I shopped for tennis shoes recently. Somehow the conversation with the sales clerk and her girlfriend got around to Judaism. When I revealed my rabbinic status, the sales clerk's girlfriend's jaw dropped, and she blurted out "I've always wanted to conform to Judaism." I corrected her usage, saying "it's convert to Judaism." I then said "you know it's really hard to be Jewish these days, with all that's going on in the world," and I hurt for feeling that way.

But after the year we've suffered that's how many us of feel these days, I suspect-- anxious, fearful, angry, concerned as Americans for the future of our country; concerned for the future of Israel and for the Jewish people. It all feels like such a struggle right now -- our American values in a world that resents or hates us, defending Jews against unimaginable anti-Semitism, defending Israel against the world, seemingly.

But in the few moments I have with you, I don't want to focus on the struggle of being Jewish, I want to talk about the dream of being Jewish. What's the difference? Let me put it more existentially: do we force our reality to conform to our dreams, or our dreams to conform to our reality? Because that's what Israel means to me, and what I believe it represents in the history of the Jewish people: the embrace of a dream over the reality of Jewish life in Exile, a dream not just of a place of refuge but a place of destiny, a destiny with the possibility of holiness.

It's hard to dream: it always involves becoming someone different, moving physically and spiritually somewhere else. Think of how Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph suffered for their dreams; of how Moses' gave his life to the God's dream of land and covenant, and died knowing that the children of Israel would continue to live imperfectly, resisting the full implications of their covenant with God.

Yet for all of the difficulties of a life of faith in one's dreams, the Torah graphically shows the difference between a life lived according to one's dream and a life overdetermined by reality. God asked Avram to follow a dream, a vision of his future greatness, of his family's destiny, of a great people in its land, living a blessing and casting a light for other's to live by as well. God showed the enslaved children of Israel in Egypt another dream, a vision of themselves as a free people. That dream unfolded in the people's physical redemption, and in the revelation at Sinai. Sinai taught them, and us, that dreams are for living and not for fantasy, and must be put into action to become real. Yet in spite of God's deeds, and promises, of the Land of Israel, Israel felt the need to see the reality for itself. Of the twelve scouts, only two---Caleb and Joshua---remembered the dream, the promise made by God of a future there. The other ten capitulated to reality, overcome by the size of the land's inhabitants, and in the infamous words of the Torah reported, "all the men there are of great size, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them."

They lacked the courage to dream, to envision an alternative, better reality, and instead projected their fears onto others and the others' vision of them. And that is what for so long life in Exile meant. Zionism changed all of that in one fundamental, dramatic way: it proclaimed that Jews needed to dream, to chart their own course, to construct their own reality. For Herzl that meant a political state, akin to creating the means for Jews to remain physically alive. For others like Ahad Ha'am mere survival, a nation like all the nations, couldn't be enough. The dream had to be a Jewish one: reviving Hebrew, creating a modern Jewish identity and culture, in a deep sense restoring the Jewish soul.

On the deepest level, Jews dream of normalcy, as the noted thinker and Zionist Isaiah Berlin wrote,

"few human beings in the end want to remain members of a minority in every society. People can only develop freely in a country in which they are not perpetually uneasy about what other people think about them, how they look to others, does their behavior attract unfavorable or perhaps too much attention---are they accepted? Is it all right."

Berlin understood that for all of liberalism's power to liberate the individual, the next question becomes: what do we do with our freedom? The answer: to connect, to choose to commit, to higher dreams and ideals. As he put it:

When men complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying. To be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and language, common assumptions, the possibility of intimate communication---in short, to share common forms of life. This is an essential human need: to deny this is a dangerous human fallacy. To be cut off from one's familiar environment is to be condemned to wither. Two thousand years of Jewish history have been nothing but a single longing to return, to cease being strangers everywhere; morning and evening, the exiles have prayed for  a renewal of the days of old, to be one people again, living normal lives on their own soil---the only condition in which individuals can live unbowed and realize their potential fully.

And yet we must recognize that to connect to others, to one's people, to one's tradition, to one's culture,  to one's God, carries with it great risks. Because there is always the risk that devotion to one's ideals, to one's highest ideals, may take the form of a utopian quest for perfection that can lead to Crusades and final solutions in response to all human problems. Mad bombers don't just hate, they dream too, of Nirvana, of Olam HaBa, of the world to come, of Heaven. The greatest dream is also the greatest disappointment: the dream of salvation in this world, of a human order both joyous and just, of a world ungnarled by viciousness and anguish. We must remember the midrash that teaches the Messiah will not come until the tears of Esau are exhausted. Jacob dreamt, but he forgot that his dream affected Esau. Jacob's dream involved Esau's pain. Whatever we dream we must know always the affect our dreams have on others, and when to let go of earlier dreams in favor of more mature ones.

