Sublime

One might add that the decision to create the state and take power also constitutes a commitment to end the martyrdom tradition of Jewish history. Since martyrdom means the risk of total annihilation, it is no longer acceptable.

(kol Yisrael arevim ze bazeh, “All Israelites are responsible for one another,” Shevuot 39a). But it may be that being human also involves collective responsibility. Not only are Jews responsible for one another – so are we all, regardless of our faith or lack of it.

The bad times brought out the best in them, the good times sometimes the worst. These facts, more than anything else, tell me that far from being over, the Jewish journey has reached its most exciting phase. Today, for the first time in two thousand years, we have a sovereign state in Israel and freedom and equality in the Diaspora. As almost never

shifting the operative frame of the American Jewish experience from one of institutional preservation to one of communal empowerment.

Orthodox Judaism, however, became more orthodox and more narrow after the fall of Jerusalem, just as it had done after the earlier fall due to Nebuchadrezzar. After the first century, Christianity also crystallized, and the relations of Judaism and Christianity were wholly hostile and external; as we shall see, Christianity powerfully stimulated an

Your very existence—both as an individual Jew-by-choice and as part of a historic influx of new Jews—challenges deeply held but unexamined assumptions about Jewish identity and about Jewishness, which is also referred to as Yiddishkeit. For those who understand Jewishness as an ethnicity, converts present an interesting dilemma.

Could it be that today’s society has made Jewish identity superfluous?