic victory, as some extremists imagine.  Life is always lived in the narrowness of bridge spans.  Faith is the insistence that the bridge goes somewhere, connecting past and future in a present that has meaning.

For the bridge is not without direction.  Creation pulses toward ever-increasing freedom.  If God is the power behind universal pattern, the guarantor of purpose, and the ground for hope, we can say, in short, that God wants human freedom; has designed a universe that invites it; and summons Jews to champion it.  The Jewish people’s moral purpose is to tell our story of servitude and freedom, to act it out in ritual that revives our vision and steels our nerve, and then to demonstrate in all we do our faith in freedom as the redemptive end of history.

Beyond the moral opposition of freedom and enslavement, Judaism codes the world also as kodesh or bol, the holy or the everyday.  We move from slavery to freedom; but back and forth between kodesh and bol.  Torah is a clarion call for freedom and a blueprint for meaningful human life in the holy and the everyday.

“Holy” (or “sacred”) likewise requires modern translation.  It means nonutilitarian – like Hanukkah candles which our liturgy says “are holy; we have no right to use them.”  Sacred relationships are those where people do not use each other.  God is uniquely holy (beyond manipulation).  We have holy times and places, too:  like the Sabbath, when we do no utilitarian work, or the kotel (the Western Wall), where we stop to pray but from which we derive no secular gain.

We humans have access to only that single quadrant of the space/time continuum which we call our present.  We cannot see it “all at once” – a metaphor combining space (“all”) and time (“at once”).  The Jewish map is thus an ellipse, revolving equally about two centers:  Israel and the Diaspora.  Diaspora Jewry sanctifies time; Jews in Israel sanctify space.  We need them both.  I am a religious Zionist in that I strive for redemption in our land (space), but also in history (time).

Given my faith in freedom, I am not dismayed by (as the editors put it) “movements of personal and sexual liberation.”  I even understand (though I do not welcome) “assimilating or otherwise falling away.”  Increased options are the price of freedom, which (as I say) “God wants,” and so should we.

I decry the reactionary call to reign in freedom, and the provocative rhetoric that pits the “good Jewish guys” against the bad.  Endemic moral chaos and increasingly marginal Jewish identity derive less from the suspension of limits by those in authority than from our society’s widespread suspicion that life is meaningless.  Here, I do indeed see the prospect of large-scale Jewish revival (Commentary’s word, not mine; I do not think we are dead), since Judaism is uniquely outfitted to provide demonstrations of human meaning, for ours is a story that celebrates freedom, while affirming pattern, purpose, and hope.

Here is the challenge:  to overcome old habits that ground Jewish survival in fear of anti-Semitism and memories of European ethnicity.  A century ago we needed Jewish hospitals, colleges, clubs, and centers – for Jews were not welcome in the mainstream.  Now we need local communities of the sacred, where people come to mark life’s passages and discover the Jewish way of making sense of the world.  We have been conditioned by a “foreign affairs” agenda – saving Jewish lives abroad and founding a Jewish state, for which we successfully galvanized the combined power, wealth, and corporate wisdom of national organizations.  The struggle to save ourselves is a different challenge, requiring small-scale communal care suffused with religious vision.  What Federations were to the world we are leaving, synagogues must become for the world we are building.  But they will have to transform themselves from old-time ethnic addresses to spiritual oases, sacred centers where the realities of pattern, purpose, and hope are beyond doubt.

Jews by choice are a particular source of promise for us.  A post-ethnic Judaism requires no particular old-country memories.  It overcomes loneliness and fragmentation with life led daily in committed and caring community.  Here is a spiritual invitation worth opting for, especially in an age where people seek out meaning.  But meaning is a lifelong search, and so, finally, revival requires that we outgrow our obsession with childhood education at the expense of attending to Judaism’s adult message.  Judaism should be recast as intellectually satisfying and emotionally enriching to the most discerning adults among us, for a religion worth affirming cannot be for children only.

I welcome denominationalism as an increase in Jewish options, but I fear triumphalism and closed-mindedness.  There is no single standard of Jewish authenticity.  As I respect other Jewish choices that I cannot personally espouse, I expect others to esteem as equally profound my own determination to be a Reform Jew.  I too am engaged in an age-old task of Jewish survival and the ever-new hope that I may help those I meet on the bridge of time that is my life.