Category Archives: Uncategorized

A man falls overboard, and the captain rushes to the rail hoping to locate him. Unable to see through the heavy fog, he shouts into the PA system: “We are here by your side, but cannot find you. What is your position? What is your position?” A moment later, a voice responds: “President of a bank! President of a bank.”

That’s a “Navy Parable” (as I like to think of it) that I heard while working for a year designing continuing education courses for Navy chaplains. How sad, we say, that even in what may be his last and dying moments, the man thinks his professional identity is what will save him.

By contrast, consider Jonah, about to fall overboard, and accosted by sailors who think him responsible for the storm that is capsizing their vessel. When asked, “Who are you?” Jonah replies. “I am a Hebrew. I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made both sea and land” (Jonah 14:9).

The difference is not just hubris versus piety. Sociologists point out the long-term trend from identity that is ascribed to identity that is achieved. Jonah’s identity is ascribed – – a simple given into which he is born and from which he has no intention of escaping. The bank president’s identity is achieved – – it is the pride and purpose of his life, something he has built and nurtured as the self he wants to be.

We can imagine both Jonah and the banker shouting avid affirmation of who they are as death threatens to annihilate them. Faced with the possibility of no longer being anything at all, they scream aloud just who they are and who it is that will go missing when they are gone. We may be born with just an immediate sense of self; but as we grow older, we learn to interpret that immediacy in ways that justify it. We are Hebrews, we decide; or bank presidents; or other things that matter.

The ultimate injury to our humanity is being told we are nothing. Consider the testimony of Primo Levi, recalling Auschwitz : “They have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair…. They will even take away our name…. I have learned that I am Haeftling [“prisoner”]. My number is 174517.” [1] Dehumanization is precisely the exercise of taking away everything we thought we were and reducing us to numbers.

Nobody wants to be reduced to a numbered nothing. But if not a number, then what? Bank president or Hebrew? What we have achieved or what we have been given? We live nowadays with a profusion of both. “Identity” says photographer Juan Fontcuberta, is “validation of my roles…. I’m an artist, or a husband, or a father, or Catalan.” [2]

We do not all have this privilege of profusion. The poor have little room for selecting the luxury of identities beyond their day to day struggle to survive. But anyone reading this is likely to have just the opposite problem: too many choices with insufficient time and energy to satisfy any single one of them. Hence the struggle to be good spouses, good parents, good professionals, good friends; good conversationalists, good musicians, good cooks, good gardeners; not to mention just plain good people; and still have room each day to be good to ourselves.

Knowing he was first, foremost, and altogether a Hebrew, Jonah had only to worry about being the best Hebrew he could be. When Hebrew is just one of many selves we might say we are, we face the need to order our priorities. A healthy exercise is shifting the question from what we think we are to what we want other people to say we are – not just now, but at our eulogy, after we are dead.

From the Navy Parable, I wonder if it will suffice to have the rabbi say, “Above all, he was a terrific president of a bank!” I rather doubt it.

[1] Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier ed., 1993), pp. 26-27

[2] From Adam Bly, ed., Science is Culture: Conversations at the New Intersection of Science + Society ((New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), p. 83.

If you were raised in an age of dental pain – that’s “pAIn” not “pLAn” — you probably still flinch at the word “decay,” a hideous pronouncement of dire things to come.

The fear of decay runs deep among us. Anthropologists associate it with the horror that premodern societies accord to ritual impurity, precisely the concern of this week’s Torah reading (Naso), which describes gonorrhea, leprosy, and contact with a corpse as matters of physical decay, so contagious that their victims must be quarantined “outside the camp.”

Biblical men and women probably thought the decay of these particular impurities was passed along through everyday physical contact. No wonder they feared them.

The Rabbis, however, date these impurities only to Sinai, thereby implying that the problem was not just physical. Revelation could hardly have changed the diseases — leprosy is leprosy, after all. What changed was the nature of society.

Pre-Sinai society exemplified what philosophers call “the state of nature” – the “every man for himself” perspective that Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Torah is the ethical and social glue that imposes order on primal anarchic chaos. Envisioning Torah as an elemental social contract, the Rabbis transformed the biblical fear of contagious physical impurity into a symbolic warning against mind-sets that threaten the social order with decay.

