By Rabbi Josh Beraha
Adapted from a sermon given at Temple Micah on February 6, 2026
When I was applying to rabbinical school, I scheduled coffees with rabbis. I wanted to ask: “What surprised you? What do you love about being a rabbi? What do you wish you’d known?”
One of those meetings has stayed with me—not because of what I asked, but because of what I was asked.
The rabbi was Dan Ain. We were walking through the West Village, overpriced lattes in hand, talking about his years in rabbinical school and his life in the rabbinate. I was asking all the questions I thought were the “real” ones: about the future of the American synagogue, Israel, assimilation, antisemitism, youth engagement, Hebrew school, politics, identity—everything that concrete.
Then, in an in-between moment, Dan stopped, turned to me, and asked: “What’s your relationship with God?”
I remember being taken aback. God? That wasn’t what the other coffees were about. I hadn’t factored God into my decision. I mumbled something—honestly, I don’t remember what.
But I do remember thinking that Dan wasn’t being pious for its own sake. He was handing me an invitation into a conversation Judaism has been having for centuries: What, if anything, does God have to do with the lives we’re living—and trying to live?
Over time, I took the invitation. Part of me heard it as personal. But part of me heard it as an American Jewish question. What is the story of American Jews and God? Do we have any real theological concern—or has “God” become a word for other people, more fluent in God-talk, a word we inherited in our prayerbook but don’t quite know what to do with?
When I got to rabbinical school, I found I wasn’t the first to wrestle with this. One of my professors at Hebrew Union College was Rabbi Dr. Eugene Borowitz, one of the most significant Reform theologians of the twentieth century. Recently, we marked his tenth yahrzeit, and I’ve found myself thinking about him a lot.
Borowitz wrote with real sharpness about American Jewish life. His critique, in essence, was this: we built impressive institutions while letting the relationship with God grow thin.
Picture the postwar decades that Borowitz entered as a young rabbi. American Judaism is taking off. Jews leave cities in huge numbers, move into new suburbs, and build synagogues that are built to last: big sanctuaries, new educational wings, social halls sized for weddings and banquets. It’s an age of institutional confidence. Synagogue life scales.
But Borowitz wasn’t impressed. Not because buildings and membership don’t matter—they do. But he looked at all that success and asked: Where is God in any of it? Where is the sacred center?
Without theological concern, he argued, the synagogue risks becoming an effectively secular institution. For Borowitz, Judaism is not just a language for the values we already hold. It’s a root system. Because an ethics that can actually challenge us doesn’t generate itself. If morality is only what I happen to prefer, then it will rarely ask more of me than what is convenient. It won’t have the force to pull me beyond my own tribe.
So Borowitz insists that our lives must be answerable to something beyond us: God, covenant, a claim strong enough to ground us. And the reason he insists on this is history. After the Second World War, he says, we can no longer assume the “naturalness of values.” The twentieth century shattered that illusion. Decency is not automatic. Civilization is not self-sustaining. And the institutions we like to imagine “produce” good people can’t be counted on to do it for us—not then, and not now.
In The Masks Jews Wear (1973), Borowitz runs through the modern substitutes: the university, the theater, psychotherapy, the latest techniques of self-realization. He’s not dismissive of these. They can educate us, refine us, help us cope. But they can’t finally tell us why we should care passionately about being a certain kind of person—why we should build a more human society.
That’s where, for Borowitz, God matters: God is the moral ground we stand on. And even if you don’t love God-language (totally okay!), the underlying claim is hard to escape: none of us gets to live without an ultimate center.
So here’s where I want to leave this. If none of us gets to live without an ultimate center—if we will organize our days around something, if we will hand our attention to some kind of altar—the question isn’t whether you worship; it’s what you worship, and what it makes of you.
So I wonder: when the world feels unstable, what steadies you? When you’re afraid, what do you reach for? When you feel powerless, what do you cling to? Call it God, call it covenant, call it conscience—just don’t pretend you have no center. Because an empty center never stays empty.
And that’s where the Jewish conversation matters. It’s not just a set of inherited values, it’s a root system that asks more of us than convenience.
So a few more questions to consider: What is your relationship with the sacred? Does it make you more compassionate, more responsible? If it doesn’t, what would it mean to re-root before the substitutes become our gods?
This article was originally featured in the Mar/Apr/May 2026 issue of the Vine.