The High Holidays are almost here. If nothing else this is the time of year where I notice the proximity or distance between me and the sacred flow that is for me divine. This has been a hard year. One that has challenged my sense of Jewishness. I have had to confront what I see as the growing divide between my Jewish values and what the Jewish state has in some profound ways become. Renewal is about reigniting the spiritual roots of our tradition.. For many it’s a new way to be Jewish. What I have struggled with is the realization that a nation state can often strip away the sacred and be reduced to something worth killing and dying for. I did a documentary a few years back called My Israel. When we were finished shooting and our our way home I thought about all the people , on all sides of the conversation and the one thing they all had in common was that they saw themselves as the victims. As the people who were under the greatest threat. Justified in their animosity towards the other’ . What Renewal has taught me is that God is a verb. It is the interplay , the dance as it were, that is made manifest when we nurture the sacred in ourselves, the ‘other’ and the cosmic mystery from which we have emerged. What I see now is that everybody is right and everyone is wrong. But without a spiritual circle of compassion and love we will find that at the moment on Yom Kippur day , the Viddui, when we are knocking on our hearts and confessing to our imperfection that the heart we are trying to break open has somehow hardened towards each other. That, for me is the greatest loss. May we see the divine in everything and everyone and grow in our affection for this gift of life. All life.