Itturei Hatorah thus reads “leprosy, gonorrhea, and contact with a corpse” metaphorically. Since the Rabbis thought leprosy a punishment for slander, leprosy is taken to represent the jealousy that lies behind our speaking ill of others. Gonorrhea signifies the extreme selfishness of wanton personal desire at the cost of others. Corpse-contact symbolizes the danger of despair – seeing death as our end anyway, we might mistakenly question the very point of life. Jealousy, selfishness, and despair are indeed disorders that corrode community. Hence the need for ostracism — putting these blights “outside the camp.”

What goes for society goes for institutions as well. Organizations regularly find their best efforts spoiled by destructive jealousies, intense self-centeredness, and nay-saying pessimists whose gloom and doom prevent the good from ever happening. For-profit organizations fire such miscreants. Not-for-profit organizations do not always have that option because they rely on volunteers. They should focus, therefore, on how the Torah concludes this section.

After being warned to ostracize carriers of social decay, we read “The Israelites did so,” and then, “Thus did the Israelites do.” Commentators solve the redundancy by referring the first instance to the Israelite leaders who dutifully obeyed the demand; and the second instance to the offenders themselves who are said to have agreed to be quarantined. The assumption is that problematic people are capable of transcending their own anti-social behavior and getting out of the way to let the communal work proceed. Why would they do that?

People who are jealous, self-centered, and negative do poison the body politic – but usually because they are hurting, not because they are evil. Having their hurt acknowledged can help them overcome their potential toxicity. Board members who lose an election may be able to step aside and let the board do its work. Complainers can be convinced that if they have nothing good to say, they can at least say nothing bad. People who hurt inside crave understanding. If given it, they may allow the project to move ahead, in effect ostracizing themselves from the further pain of an institutional battle that they are going to lose anyway.

It is painful to see everyone else getting ahead, while you alone fall farther behind; painful to want something desperately but know the institution you love is moving in the opposite direction; painful to awaken every morning, seeing the glass half empty and the world growing darker. People who suffer these inner disappointments are to be understood and helped, not despised and denigrated. Show them some love while still insisting on the greater good, and they just might let the greater good happen.

I have reached the age when most of my rabbi and professor friends are retiring. Unlike mail carriers, lawyers, electricians, and pretty much everyone else, however, they are being renamed emeriti. At university commencement exercises just this past week, I observed a cohort of newly designated professors emeriti being ceremoniously awarded their new title as if it were a promotion rather than just a euphemism for “retiree.”

What does it mean, I wondered, to be named emeritus (emerita, for women) — a title that is anything but a study in innocence. From the Latin, ex meritum, it might, with a stretch, be  taken as implying the condition of no longer being in a state of merit – no small matter, after all. Affording myself some homiletical license, let me pursue this line of thought a little.

Practically speaking, professors or clergy emeriti are simply people who no longer merit their normal salary and emoluments: their offices, perhaps, or support staff, and pulpit or library privileges. But psychologically, the condition of ex meritum can seem to mean being “out of merit,” like “out of gas,” stranded on the highway of life with no capacity to continue the journey? When you are “out of merit,” what exactly are you out of?

The issue of “merit” runs deep in western culture, where 2,000 years of Jewish and Christian theology have argued over what constitutes ultimate human merit – “justification” before God, in Christian terminology. Jews typically have argued that we are “justified by works” – that our merit consists in performing the good deeds that God wants. By contrast, classical Christian thought has held that human beings are irreparably born into a state of sin so that no amount of good works can save them. They are “justified” only by “faith” in the grace of God, “grace” being God’s determination to love us even though we are emeritus (“without merit”).

Either way, the matter of human “merit” has exercised western culture for two millennia. I am reminded of it, perhaps, because my newest book (Naming God, Jewish Lights Publishing, June, 2015) examines Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, Our King,” a favorite Jewish prayer whose best-known line approaches the Christian position by pleading for God to show us grace “because we have no good deeds” – because we are, that is to say, emeritus, “out of merit.”

It may be more than accidental that we generally reserve the term emeritus for clergy and teachers. Teaching, in western culture, was once the province of the church, after all, and being a “churchman” was a “calling” to do God’s work. Official theology aside, it was popularly thought that preaching the gospel in pulpit or classroom was about as meritorious an activity as one might find. The day you stopped, you were emeritus, “out of merit” — just like everyone else, that is.

