 I wanted to begin by sharing a very sobering report that came out actually this year by the Pew Research Center, which studies all different kind of religious issues and religions in the world. So in an article that came out in August of 2018, there is a new analysis showing that 42% of American Jews reject Judaism. 42% of American Jews reject Judaism, meaning they reject the religion of Judaism. They may identify as Jews either culturally or ethnically or in terms of their heritage as a cultural association. But in terms of the religion of Judaism, the latest data in the United States shows 42% of American Jews basically don't have any affinity or interest in Judaism as a religion. And at Jews for Judaism, this is a large part of our concern. Jews for Judaism did not, we didn't name our organization Jews Against Jesus, right? We named it Jews for Judaism because the truth is that there are plenty of Jews who don't only now go to churches or go to a Hindu or Buddhist ashrams, but there are plenty of Jews who in the words of Shlomo Carl Bach are Jews for nothing, meaning that they are Jews who don't really have any association with religion at all and especially their own Judaism. And so the kind of people that we see, especially in our counseling and just in terms of our activities, are many of them are Jews who report and their families tell us that they don't have any interest at all in Judaism. They often have bad experiences when they were growing up or even bad experiences as adults. And so we don't only see Jews that have converted, we see many other kinds of dropouts and casualties, people that are disappointed, people that are hurt, people that are just bored and find the entire subject to be something that does not interest them. One of the things that I've observed over the years, and I've been teaching now for a long time, is that most people have not rejected Judaism. Most people in my experience have not rejected Judaism. What they have rejected, unfortunately, is a very sad caricature of Judaism. It may have very little to do with Judaism at all. I often tell the story that the market of Meserich, who was the great disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, once ran into a fellow that said to him, you know, Rabbi, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God. So the market said to him, I want you to know something, that the very same God that you don't believe in, I don't believe in that God either. Meaning, when someone says that they don't believe in God, they're an atheist, often the kind of God that they're rejecting has nothing to do with the God of Judaism. And so that's the great problem that we face, is that the Judaism people are rejecting may have nothing to do with Judaism. It's often a very sad caricature of Judaism. They tell one of the cute stories of the wise men of Helm, that someone was once walking down the street, and he sees someone he thinks is an old friend. He says, Isaac, is that you, Isaac? Is that you? I haven't seen you in so many years. I can't believe it. Isaac, look at how you look. Used to be well dressed, and you were put together, and your hair was done nicely. And now look at you. Your clothing is disgusting. Your hair is all unkempt. What happened to you? And this fellow says, excuse me, I'm not Isaac. I'm Jacob. And he says, look, and then you even went and changed your name. So when we see someone, is it the person we assume it is? And when people are saying Judaism is boring or it's meaningless, are they really looking at Judaism? The truth is that, as the Baal Shem Tov told in one of his stories, said, if you imagine that someone is in the forest, and they come upon this very, very long building. It's not tall. It's a very large building. It goes on for a long time. It's almost like the size of a football field. And the fellow walks over to this building, and there's a window on one end of the building. And so he goes over to the window, and he peers in, and he looks into the window. And what does he see? He sees in the middle of the room about 50, 60 people. They're running around in circles, jumping up and down and doing somersaults. And the Baal Shem Tov said that this person had two problems. Number one, he's looking at a window all the way on this side of the room, but he can't see. His peripheral vision is cut off. He can't see all the way down to that end of the room. And secondly, not only is his vision cut off, but this fellow is totally hard of hearing. He can't hear anything. So not only does he not see that there's a band on the other end of the room, he can't hear them. So he's looking into the middle of the room, and he sees these people running around in circles, jumping up and down. He assumes that it's a mental institution. He thinks this is a place of Michigan, and they're running around, and they're not normal. And the Baal Shem Tov said that the problem here is that he cannot hear the music. And so when so many people, they experience Judaism, when they look at what they think is Judaism, and it