So for us today the question is not just---to dream or not to dream---but what constitutes a defensible way of dreaming, a legitimate goal to seek? The best formulation I know comes from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, who taught that Jews received two covenants, one of Egypt and one of Sinai, one of fate, the other of destiny. The former, given to us in the darkness and drama of slavery, reminds us that we belong to a community of fate, of history, that renders us distinctive regardless of how hard we may try to escape it. As Erik Ericson said when a student at Harvard asked him if he considered himself to be a Jew or Christian, "If you are anti-Semitic I'm a Jew."

But R. Soloveitchik taught that what matters isn't that our historical fate rendered us immutably unique, but what we make of that history. And here, he invokes the legacy of Sinai, which demands not just that we remain different by virtue of history, but that we strive to transcend fate and dream of a greater destiny.

Our historic obligation it to raise ourselves from a people to a holy nation, from an existence of necessity to an authentic way of life suffused with eternal ethical and religious values. The task for world Jewry, and for the State of Israel, is to embrace both our historical fate of isolation, and the power of our mission. "This task embraces utilizing our afflictions to improve ourselves, and spinning a web of hesed that will bind together all the parts of the people and blend them into one congregation, "one nation in the land," it involves the readiness to pray for one's fellow human, and emphathy with his joy and grief."

[If we will ourselves to dream of such a vision of holiness, our children will sleep and dream of peace rather than of destruction. Then we can learn a beautiful truth, helping us remember the bitter truth of last year: as a participant on the PBS program on religious responses to 9/11 put it: "to be open to faith takes vulnerability and we're not up to that because we've been burned by faith, literally."

I hope that speaker's wrong---I'm wagering that we can be open to faith---a faith of love and respect and commitment to our Jewish past and future---not for the sake of our religious institutions or leaders, but for our very lives and the dream that God had when He created it and us. As the Book of Genesis put it, that He made us all in His image, to live with the self-knowledge and self-dignity of that Divine inheritance, and make of His dream something worthy of both God and humanity, something not just declared "good" , but "very good," something holy.]

The great American literary modernist William Faulkner wrote, "I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."

For Jews all of those magnificent qualities we possess as humans reflect the Divine in us all, and I suppose that is the greatest dream we dare to have: the dream that our lives matter, sanctified by the covenantal bond with God, by lives illuminated by His teachings, transforming ourselves and the world. As long as we may say "Do not despair"---the motto of R. Nahman of Bratzlav, we keep our faith, because in the end that is what faith is: that for all the trials of the world, life can be made worthwhile if only we do not abandon the belief that life can be made worthwhile. We are the prophets of our own destinies; that which we believe will be meaningful will be meaningful. When we despair; we empty the world of meaning for our lives.

In this difficult hour, poised between past and future, hear the words of Rabban Johanan in the Midrash, who taught that the eye has a light part and a dark part; one can see only through the dark part. We see through darkness, through failure and heartbreak, if outside there is light. Faith in the dream helps us move through failure, powerfully shaping our character as individuals and as a people. Youseff Karsh, the famous photographer who recently passed away, well known for his portrait of Churchill and others, once said, "character, like a photograph, develops in darkness." Rav Kook taught that the wholeness of the universe, the holiness of God, remains largely concealed from us by "the crudeness of conventional life, and the pain of a world devoid of dreams and filled only with the darkness of reality." But out of the pain we all feel---of loss, of loneliness, of shallowness, of division and hatred, may come a renewed quest for wholeness. "The only whole heart is a broken one," taught the Kotzker Rebbe; only out of pain can we heal, only out of reality can our dreams emerge.

At this time of remembrance of the year past, and anticipation of the year to come, we know that Herzl's dream of 1897, a State of the Jews, came to pass. Born of a difficult birth, with many pains along the way, the dream created a reality as realities always are---infinitely more complex and problematic than our fantasies. Yet I believe still that it's better to be a free Jew in Tel Aviv than a fearful Jew in Europe. I embrace Israel's nourishment of our Jewish bodies and souls, cherishing its possibilities for preserving and strengthening our precious culture. The struggle continues, the dream lives. May we have the courage and strength to live by our dream.