Secularism has eroded such medieval metaphysics by now, but not altogether for the better. Our secular society has done away with divine “calling” but replaced it with “professions” – a term that still has religious connotations of “professing higher truths” and that demarcates doctors, lawyers, and accountants, say, as more worthwhile than plumbers, farmers, and mere money-makers, let alone volunteers and unpaid parents. We ought to counter that secular bias by maintaining that we are all called to serve God in our own distinctive ways, whether by parenting, teaching, or blacksmithing; through our professions, our crafts, our businesses, or our artistry; through just being kind and good and helpful, if we cannot or do not work for profit.

God calls all of us, then, not just some of us; and not just to work (as meriti) until we retire (as emeriti). Ultimate “merit,” we should say, is not just what we do for a living. Retirement may be the opportunity of a lifetime to replace dependence on what human institutions decide to reward for what God would have us be.

“What God wants” said the biblical prophet Micah, some 2,700 years ago is for us “to practice justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Divine.” Here is the only calling that all of us can practice, independent of our age, our health, and the accidents that befall us. It is the only calling we carry to the grave and the calling from which we can never be declared emeriti.

That’s exactly how it felt for those of us who gathered to revisit 30 spectacular years of the Wexner Foundation, my vote for the experiment with the greatest vision and long-term promise for 21^st-century Jewry. The brain child of Leslie Wexner in Columbus, the Foundation has quietly but systematically been establishing a coalition of partners who can change the world: a generation of young Israelis brought to Harvard to learn leadership and business entrepreneurship; a cadre of young adults about to enter careers in Jewish organizational leadership; and a massive cohort of Jewish men and women in every major city in North America, who have been given the Jewish education they always wanted paired with vision to lead the communities that they serve.

Just two weeks ago, some 1500 graduates of all three programs converged on Columbus to say thank you and to herald their coming of age as the next generation charged with creating a Jewish future, the people who already determine much of Jewish life and who are poised to do a lot more.

Wexner is not one of yesteryear’s salvage operations: saving Jewish literacy, Jewish memories, Jewish in-marriage, Jewish nostalgia, or Jewish anything-else. It is a crash course in studying Jewishly, thinking differently and acting strategically — not to recoup past losses, but to establish future gains. It lays the groundwork to be for our time what the Rabbis were for life under Rome, what Maimonides was for the golden age of medieval philosophy; and what Zionists were for a window of opportunity in which to establish only the third Jewish commonwealth in history.

As befits a “Sinai” experience, I walked away with a “Torah” that undergirds the Wexner vision – boiled down here into Ten Commandments that stand out for me. To be sure, there are many more, and each of these deserves expansion, but you get the idea: they should be emblazoned on the boardroom walls of every Jewish organization and the computer screen savers of everyone who works there.

1. Attack tomorrow’s challenges, not yesterday’s. Be proactive, not reactive.
2. If we demonstrate the reason Judaism matters, it will start to matter.
3. Develop a compelling vision of why and how it ought to matter, and remain systematically and scrupulously true to that vision,
4. Root the vision in a strong moral compass; be value-driven – with guiding values that are inherently Jewish but intensely universal as well.
5. Saturate your organization with that strong moral leadership buttressed by authentic Jewish learning.
6. Run your organization with consummate excellence. Your mission is too serious to let it be compromised by mediocrity. Demanding excellence for yourself, you will get it from others.
7. Treat those others with respect: your own staff; the teachers and consultants you hire; the people you serve – the people who put their faith in you. In almost 30 years of teaching Wexner classes, I can say that nowhere else have I been shown such consummate respect. My adult Wexner students have had their time, energy, and attention richly rewarded by access to cutting edge thinking, spectacular presenters, and conferences in environments that give the message, “You matter.”
8. Practice scrupulous honesty with regular reviews of what is working and what isn’t. Do whatever is necessary to reestablish the centrality of your vision and the excellence of how you carry it out.
9. Surround yourself with the right people: they must share your values and your vision; they must do, with excellence, what you cannot do yourself; and work positively as a team with faith in what you all are building together.
10. Over time, these practices will build trust – trust well-placed, trust that will catapult everyone to a place of demanding the best from themselves and enjoying the common journey to a better future.