makes no sense to them, the great problem is that they don't hear the music. It looks strange. It looks bizarre. And if you don't appreciate the music of Judaism, it's melody. It's rhythm. It could be very, very uninspiring. It could even be strange looking, or it could be a turn off. But there's a bigger problem. Not only do many of our Jewish brothers and sisters not hear the music, sometimes they hear the wrong music. They hear the wrong music. They hear a very off-key kind of Judaism. When I was a freshman in university, so I attended Northwestern University outside of Chicago. And I had a roommate, Doug McKenzie, who was somewhere from Missouri. And that year that I was a freshman in university was the year that Kat Stevens, I think now his name is Yusuf Mohammed or something, Yusuf Islam, Yusuf Jihad, he ended up at one point destroying all his records. I think he's now come back to playing. But when he was Kat Stevens, and that was the year that he launched his career with an album called Teaser and the Firecat. I was crazy in love with many of his songs, but there was one song. I used to walk around singing all the time. I thought the song was called The B-String. And I would sing, come on, B-String, B-String. Make me happy. And my roommate Doug says to me one day, go back. It's peace train, you idiot. I'm singing about a B-String. He said, what in the world are you singing about? So the truth is that many people don't hear the words. They hear the wrong words. A friend of mine used to tell me that he thought that the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, he thought that one of the lines was, the girl with colitis goes by. And the actual line is, the girl with colitis scope eyes. He didn't hear that. He heard the wrong music. For those of you who are interested, so there is a website for those interested, www.kissthisguy.com. Jimi Hendrix along the refrain is Kiss the Sky. But people don't hear Kiss the Sky. They hear Kiss this guy. So this is a problem. It's a huge problem when people hear the wrong music. So this is our problem. If we're wondering, why is it that so many Jews are just not connecting with Judaism, they either don't hear the music at all or even worse sometimes, they're hearing the wrong music. They're getting the wrong ideas. My idea for tonight, what I wanted to share with you tonight is that I believe one of the problems we face. I don't think this is the only problem. But I think one of the problems we face is that people associate, they assume that Judaism is a religion. When I was growing up, they played this game, animal, vegetable, or mineral. How do you classify something? So if you ask people, what is Judaism? So people say it's a religion. And I think our problem is that people do not have positive associations with religion. So if people's associations with religion in general are not positive and they associate Judaism as a religion, I believe Judaism suffers by that association. The way we frame things in life, the way we frame things is very important. And often in discussions about various topics, if we let the other side frame the terms of the discussion or frame the terminology or frame the definitions of the discussion, we're at a tremendous disadvantage. So for example, without getting into politics now, it's not my point. But for example, when people speak about Israel and they speak about occupied territories, well, the truth is they're unoccupied. They're disputed. And there's a world of difference between disputed territories and occupied territories. And so when the terms of the discussion can get framed in a way which are disadvantageous to us, that's the problem I believe we have when we allow. We can't stop it. But I think this is a public relations image problem. It's significant, by the way, that in the Bible, there's no word in the Bible for religion. There's just no word for religion. And I think that's significant. The fact that there's no word for it in the Bible indicates that it's not something which in Judaism is really relevant. They tell a story, the rabbis tell a story in the Midrash that when the world was being created, the trees came to God one day. And they were freaking out. And the trees started screaming and yelling to God. And they said, what's going on? The tree said, we heard that you created iron. And God said, what's the problem? And they said, iron, they're going to be axes that are going to cut us down. So God says to the trees, you're very foolish. If you would just not allow your wood to be used for the axe handle, the iron by itself can't hurt you. The iron can only hurt you when you give your wood to become part of the axe. And this is a very beautiful Midrash. And it could be interpreted in many ways. But I think one of the lessons here is that in life, we are often our own worst enemies. That in a sense, we've given a handle to those people who easily reject Judaism, because again, they think of it as a religion. The Talmud says that you should not blame the mouse for eating the cheese. Talmud