For five weeks, I worked with Orthodox, Conservative and Reconstructionist rabbis –each of us teaching for 90 minutes every morning before together venturing out in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, the North and the South, and engaging in the vast array of issues that face Israelis, Palestinians, and world Jewry. We met leading writers like Etgar Keret and AB Yehoshua, Knesset Members and Government Ministers like Michael Melchior, peace activists from the Will Brandt Center for Coexistence, the Belzer Hasidim Synagogue and the Jerusalem Open House for the city’s Jewish and Arab LGBT population. And that was just one week! Reform kids tried Orthodox shuls and Orthodox kids tried Reform shuls—each learning that the Jewish people are united by a love of tradition, language and learning, the land and the narrative of their common peoplehood that is changing, dynamic, and a source of inspiration for growth. We crossed paths with birthright trips, congregants and friends visiting Israel—including Hannah Gorfinkel on her NFTY trip, Nikki DeBlosi on her first year at HUC, and David Greenberg and Abby Everett studying Hebrew diligently up at Haifa University. Like New York, Israel is the other crossroads of Jewish peoplehood. What a gift to be able to experience it.

Upon our arrival, there was a new and unique terrorist attack by tractor; another would come two weeks later. With the security fence impeding most suicide bombers, now the terror threat comes from East Jerusalem, complicating the delicate infrastructure of Jerusalem's inhabitants, further muddying the potential waters of peace. The exchange of the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, killed in Lebanon, for Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese terrorist who killed an Israeli child with his bare hands, tore at the heart of the country. Soon after, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced he would not seek re-election, throwing electoral politics into disarray. And as those of you who have visited Israel know, each hour the radio news would play—this summer with the added tension of literally one hour updates on the state of affairs with Iran and its development of nuclear weapons. On one hand, tension was very high…

And yet, the Shekel is stronger than the dollar and news carried story after story of American, European, and Chinese investment in Israel's booming economy. The Israel Museum celebrated the country's 60th anniversary with a moving and provocative exhibit of Israeli art that demonstrates a society alert to its challenges and alive with the dilemmas of what its next steps may be. Jerusalem is growing with building and construction and Tel Aviv now has some of the best restaurants, ice cream, and chocolate of anywhere in Europe or the US. The papers reported each day of Israel leading the way in green technological development, electric cars, and advances in medicine and science that outpace most nations.

Despite so many dilemmas and the seeming threat to its existence, Israel remains an unprecedented blessing for the Jewish people. This is not to ignore its deeply ingrained troubles—most fundamentally the occupied territories, the fate of Palestinians, and the relationship between the Ultra-Religious and the Secular. But with eyes wide open, there is a fundamental coming to terms with the fullness of Jewish life that is undeniable and something each of us should try to experience at least once in our lifetime. It's important to remember that Israel is now home to the greatest number of Jews in the world, exceeding even New York. What that means for us now and for the future is being determined there on a daily basis; a totally exhilarating experience.

As congregants of one of New York city's most vibrant and active synagogues, we have much to learn from and much to offer our brothers and sisters in Israel. The same values that animate life at Congregation Beth Elohim, (language, arts and culture, politics and religious expression; social justice, learning, caring and the environment) also animate the daily fabric of life in Israel. The great joy in experiencing both is in seeing and knowing the ways that one informs the other—not unlike the values of the program that I was privileged to teach on this summer.

On our last night, we took the kids out for dinner on Rothschild Street in Tel Aviv. Built by many of the German Jews who left Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, they recreated a European city-by-the-sea. After decades of neglect and disrepair, the world’s largest collection of Bauhaus architecture is being reclaimed, renovated, and made to shine again, much like our own Temple House at home. At 11 pm at night, with the moon bright in the sky, we all walked slowly back to the car for the ride to Jerusalem to prepare for our return to Brooklyn. This first Hebrew modern city, built in 1908, was just waking up, not unlike the city we would soon fly back to. And we were already discussing what Brooklyn can learn from Tel Aviv and what Tel Aviv can learn from Brooklyn.  After all, in the 1970s, one wave of immigrants to Park Slope reclaimed the Brownstones and made Beth Elohim their home, in dialogue with the generation that built the Temple House in the 1930s and 1940s, who were in dialogue with a generation that made Brooklyn their home in the 1950s and 1960s. And so it is again, as Brooklyn's growth and renewal continues, with those having moved here in the 1990s and at the dawn of the 21st century—each with their dreams of the future, born in their understanding of the past.

If there's one thing these summers have taught me about these two crossroads of Jewish peoplehood, is that there is more in what unites us than in what divides us. That with a commitment to grow and dream we can see our way through our troubles; and when all else fails, we sing, celebrate, share the best parts of ourselves, lighting the way for each other out of any darkness we may know.