In 1864, with the Civil War approaching its long and bloody end, Abraham Lincoln took stock. “Human nature will not change,” he averred. “In any future great national trial, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.”

He was describing the diverse cast of characters that the war projected into the spotlight of history. But he might equally have meant any single human being, then or now, for we all combine within ourselves the potential for contrasts: we are often weak, but can choose to be strong; silly sometimes, but overall (we hope), wise; good (we pray) – but at times (we fear), at least complicit in some evil.

Physically, genetics deals us disparate hands: we are tall or short, dark or light, graceful or clumsy. But character is different. There we choose what to become. To appreciate happiness, live through grief with nobility, be unstintingly grateful, show appropriate love, be generous in spirit — these measures of human depth do not emerge automatically. They require nurture.

Precisely this is the religious quest: to foster human character befitting those who are made in the image of God. Toward that end, this week’s sedra delineates the Jewish calendar, for as much as a calendar structures time, it also creates the character of those who follow it.

A calendar is like the stretching of time across a plain, and dropping magnets along the way. The magnets are those special days that attract us as we march through the year’s terrain. Each magnet attracts a different part of our psyche, but taken together, they plumb the entirety of our human endowment. The religious calendar is the key to the deepest resources of our soul.

Shabbat, for instance, is a day not for work, but for God. Imagine the personal depths we might discover if a seventh of our time were dedicated to spiritual awareness, unselfish acts for the sake of God, and taking stands for the sake of heaven. Passover proclaims the value of family and friends, and the sharing of relationships in a state of freedom. Shavuot — the harvest, when we were commanded, “Leave gleanings for the poor and the stranger” — teaches generosity; as Sukkot features gratitude, a time to “rejoice before your God” for one full week. The High Holy Days generate introspection and remorse, pardon and new beginnings.

The holidays mentioned so far are all biblical, but the calendar didn’t stop with the Bible. As the centuries have rolled by, the magnetic field of Jewish time has multiplied its points of attraction. New holidays added to old allow us to delve down ever deeper in our pool of character, ever enlarging our capacity to be fully human.

The Rabbis added Chanukah, with its ever-possible miracle of light; Purim, for adults to remember how to play and stay young; and Simchat Torah to dance: momentarily, with the Torah; but beyond that, with the ongoing wonder of life itself.

We now have Yom Hashoah, history’s archive of horror-beyond-belief, to acknowledge the demonic depths to which even “cultured” people can descend; and Yom Ha’atzma’ut, where a national anthem trumpets Hatikvah, “hope,” in a land where even deserts come to life.

We can enter the stream of human potential any holiday we wish, and most of us wait until Rosh Hashanah to start again. But right now will do just fine. We are in the period called the Omer, when we count the days until Shavuot – practice, really, for numbering all our better tomorrows. This omer period, as we count the days, we should count also how our days are spent. If we ignore the magnetic rhythm of the Jewish year, we forfeit the fullness of our humanity, letting time congeal into one large yearly clump of blandness. By yielding instead to the magnets of time, we become practiced in those virtues that color our lives in multifaceted glory.

Sometimes you need a very good memory!

That is the case this year, as Passover began on a Friday night and ended on Saturday night, eight days later. Jews attending synagogue thus found their weekly Torah cycle interrupted not just for one week but for two, as special Passover readings were interjected into the normal weekly progression. Only this week, do we finally pick up where we left off three weeks ago, resuming the tale of Aaron’s investiture as high priest. We start with the enigmatic phrase, “On the eighth day.” But, eighth day of what?

You have to remember that the reading three weeks ago ended with Aaron and his sons (newly ordained as priests) having to wait seven days outside the desert sanctuary (the mishkan). Only now, on the eighth day, can Aaron and his family enter it to initiate sacrifice on behalf of the people. By doing so, they celebrate the fact that God has come to dwell there.

But still: why only on the eighth day?

A Talmudic tradition says the eighth day corresponded to Nisan 1, the anniversary of the day that God began to speak the universe into being. If so, our reading really does require a good memory! It assumes you are thinking back all the way to the act of creation itself. We saw there how God created the world in seven days. Now, as it were, though countless centuries have elapsed, we come to the eighth day: not just the eighth day of Aaron’s ordination, but the eighth day of creation.