says you shouldn't blame the mouse for eating the cheese. That's what mice do. If you're upset, the Talmud says you should blame the hole in the wall that no one fixed. That's how the mice get through to eat your cheese. Don't get angry with the mice. Get angry with the hole in the wall. And so when we think about all these Jewish people that are in churches or in ushrams or are just simply disengaged from Judaism, we shouldn't be upset with them. We should just sort of think about how did we allow a world, a culture, their environment, the Jewish world to have so little impact on everyone? How did that happen? That sort of we are responsible for the ecosystem, if you will, of Judaism, right? Little kids growing up didn't build the Jewish community. So when you think about how do we account for the fact that so many people are slipping through that hole in the wall, we have to think about what we've done, what we have allowed to become the sort of the way Judaism is framed and understood. So let me share with you a few reasons why I think religion has a bad rap. A few simple examples. And then I want to go into what I think are the main points I wanted to share tonight. First of all, I believe that many people when they think of religion, they think of a system that is stultifying and cramps your style. It's a bunch of rules and regulations, do this and don't do that. And who needs it? Who needs people to be telling me how to live my life and what to do? People don't like to be bossed around. People don't like to have all these things that they have to do and not do. That's not good. If we think of religion as something that cramps my style and gets in my way and does not help me live a fulfilling life, who's going to want to go near it? They tell a story that when the world was being created, every animal came to God to thank him. So one animal comes to God and says, God, shkaiach, thank you. It's incredible. I see that if anyone tries to attack me, I give off this horrible smell and they go running. Thank you God, you're the best. Another animal comes to God and says, God, this is so cool that anyone comes to attack me. I shoot these little spikes at them and they go running, they won't bother me. And another animal says to God, this has got the coolest thing in the world, God. You gave me the ability to camouflage myself. And if anyone tries to get me, I just disappeared, they can't even find me. And another animal says to God, God, this is so amazing. I can run so fast, no one can even catch me. And the elephant comes and says, thank you God, I'm so huge, no one's gonna bother trying to get me. And every single animal, every animal came to thank God. All of a sudden, the little bird shows up, wants to know, where's the complaint department? I'm very upset. So God says, what's the problem? And the bird says, are you kidding? What's the problem? Look at what you did to me. You gave me these stupid, skinny little legs. I got hardly moved. And on my back are these ridiculous clumps that weight me down. I'm a sitting duck, if anyone wants to get me. And God says, you don't understand. Those clumps on your back, those are wings. And with those wings, you can fly. It's a matter of perspective. People think, for example, about something like Shabbat. There are many people who think Shabbat is 25 hours of torture. Can't do this. I can't do that. I can't use my cell phone. I can't, and they think of it as a day of torture. Many other people would say, maybe there's another way of looking at it. Maybe this is a day where you can become free of all those gadgets and all those things that you become a slave to. We've invented amazing things to make our lives easier, to make our lives more convenient. But we often become a slave to these things and we can't live without them. Shabbat is a day where we learn that we're the master, not the slave. I can control my addiction to these things. And if I can control my addiction, I'm not really addicted. And I'm being strong and I'm being free. But there are people who say, no, religion is just one big pain in the neck because it gets in the way. Another complaint people have about religion is religion is for the weak. If you need it as a crutch. Religion is basically for people that are emotional, psychological losers. And you need to have something to make you feel better what the communists would refer to as the opiate of the masses. That religion is just for people that they can't get by and they need this support system and they're weak people and this is their crutch. This is their little drug that helps them get through life because otherwise they'd fall apart. That's a very common complaint about religion. Now, where did this come from? Where do people get the idea that religion is a crutch? So I think that there are many places it comes from but I think one of the places is if you ever look at the way Christianity is often sold in the world today, think about it. I'm sure that many of you have seen late night Christian television. And often Christianity