"Jewish identity"---like all ethnic/racial/religious/class identities--was an is easiest to appreciate and fortify where a group is in the minority, preferably a minority that it subject to prejudice by outsiders. It is easy to keep when there is spatial separation, as with the Amish, or in the shtetls of the Pale in Europe the Lower East Side in New York a century ago.

The problems for retaining identity come for some of the following reasons: the environment turns at least neutral and at best friendly; there is assimilation to the surrounding culture; entrance to and exit from the group is more casual and easier to obtain; where intermarriage diffuses the identity of second and third generations.

All these factors are creating problems for the American Jewish communities. Many Jews do not care much about identity, but those who do work to fortify what is left of group coherence. Here again, there are problems: in "the Old Country" one attracting and defining element was Torah, and with it, regular synagogue attendance, or belief in God. I read widely in the Jewish press and find that these three elements are weakening or not even retrievable. For thousands of Jews, Israel and the modern state of Israel served and, for many, they still do. Every opinion survey one friends will make clear that Israel is "it." Yet, again, critics and editorialists from within note considerable decline in support of Israel among younger Jews and exogamous Jews
Moral ambiguity about Israeli policies in respect to Palestinians also causes some stepping back by many Jews, with resultant agony over identity.

Whether Israel can bear all the wait it has been asked to by American Jews is a tough issue. Devotion to broader Jewish history, scriptures, and the like, might reverse some tides, but the tides still flow strongly.

"Pride" has suffered a fall since we began to learn in 2003 that boasting of our being the dominant power in the world and the most powerful in history did not help us in recent wars and now we even go running to little countries with big banks to stay alive financially. So it's bruised, but it'll be back.

"Sloth," which does not mean laziness-sloth, is always a candidate. It means, in Thomas Aquinas' concept, sadness in the face of spiritual good, the inability to "get up" for anything. It is benumbing, and indulging in it may be helpful in our quest to forget that we are in a war--"which no one noticed" at the mall.

"Lust" is colorful and gets tabloid attention but has its limits.

I vote for greed, which shows up on all pages of domestic coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, etc. We Jesus-people have heard that we cannot serve God and Mammon, the god of material things like money, but we don't pay too much attention to that accent of Jesus, and devote energies to satisfying our greedy impulses which, by definition, cannot be satisfied. "Envy" goes with this one.

That takes care most of the seven "capital" (head of a column, not "deadly" originally) sins, leaving "gluttony," which is good for the diet industry and "anger," which readers may well show those of us who have not spoken of their favorite.

In 1786 Thomas Jefferson's bill on religious freedom was passed in Virginia. James Madison reported that some legislators wanted to insert the words "'Jesus Christ.' He and the legislature rejected it because it would have worked for "a restriction of the liberty defined in the bill to those professing his religion only. Jefferson saw rejection of the restrictive bill to be "proof" that the legislature "mean to comprehend within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination."

After the passage Maryland's Luther Martin spoke for a few delegates who were "so unfashionable as to think. . . that in a Christian country, it would be at least decent to hold our some distinction between the professors of Christianity and downright infidelity and paganism." As the states ratified the Constitution with its Article VI against religious tests for office, here and there someone would speak up fearing, in one celebrated instance, that the Constitution would be an invitation to Jews and Catholics to come to the United States,, and be a threat to its survival. Another feared that "a Turk, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States." Such advocates always lost badly, and we are stuck with the Constitution the founders gave us. It is godless mentioning only that it was passed "in the Year of Our Lord. . . "

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