The universe was apparently incomplete all those years, awaiting a final act of creation that even almighty God cannot accomplish. God can make the world, even visit it on occasion; but God cannot live in it without the work we do that invites God in.

So that is what the many weeks of reading through Exodus (and now, Leviticus) have been about. All that detailed stuff about hammering together boards and sockets, sowing priestly garments, preparing the eternal light, and affixing the gorgeous drapery — even Aaron’s crash course in sacrifice: all of that was about the uniquely human task of bringing God here to earth, to dwell.

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe reputedly said, “God is in the detail.” He did not mean God’s details (though they are beautiful enough) – the microscopic magnificence of a butterfly’s wing or the billions of flower species each different from the next. He meant our own. Yes, all these past few weeks of reading Torah have been about finding God in our details, the details of a desert mishkan that, made just right, invites God in.

When God finished the divine share of creation, “God blessed the seventh day and rested.” But think about it: Can God get tired? No, God rested because there was nothing left for God to do. Creation had now to be delegated to us. That is why the sixth day of creation ends with the words, “God looked at everything he had done.” Everything God had done, not everything there is to do – like a builder of a home who erects the framework but then must await the electrician to light the place up. From the seventh day on, then, God awaited this eighth day, when God’s creatures might finally finish the job by doing the one thing God could not: make a dwelling place here for God.

We are invited to continue that tradition, not just in building actual sanctuaries, but in our everyday pursuits. Whatever our tasks – planting a garden, serving a customer, preparing a report, representing a client, visiting the sick, chairing a committee – we are to do them with such excellence of detail that even God would feel comfortable dropping by. Are you raising a family? Attending to business? Volunteering in a synagogue? Building a friendship? These are not mere pastimes to fill the space between birth and death. They are examples of a sanctuary, updated for our time: examples of the human ability to find creativity meaningful and work fulfilling. So decorate your home, sell your product, investigate a school for your children, invent a better something-or-other – but do it right; cut no corners. You may find God coming to live nearby. And some day, someone may write of you. “It was an evening and it was a morning: an eighth day.”

What makes things ethically good? That’s Plato’s classic question in his dialogue, Euthyphro: Grant that the gods love what is holy, he says, but do they love the holy because it is holy? Or is it holy because the gods love it?

Change “holy” to “good,” and you get our dilemma. Do the gods advise such things as justice and kindness because they are good? Or are these things good because the gods advise them?

Most readers cheer when Plato demonstrates the former: justice and kindness are intrinsically good — not just called good because the gods like them. Hurray for the independent good!

But Plato’s question reads more threateningly when we replace the Greek “gods” with our own God. Does the prophetic adjuration to do “what is good: do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8) mean that justice, mercy, and humility before God are good because God likes them? Or that God likes them because they are good?

What we said for the Greek gods must hold for our God as well. God must like the good because it is really good, not the other way around.

But then, who needs God? If the good exists in and of itself, doesn’t God become ethically redundant?

Not necessarily. We might say that God does indeed like the good because it is good, just as we should. But note the verbs. God does and we just should – because sometimes we do not. God necessarily does like the good because God is altogether good by nature. Not being God, we sometimes get it wrong.

So the good is the good on its own merit; God likes the good because it is good, but also because God’s nature is altogether good. Religions, we might say, preach the good both on its own merit, but also in the name of God who recognizes it.

All of which leads us to the function of religion, which, it turns out, does three things to lead us to be good.

1. Religion teaches, argues, reasons, cajoles, preaches and pleads: Like philosophy, religion too reminds us cognitively of our obligation to choose the good. But unlike philosophy, religion links the good with God, using one ideal (God) to reinforce the other (the good).
2. Religion uses ritual to enhance its moral message. People don’t actually respond well to purely cognitive reasoning. We require also the aesthetic, which religion supplies through ritual. It is one thing to say that God wants “justice, mercy and humility.” It is another to enact it in ritual that moves people to internalize these goods as what we should choose – as God does. Over a century ago (1912), sociologist Emile Durkheim noted how ritual enlists our emotions, not just our mind, to reinforce communities that hold people responsible for ethical behavior.
3. Religion tells stories. Part of the aesthetic appeal comes also from religion’s endless rehearsing of stories about ethical dilemmas. “The artistic is very close to the ethical,” writes literary critic Terry Eagleton (How to Read Literature, pp. 75, 77), discussing George Eliot who wanted readers to “imagine and to feel” the “pains and joys” of her characters. We develop “imaginative sympathy” with the heroes and victims of our religious narratives.

