We should look for a president with wisdom, compassion, courage and integrity: the wisdom to know what he or she does and does not know; the compassion to recognize the integrity and worth of others, even when they disagree; the courage to listen to a wide range of points of view, without pandering to or dismissing them; and the integrity of character, having listened, to make clear and often difficult decisions. We need a president with the energy to stay focused on his or her enormous task, with the experience to understand the fundamental issues that face our great nation, and with the capacity to form and express a real vision of the direction we must take to address those issues effectively, both here at home and overseas. Finally, we need a president who can communicate that vision and those hopes not only to the people of this nation but to the larger world as well.

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The first part of the question is best addressed by members of the Jewish community itself – as they will be its principle authors. We can all hope and expect that they will be as successful in the future as they have been in the past.

All of us in the larger community have a stake in helping to create and sustain an environment in which a religion professed by a minority of people can thrive. The key to this survival, as the Jewish community has so clearly demonstrated over the centuries, is that the core beliefs are held firmly while beliefs and practice more peripheral to those core beliefs are allowed to accommodate to the culture in which the believer finds himself or herself. The perennial challenge before believers is determining exactly what is a core belief and what is a cultural adaptation. If everything is a core belief then religious communities will be progressively isolated from an ever changing culture. If nothing is core then the whole enterprise of faith will fade into the vapor.

The role of a free society is to allow maximum scope for the believers to define what the core belief might be.

The advantage that a religion professed by a minority of citizens has is that it is less likely that there will be confusion between the religion and the culture. Few Jews would imagine for an instant that America is a Jewish nation where many Christians mistakenly believe that the U.S. is a Christian nation. Given that Christians for a large part of our population, if not an actual majority, many may find cultural assumptions about their faith sufficiently resonant with their faith claims that culture and faith become blurred and confused. This is a grave danger for many Christians in America, for example.