is sold as basically a magic solution to all of life's problems. If you have a money problem, if you have a marital problem, if you have a drug problem, you have a problem with your kids, you have a problem with your job, problem with your boss, problem with going bald, problem with everything. You're overweight, you're underweight. Come to Dr. Jesus and your life will be better and wonderful. I mean, that's how the, this is the dominant ambient religion in North America. That's how it's sold. If you've got a problem, Christianity is for you. So I think that this becomes part of the consciousness of our world. That religion is for the weak. Religion is for people that have problems. Religion is a crutch. That's what it's for. I remember years and years ago, there was a famous Canadian, I believe Canadian comedian, David Steinberg. I think he was from a long line of rabbis. And he was doing a comedy program in the next studio nearby Oral Roberts. Oral Roberts was the first major league faith healer on television. And people would go over to Oral Roberts and they'd say that they have, I don't know, a problem with their back or a problem with whatever. And he would smack them in the forehead and they would get healed. So David Steinberg walked over to him and he shook his hand and he walked away, limp. That's what, that's what this Jewish guy does. So they say, they say that real religion, real religion is not to comfort the afflicted. Real religion really is here to afflict the comfortable. That's what it's really for. Another problem with religion. I believe that people associate religion with superstition. That's why they're not interested in it. They think that it's Bubba Mises, it's craziness, it's superstition. I'll tell you where I saw this. When I was in high school, I was very much interested, I was crazy about a film by Stanley Kubrick called 2001, A Space Odyssey. So if you remember this film, how does it begin? It begins with this beautiful panoramic scene and there are dozens and dozens of apes and they're jumping around and they're really having a great time. And all of a sudden in the middle of this scene comes this huge rectangular black monolith. I remember when Med Magazine did a satire on 2001, A Space Odyssey, they said, this is the box that the UN came in. So all of a sudden these apes see this thing and they're going nuts like they're, what is it? And they're very nervous. Can I touch it? And they would go over to it gingerly and they would touch it and they would run away because maybe it's got some kind of powers but you would see in the film, these monkeys looking at this object with sort of fear and trepidation, sort of superstitious kind of way of looking at it. When did I next see this? When I first went to Jerusalem in 1979, I would go to the Western Wall and I would see lots of people putting on the little cardboard kippah and they would go over to the big Western Wall in Jerusalem and they would do the same thing. They would walk over to it and they would nervously, then they run away like something's gonna happen if they stay near the wall. Meaning that they didn't have a healthy relationship with this holy place. They were nervous there. It's happened to rabbis a lot by the way. Rabbis walk in the room sometimes and everyone shuts up because, ooh, the rabbis here. One of my rabbis told me that when he was living in Manhattan, so he used to walk home from the synagogue on West End Avenue, which was the quiet street because he knew that not everyone from the synagogue strictly observed the Sabbath and some of them would go shopping and they shopped on Broadway and he didn't wanna run into one of his congregants on Shabbat carrying packages. One day for whatever reason he's walking home on Broadway and out of Zabars comes one of his congregants with the two bags of groceries and she sees him and she goes, ah, and she drops the groceries all over the street. Now she didn't do that when she saw other people but there's a strange relationship like the rabbi. I remember Moment Magazine had this wonderful issue about rabbis' wives. They interviewed a lot of rabbis' wives and the rabbis' wives says it's not easy to be the rabbi's wife because a lot of the congregants think the rabbi is God and here I am, I'm sleeping with God at night. So there's a lot of just unhealthy superstitious associations people have with religious stuff and they associate Judaism and religion in general as superstitious. One last example. People think they have an expression, right? Organize religion. People think about religions as bureaucracies, as institutionalized, as overly structured, as just almost sometimes as a business. I remember that I once met a woman who had joined a really destructive cult in the 60s and I asked her what was her story and she said that she was trying to find something in the Judaism or her childhood and every time she went to a synagogue it just was a big bureaucracy. It was something that sort of turned to wrath. Just turned off to it and I had a similar experience