As a Marxist, Eagleton suspects that such sympathy is hardly enough to guarantee the good, however, and no doubt, he is right – else serial killers and corporate polluters could be reborn by a course in reading the classics. Neither is religious ritual sufficient – regular attendees at worship are not necessarily models of morality.

So religions do all three.

1. They moralize, lecture, teach, and preach (as philosophy does), but they go farther by linking what is independently good to God who is good.
2. They provide rituals that create cohesive communities and move us emotionally beyond what mere argument can accomplish.
3. They provide stories with which we identify.

All this makes religion a delivery system for the ethical; it does not, however, guarantee that the ethics it delivers are necessarily moral. But the same can be said of every other option: Philosophy includes Marxism gone wrong as well as Kant’s ethical imperative.

Religion’s very power to deliver explains the evil it has wrought; but that very same power explains also the good of which it is capable. The specter of religion on the side of evil should not deter us from the promise of religion on the side of good; and given the complexity of human personality and culture, I can think of nothing better than religion to advance humanity beyond our current state.

“Aren’t all religions alike?” people want to know. “Isn’t the point really just to be a good person?”

Well, yes and no. What makes any religion great is indeed its commitment to human goodness. But religions approach that goodness in their own distinctive ways. They all serve up the idea of how properly to respond to the human condition, but they slice it differently.

The issue arose most recently for me when I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s definitive exhibit entitled, “The Plains Indians” – the culture of a large grouping of tribes ranging from the Cree and Ojibwa in western Canada to the Cheyenne, Comanche, and Sioux nations scattered southward all the way to Texas.

One of the items on display references four basic values of these Plains Indians: generosity, courage, wisdom and fortitude.

As it happens, I had just discovered elsewhere that over in England, Jane Austen’s 1817 tombstone praises her for charity, devotion, faith, and purity (see Roy and Leslie Adkins, Jane Austen’s England).

Hmmmm. Generosity, courage, wisdom and fortitude, on one hand; charity, devotion, faith, and purity, on the other.

Every culture, said pioneer sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), establishes its own “ideal type,” the recipe for perfection that its adherents strive ideally to emulate. What we have here, then, are two examples of ideal types: generosity, courage, wisdom and fortitude (for the Indian Peoples of the plains) and charity, devotion, faith, and purity (for Christians like Jane Austin).

The attributes are gendered. The tribal culture’s selection is largely male, the model for tribal braves; Austin’s set was prescribed for pre-Victorian women. But even so, they tell us a lot about Native American religion on one hand and Christianity on the other.

The tribal traits are weighted toward the competitive (even warlike) life on the plains, where tribes contended with the need to hunt and fight for control of their environment. High on their list are courage and fortitude, what every young man was asked to demonstrate in the grueling vision quest that marked his transition to manhood.

With Austen, by contrast, we get a feminized version of recognized Christian virtues: faith and devotion, certainly, but also charity and purity – traits found in monastic culture for men as well.

Native American religion inculcated attributes of bravery, its ideal type being the Indian Brave. Christian religion accented faith, but also selflessness (even self-abnegation) and the challenge to remain pure in a world filled with temptations of the flesh; its ideal type was the solitary monk, devoting days and nights to the veneration of God while avoiding worldly pleasures.

What about Jews? What would the four Jewish attributes be? As with Native Americans and Christians, the Jewish ideals too were intended originally for men, but have nowadays been generalized to women also. What are they?

To some extent, any four terms are an arbitrary selection – just as the Indian and Christian examples here must be. But their general orientation is not. What is the Jewish ideal type? If not the Native Brave or the Christian monk, what does classical Judaism prescribe as ideal?

I suspect the Rabbis would have advocated learning, justice, righteousness and making peace. Their ideal was the learned judge who dispenses justice, acts with righteousness, and makes peace between warring parties. These four traits figure prominently in such manuals of behavior as Pirkei Avot (second century) and they recur throughout rabbinic literature. They epitomize the Jewish exemplar of talmid chakham.

