In the 1970s, UJA’s rallying slogan was: “We are One.” Indeed, those were the days in which the Jewish community banded together over three core principles—commemoration of the Shoah, saving Soviet Jewry (and Syrian Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry), and Israel. The past fifty years have eroded each of those. People are tiring of the Shoah and are eager to move on from what Salo Baron termed the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Soviet Jews left en masse in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Jews of Syria and Ethiopia have mostly migrated and resettled as well. And Israel, which is itself grappling with unparalleled polarization, no longer serves as a uniting factor for many North American Jews. All this leaves us, fifty years after the UJA banner, with a dramatic shift in punctuation:

I must confess. I am deeply torn about spirituality. I have gone through extended periods during which I experienced deep and profound connection with God. Music, tefillah, mind-expanding Torah-study, cloudless starry nights, awesome thunderstorms, staring at a single flame, witnessing a birth, being present at the moment of death, and running a marathon in Jerusalem have each inspired me to sense that I was in the immediate, intimate, and terrifying presence of God. As a shaliah tzibbur leading tefillah on Yom Kippur I have been transported into worlds I cannot describe.

“Imagine that you could travel back to any period in history. What moment or event would you want to observe? What people would you want to meet? What would you ask them?” Many of us have asked and been asked these hypothetical questions. They are designed to inspire curiosity, drive thinking, and spark the imagination. They represent, to some extent, a considerable component of what historians try to do—to use the tools at hand, books, documents, records, artifacts, testimonies, and more to explore the past, and for some perhaps to create a virtual time machine through which they can re-create that past.