when I went to India in 1998 and I was helping to run saders in Dharamsala and we were sitting on the floor, we didn't have furniture and there was a woman sitting next to me and she was telling me her story. She was not from Israel like most of the travelers there. She was from the West Coast, United States, from California and I asked her how did you come to India because she actually was living there now. She wasn't just traveling. She was a single mother with two kids and she's living in this town. Dharamsala is not a five star hotel. It's a very simple town where there was running sewage going through the streets and I asked her how did you come to live here and she told me that in California she tried going to synagogues and she said to me, Rabbi, all I experienced was this meeting and brotherhood meeting and sisterhood meeting and this committee and that committee. She said to me, I was simply looking for a place, she said, to be reverent. I wanted to be able to go to a place where I could sit quietly and maybe think and maybe meditate and just be reverent and all I used to find in the synagogues was just this big machine, this bureaucracy, meetings and committees and meetings and committees and people have that association with religions. So I believe that because there are so many negative things people associate with religion, I believe that Judaism just gets a bad rep because of that association. Now, when I was growing up, I might have mentioned this last week briefly, I was a very near casualty to a toxic association that I had with religion. I was a very idealistic young teenager. I was obsessed with world peace. I probably would have sounded like a Miss America contestant. What are you interested in, Michael? World peace. That was like, but it was true. That was something I was growing up in a world where they had these horrible wars going on and I was someone who was interested in having a world of peace. And I saw religions as institutions that divided people, that caused strife in the world, that was probably responsible for a lot of the conflict and wars in the world. And I saw religions in general as evil. That was my association, that religions are evil because they're part of the problem. And because I was being raised in a Jewish home, so to me, Judaism was part of that problem. Judaism was an evil religion. I'm used to have debates when I was growing up at our dinner table at night. My brother and I, against my parents, it was certainly not a fair fight. And one of the topics that would sometimes come up was who are you supposed to marry when you grow up? Now, my brother and I were kids, we were like teenagers 15, 14, 13, 16. And this was part of what we were being told. It is Jewish people, you're supposed to marry Jews. And I remember asking why, because you're Jewish. Yeah, but why do we have to marry Jews? Because that's what Jews do. Why? Because you're Jewish. Now, you can see how compelling this must have been to a 16-year-old, right? So, before I went away to university, someone asked me to meet with a rabbi. Someone was concerned that, I don't know, something would happen to me in university. And so I met with a rabbi. And this topic came up. The topic came up of why are Jews so obsessed with not marrying out of the faith? Why is that your big deal? And the rabbi tried to basically invoke Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative and say to me, look, if all the Jews married out of the faith, the Jews would disappear. There'd be no more Jews in the world. And I said, so what? Like, would that be some ecological catastrophe that there won't be any more people even eating a filth of fish or bagels? I mean, why would, he's assuming that it's important to have Jews around. And I'm wondering why? The problem is that these religion things are causing a lot of wars in the world. And it's important to have this religion survive just for memories, for nostalgia, for, you know, it's like history, this crazy game where the longest lasting religion wins some prize. Like, what was this obsession with surviving? What is this obsession with surviving? And he wasn't able to answer this question to my satisfaction. He probably gave me some answers. I wasn't satisfied. And I remember basically ending the conversation and calling him basically a racist. That was my impression that this is just rank racism. Anyway, go off to university and I'm rooming with Doug McKenzie. And we were the odd couple because Doug met a Jewish girl the first week of class. He probably never saw a Jew his whole life in Missouri. And the first week of class, he runs into Lisa from Long Island, Jewish Lisa from Long Island. And he immediately is crazy about her. But he was intimidated because what does he know about Jews and Jewish girls and whatever. And then he said at some point probably, oh, there must be a God. I have a Jewish roommate from New York. That means he's practically a rabbi, I'm sure. So he would ask me all these Jewish questions and I wasn't interested and I didn't know. And