So back to the original question: aren’t all religions just cases of being a good person? Not really.

To be sure, they all admire the good; and there is much that they share. Whether expressly mentioned here or not, for example, peace is valued by all three cultures; so too is generosity, which appears expressly in the Native list and is reflected in monastic vows of poverty. Similarly, all three religions esteem living in accord with the divine; offering part of our bounty back to God (or the gods); and learning the wisdom of the past. I make no inveterate distinctions here: as I said, all great religions are great for a reason – they all raise us up to be our highest selves.

But they approach the good differently; they slice the ideal in different ways. In identifying with a given religion, adherents learn to value that religion’s particular slicing. Judaism’s signature path to the good is through learning and study, by which one becomes a scholar; scholarship must lead to action, however: lo hamidrash ha’ikar ela hama’aseh (“not learning but doing is the main thing”). And the highest form of action is to act justly and rightly so as to bring peace where there is strife.

It’s Shabbat Hagadol again, the “Great Shabbat” that precedes the seder, and time for my annual plea to make this year’s seder something worthy of being called great. No one knows exactly why this anticipatory Shabbat is called “great” – the term appears first in the Gospel of John (of all places) and no Jewish source uses it until the Middle Ages, by which time, no one knew any more what it meant. Among the possibilities, however, is the realization that it precedes the greatest holiday in our calendar: Passover, which gave us our birth as a People and introduced freedom from slavery as a supreme value for all humanity.

Unless we rise from our annual seder convinced of Passover’s “greatness,” we miss the mark. It must echo with this year’s news, not just antiquity’s events. The “Great Shabbat” was established to rehearse the Haggadah in advance, anticipating moments for our seder to make old words sound entirely new.

Just think of all change that our Haggadah has undergone in attempts to retain its freshness. Originally, there was no printed text at all – in an oral age, people made it up as they went along. Originally too, there were three, not four cups of wine, and some rabbis even added a fifth cup, because the ones they had represented God’s acts of deliverance in the past, but they wanted a cup to remain unconsumed on the table unless God appeared to save us once again. By the late Middle Ages, that became an Elijah’s Cup. And nowadays, some people have added a Miriam’s Cup as well.

The meal didn’t come only half way through the night either. People ate first, originally, using the foods to prompt discussion. When people began to “eat and run,” however, the meal was postponed to make hungry diners sit through the discussion before satisfying their appetites.

There were not four questions originally either; and a child did not ask them until the Middle Ages. Since people ate first, children asked genuine questions prompted by the meal. Our “four questions” are just rabbinic examples of what to say to a child who cannot think of anything to ask. Without a meal coming first, and with nothing to prompt a child’s curiosity, these became standardized questions that children delivered by rote, the way we do today.

No one sang Dayyenu in the early years either. It was still optional in the tenth century.

At first, the Seder’s high point was an opaque midrash about some “wandering Aramean” who was worse than Pharaoh. Traditional seders still have that midrash, although those who say it are unlikely to know that it was a veiled reference to Roman domination – change the vowels and the Hebrew aRaMi (Aramean) becomes RoMi (Roman). After the Crusades, a new climax was added: opening the door for Elijah, and hoping for the messiah. “Next year in Jerusalem!” we began saying.

A slew of new Haggadahs appear annually about now. Some are just glitzier rewrites of the old; others provide commentary with contemporary interpretations; some update our story to reflect the realities of slavery still rampant round the world. More than a new Haggadah, however, consider the need to be a genuine leader of the seder, not just its facilitator. Ask people for a new question that we ought to be considering. Take time for them to express what slaveries they feel, what freedom might look like this year.

Feel free to skip readings that make little sense to you. The book we use for a holiday of freedom should not be oppressive! The point of the seder is not its readings but its message: the Jewish People’s mission is to see a world redeemed from degradation.

Do whatever you can to apply that message to our time. Just rereading the same old script of the centuries may get the word out; but only pausing to make the script come alive we get the message through.

Synagogues should be asking, “What business are we in?” That may seem obvious, but it isn’t, and most synagogue leaders get it wrong – with disastrous consequences.

The usual answers are things like Jewish education, Shabbat and holiday services, social action, or even all of the above, in the tried and true triad of religion: Torah (study) avodah (prayer) and g’milut chasadim (good deeds).

