if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

Remembering Jeremiah, the sages formulated a third way: to sustain their faith through institutions that (unlike the Temple) could be established anywhere – the synagogue, the school, the house of study and the home. In the meanwhile they would practise what today would be called active citizenship in the countries of their dispersion.