I remember he was taking classes in Jewish philosophy and he was trying to read Martin Buber's books. He was quite interesting and he was quite disappointed with me that he was living from his point of view with a Jewish anti-Semite. You know, I was the person that was the worst Jew in the world from his point of view. So that year, there was not just the war going on in Vietnam, the war expanded into Cambodia and I was very involved with the protest movements and demonstrating against these wars. And at one point at the last semester of my first year, we organized a moratorium to close down the school. We built basically blockaded the main road and we organized a hunger strike. And we had a tent where we were hanging out and the idea was that we would not have any food for a week and we would exist on fruit juice, 3,000 cc's of fruit juice a day. And it was interesting that most of the people in this group were Jews. And we had a big sign on the tent that said juice for peace. But I remember we were joking around and it's really should say Jews for peace because they're all Jews. Now, a bunch of the Jews that were there involved with this strike were young Jews like myself but they were getting interested in Judaism. All right, if you go back to the early 70s, Alex Haley had written a book, Roots. And so many black Americans were getting interested in their African roots and they were taking African names and they were wearing dashikis and it was sort of cool to return to your roots. And at the same time, there was a similar movement among young Jews. And so some of my co-demonstrators were young Jews that were interested in Judaism and learning about it. And they were bothered by me because they said, you know, Skobach is someone that has such a chip on his shoulder against being Jewish. He said, it's on to us because you seem to know nothing about it. So wouldn't it make sense before you reject it forever to first find out what it is? And I basically had to admit that they were right. And so there's a longer story but I left Northwestern University and I enrolled in a special program in New York for wayward Jews. This was a program for Jews that had no background. It was a special program called the James Stryer School, JSS, at Yeshiva University. I came in, they originally didn't want to take me because my hair was down to the middle of my back and they thought I was gonna bring drugs and stuff into the school. But the rabbi that had called a racist, he pushed for me to get in. And so I got into the school and I was open. I was open mind, if I was anything that I had virtuous at that time, it was I was open minded. And so I was willing to hear what they had to say and my mind was blown because I found that all of the deepest held convictions and values that I had as a young hippie, these were Jewish teachings. The idea that we are here to make the world a better place and that we're here to bring people together and that we're here to restore the world to some utopia. These are all ideas that were very popular, right? Remember this song, Woodstock and the refrain was we've got to get back to the garden. So that's a Jewish teaching. If the garden of Eden is paradise and everyone wants to get back to the garden, that's a Jewish teaching that ultimately we want to restore a utopian world. And I wasn't aware of that. I just thought Judaism was prayers and holidays and whatever, I didn't realize it had any interest in changing the world. That's what I wanted to do but I saw that Judaism had a way of doing it. I realized that as a hippie, my idealism was sloppy. I had no plan, I had no methodology and it was very haphazard. When did I get a chance to protest against the war in Cambodia when someone organized the demonstration or if I got a chance to argue with someone? But I didn't get a chance to live my idealism 24 hours a day. It was a part of my life. And what appealed to me about Judaism was that it was an integrated program, a holistic program that allowed people and me here specifically to live my idealism 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If it's important to me, isn't it great to be able to do it all the time? Abraham Joshua Heschel said, if spirituality is not ultimately important, it's not that important at all. And to me, my values were ultimately important. So the fact that Judaism said you can live these ideals 24 hours a day, seven days a week, I said this is for me. I'm interested. And I came to understand that Judaism's concern with intermarriage was not racist. What's the proof? Very simple. When I was looking to get married, it wasn't simply that I wouldn't date non-Jews. That wasn't my criteria. I was not going to date equally a Jew that was not interested in Judaism. Not a matter of racism. What is the problem in terms of marrying non-Jews? It's very simple. The non-Jewish person is not interested in Judaism. Why in the world would I wanna spend my entire life with someone who doesn't share my most deeply held values? But that applies to thousands and