Religion may be what we do, however; it is not our business. The two are not the same.

The question arises compellingly in Peter Drucker’s 1954 classic, The Practice of Management. Drucker’s 1950s example is Cadillac. What it did was manufacture cars; its business, however, was not automobiles but status. Recognizing its business aright led to the realization that its competitors were not Chevrolet and Ford but high fashion and diamonds.

So what is the synagogue’s business?

During the years following World War II, we were in the continuity business. We had lost 6,000,000 and Israel was beleaguered. Challenged by anti-Semitism without and assimilation within, synagogues implicitly guaranteed Jewish continuity. So too did UJA and Federations, but explicitly, and when they proved better at raising huge sums of money to build up Israel and rescue Jews from the Soviet Union, they surpassed synagogues as the dominant Jewish organization. Wrongly so, synagogues complained, thinking the proper Jewish business was study, prayer and good deeds. Rightly so, said average Jews – whose passion was saving Jewish lives and who belonged to synagogues mostly to educate their children, another sign that what they wanted to invest in was continuity, not religion.

What made continuity our business was the fact that the customers (the rank and file Jews) wanted it enough to “buy” it. The business is not necessarily what the entrepreneurs running the show think it is. It is what the customers want. And from the 1950s to the 1990s, the fear of Jewish discontinuity was enough to galvanize the troops.

It isn’t any more, much as Jewish leaders may wish otherwise. Lots of Jews identify as Jews but not enough to insist on raising Jewish children, paying for Jewish education, supporting Jewish causes, and joining Jewish synagogues. Continuity is no longer a sufficient business to be in – not if we want to stay in business.

But neither is religion – not by itself, that is. Witness the Pew study where people increasingly say they are not religious, even though they may spiritual.

Still, religion deserves a closer look, not for what it is but for what it delivers. In the post War years, it succeeded as long as it delivered continuity. What does it (or can it) deliver now?

Religion was once what sociologist Peter Berger famously called the Sacred Canopy — the overarching reality that drove everything people did. To abandon your religion was to trade in the very essence of who you were. Not any more, however. A moment’s observation reveals that religion has become discretionary – what we do (if we wish) with our discretionary time, money and attention. I attend Sabbath services; you play golf; she gardens. I drop $3,000 as synagogue dues; you join the country club; he buys season tickets at the Met. I go to Torah study, you attend lectures on art; others take classes in American history.

Like it or not, that’s just the way it is.

But not all discretionary activity is of the same consequence to consumers. Movie-going on the odd Saturday night ranks lower than what we can call “committed pursuits,” the discretionary choices we make about matters of commitment. In the good old days when religion was a sacred canopy we knew who we were: we were Jewish or Lutheran, or Catholic or Episcopalian. Without a sacred canopy, it is not clear just what counts as our identity.

When the canopy first began to unravel (with the advent of modernity), people thought nationalism would take its place: and for many, it has. We pay taxes to, obey the laws of, and are most dependent on our countries. But the wars of the twentieth century showed us just how horribly, terribly, wrong nation states can become. “Moral man” is subject to “immoral society,” warned Reinhold Neibuhr way back in 1932. So as much as we may value national citizenship as primary, we hesitate to adopt as the deepest motto of our identity, “My country right or wrong.”

And, in any event, with the religious canopy gone, we have room for multiple identities, not just our nationality: I may be an American, a Jew, a professor, and a serious violinist; you may be an American and Jew, but also a feminist, judge, and artist. Whatever we say we “are” requires the committed allocation of discretionary time, money and attention.

Synagogues compete for these resources, the symbolic tokens of people’s inner identities. We are ultimately in the identity business. The Age of Continuity has become The Age of Fractured Identity.

A great deal follows, most particularly, how synagogues make themselves known to the world. Synagogues in the Age of Continuity advertised programs that would keep Jews Jewish: a better religious school, a guaranteed bar/bat mitzvah, or Sunday afternoon lectures on Israel. In the Age of Fractured Identity, these still matter, but for different reasons. If identity is the issue, we need most to demonstrate that we are a serious candidate for people’s deepest selves, their aspirations to matter, their pursuit for meaning, and their desire not to have lived and died in vain.

As it turns out, religion is profoundly (even uniquely) suited to this venture. That’s why synagogues matter more now than ever.