thousands of Jews as well. It's not a Jewish non-Jewish issue. And if this non-Jew was interested in my values, the Jewish values, they could convert to Judaism, be a perfectly perfect marriage partner. So I came to understand this is not racism. It's a question of how we live our lives with people who share our most deeply held values. Now the truth is that my journey to Judaism was essentially political. It was essentially political. I became attracted to Judaism's program and Judaism's commitment to changing the world. And for me, that was the beginning. That was opening the door. Everything else came later for me. But I'll tell you that the biggest objection that I hear to religion today, and I hear this regularly, is I'm not interested in religion. I'm interested in spirituality. This is the number one complaint that we hear. I'm not interested in religion. I'm interested in spirituality. And the assumption is obviously that religions are not spiritual. The assumption is that these are mutually exclusive. And since I'm not interested in religion and spirituality is what I want, religion is not gonna have it. A wise person once said that the difference between religion and spirituality is like the difference between reading the menu and eating the meal. So the wise person once said that the difference between religion and spirituality is like the difference between reading the menu and eating the meal. No one gets filled up reading the menu. And that's the great problem with Judaism as a religion. When I meet with Jewish people that have converted to other religions, and I asked them about how they grew up and what their story was, this is universally what I hear. I'm told, you know Rabbi, I grew up in a Jewish home, I had a bar about Mitzvah, and my family celebrated Chanukah, and we had a Passover Seder, and I went to Israel when I was a teenager, and I had a normal Jewish upbringing. But you know Rabbi, in all of my years growing up in a Jewish home and going to Jewish schools, none of it was ever experienced by me as spiritual. It was all just cultural, my ethnicity, my heritage, my identity. That's what it was. It was an identity, it was an ethnicity, it was a culture, but it wasn't really spiritual. I never experienced anything in a spiritual way. Roger Kamenetz, who wrote the wonderful book A Jew in the Lotus, who himself was very, very disengaged from Judaism, and he ended up going to India with 12 rabbis and teachers to meet with the Dalai Lama. So he ended up writing a number of books that he became interested in Judaism after meeting with the Dalai Lama. And he writes in one of his books that the house of Judaism in North America has not been satisfactorily built. It does not have a spiritual dimension for many Jews. Too many Jews are like me. Our Jewishness has been an incohate mixture of nostalgia, family feeling, group identification, a smattering of Hebrew, concern for Israel, and so forth. He says that the Judaism of my youth focused on outward symbols and rites of passage, but not on the inner life. This is precisely where a tremendous amount of work is needed. Judaism ultimately has to change who we are. It has to make us sweeter. It has to make us kinder. It has to make us more sensitive. It has to make us less angry. It has to make us less jealous. Or it may not be worth saving. Unless Judaism is a spiritual path that actually impacts our lives and improves our lives, it's not so critical to have people singing Hebrew songs for the next 20 generations. If that's all it is, is it that important to have people singing Hebrew songs or eating bagels and locks? There's got to be something much more valuable to make it worth saving. So one of the things that's critical is that people begin to experience Judaism as something that is real and that impacts their lives in ways that are positive. We have to begin to see Judaism as transformative, as a path to personal spiritual growth. Secondly, for too many Jewish people, Judaism is totally disconnected from God. My wife grew up in a home where her parents both taught Hebrew school. My wife went to Hebrew school, she had a bat mitzvah, and after she went to university she went traveling in the Far East and she lived in Bali and in India for about eight months. And when she came back to New York, her spiritual path was what I would call Hinduism light. Basically it was meditation and yoga and ashrams. That was her spiritual path. And one day she tells me that she turns on the radio in New York and it's WBAI List and Response Radio and she hears Rabbi Gedalia Kenig who is speaking in Hebrew and it's being translated into English. And my wife said that she was blown away by what the rabbi was saying. And she said to herself, wow, I never knew Jews believed in God. That was her reaction. Wow, I never knew Jews believed in God. So I asked her, what did you mean by that? And she said, sure, I knew I heard the word God growing up. People said the word God. People said blessings with God's name in it. But my wife told me that for her, God was not real. It was just a word. God was a word and the word was said occasionally. But as far as she was growing up, she never ever, ever heard people talking about getting close to God or having a relationship with God or feeling the presence of God in their lives. That was totally absent. It wasn't real. And when she heard this rabbi for the first time in her life, she's hearing someone that made it very clear that for us as Jews, having a relationship with God and getting close to God is not just something we do. It's the very, very bottom line of Judaism. It's the core. There's a story. I'm not sure it's a true story. But there was a young man who was studying in a Yeshiva in Europe. It was a Lithuanian Yeshiva, the home of the misnogdom. And a very studious, very intellectual. And he heard that in Meserich, where the Hasidic movement was exploding, he heard there was a fire that was burning in Meserich. A spiritual fire. And this young man was very attracted. He wanted to go there. So he said to the head of his Yeshiva, the rabbi, he said, you know, rabbi, I want to go and see what's doing there in Meserich. And the rabbi said, what do you have to go to Meserich for? You're sitting here in a Yeshiva. You study Talmud all day long. And we pray and we, what else is there? And the student didn't care. He ran away to Meserich. And he was there for three years. He comes back and his teacher sees him. And the teacher says, oh, look who's back. The big shot from Meserich. So he says to his student, tell me, no, what did you learn there in Meserich? So the student says, you know, rabbi, in Meserich, I learned how to read minds. So his teacher said, really? You can read minds. What am I thinking right now? So the student said, rabbi, I know that you're meditating on the verse in the Bible. Sheevit, Hashem, l'negdi, tamid. I set God's presence before me at all times. So the teacher said, I wasn't thinking about that. And the student said, that's why I ran away to Meserich. Because it's possible to get so caught up with the nuts and bolts of Judaism that you lose the bigger picture. The market of Meserich, I mentioned it before, once came into a study hall where everybody's studying Talmud and they're studying Talmud. And he came and he banged. And he said, in Yiddish, he said, rabbi, I did it. There's a God. You can lose that. You can lose focus on that. And I think that's unfortunately what has happened to so much of our Jewish communal life. You know, there was a study done not long ago where someone took the charters and the constitutions of the 17, I believe it was 17, largest Jewish organizations in North America. The biggest Jewish organizations. And they studied their charters and their constitutions. And they didn't find the word God written once. God has sort of been exiled. And many people, when they hear Jews talking about God, they'll say, you sound too Christian. What kind of a tragedy is that? Where do you think Christians got God from? We were there first. So when we've reduced Judaism to a mechanical religion of tradition, it isn't that important. And people are not going to stick around. And so we have a challenge. We've got a challenge. And I often tell this little story about a man who has a little store. And you know, he makes a living. He sells chachkis and he sells souvenirs and discount things. That little discount store sells junk basically. Anyway, one day he looks out and he sees that on the other side of his store there is this massive store going up, a big huge store. And there's a big sign on the front of that store that says, lowest prices in town. On the other side of him is an even bigger store and it says, you can't beat our prices. That little poor Jewish guy is plotting. He's going crazy. They're going to kill me. They're going to drive me out of business. They're going to ruin me. And he goes to a friend and says, what should I do? And his friend says, you put up a sign on the front of your store that says, main entrance. That's what you have to do. And that's our challenge. Our challenge is how do we make Judaism the main entrance? How do we create communities and families and synagogues and institutions that radiate joy and love and passion and godliness and spirituality? If we do that, trust me, we won't be worrying about where all the Jews going. They're going to be running to us. They're going to be running. And so, as I mentioned before, the mouse is not the thief. All of these young Jews and even not so young Jews that are dropping out and going elsewhere, they didn't make the hole in the wall. They're just falling through it. Those of us who are here in the room, we care and we're involved and we're interested. And many, many other Jewish people are involved and they care and they're interested. It's up to us to make sure that that hole is patched and that we won't have to worry so much about Jewish people abandoning ship. We'll have a very healthy and very beautiful community that will radiate the kind of strength and beauty that people will be attracted to.