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Since this is the season for soul-searching and searing honesty, I'll begin tonight with my own truth as I stand before you. First, I'm nervous and second, in preparing for the Holidays, I learned a lot about myself.

In June, when I thought about what I might do for the Holidays, I thought about taking a pulpit in New York. Then, I spoke with Rabbi Ward-Lev and he asked me if I would come home to do services here. At first I loved the idea-I'd get to be home a little longer. Some of you know that I'm in New York for the next two years studying to become a rabbi at the Academy for Jewish Religion. Best of all, I'd get to lead services for my community, the first community to which I've ever really felt I belonged.

But then-I thought, "Wait. I don't want everyone to see me do this for the first time. When I lead services here, I want to be seamless, smooth, professional, rabbinic. I don't want anyone to see my anxiety and uncertainty." And this is when my Teshuva, my turning inside to look at myself began.

I like to be right, maybe even the rightest. I don't like to make mistakes, especially publicly. The power of knowing more than someone else is strong in me. I want to appear sure, confident, and above all, in control.

This is one way to be in community, the benevolent, generous leader who knows everything. But the truth is I have something better to offer. I can show you who I am, let the robe drop and be honest rather than mighty and removed. It is a credit to this congregation that it has encouraged me to be myself before you.

And that is why I am here tonight leading services and that is why I like to come to temple. Like any good relationship, it makes me feel known and brings out the best in me. Many of you may be here for the same reasons, but I suspect that some of you are ambivalent about being here for the same reasons, but I suspect that some of you are ambivalent about being here, wondering in fact why you're here at all.

You're not alone. Maybe ten percent of all the Jews I know are sitting in shul tonight because the synagogue isn't giving them what they need, and I know that I'm going to hear from at least half of that ten percent that the services were too long and boring.

Last month an article in the Atlantic Monthly called "The Next Church" described congregations of 10,000 or more people every Sunday. This is what I call a gathering! These churches, of which there are about 400, are the fastest growing ones in the country. Half of the Protestant churches have fewer than 75 congregants. This means that there is a population, a consumer market, for the religious experience but that only 10 per cent of the churches understand what the people want.

As I read the article, I began to dream about the next synagogue. "If Judaism is to survive it must walk beside the people, listening to deepest human needs, and at the same time offer its age-old instruction manual for living, the Torah. As one minister said, "We give them what they want, and we give them what they didn't know they wanted, a life change." At Kol Nidre, ten days from tonight, I will talk about how we, as Jews, want our lives changed.

Freud asked, what do women want? Rabbis ask, what do Jews want? We live in a world of change: families, schools, neighborhoods, governments, and work are not what they used to be. Each provided a sense of belonging and a security of identity. Belonging and identity requires something the individual cannot create alone. This is the function of community and our society cries for its embrace.

The mega-churches are not old-fashioned, Bible banging revivalist meetings. Many are mainstream denominations and the people are like you and me. Picture this: thousands of people gather on a patio outside a large, modern building that looks like a performance arts center. It's Sunday and people are dressed casually, shmoozing and drinking cappuccino. Contemporary music with liturgical lyrics played by an orchestra wafts from inside the building. Dozens of tables rim the patio advertising something for everyone: weight watchers, 12 step groups, ministries of service, singles, teens, and so on.

The service begins without prayer books, with people following lyrics above the stage. They sing with uplifted faces and hands free for clapping. A few members speak, telling of their experience that week in, say, the women's Bible group or the new member who no longer says she goes to church but that she belongs. Then the minister delivers a message, never called a sermon, about the importance of the church not being a gated community but a wide-open, growing place.

Can you imagine this scene not on a Sunday morning with a Star of David outside the building? The cynic in me says, "Every Jew needs not only a synagogue she goes to but one she doesn't go to. You could never get so many Jews to agree upon a service, a rabbi, and a congregation. Luckily for me, however, I have seen the beginning of the next synagogue.

It's called B'nai Jeshurun and it's on the Upper West Side of New York. They have split services every Friday night because they have over two thousand people in attendance. Well, that's New York, you're thinking. Wrong. Go to other synagogues there and you'll see the same spotty, indifferent attendance unless there's a Bar Mitzvah. Only seven years ago BJ, as it is called, got about six old men on a Friday night. Founded in the 1800s, it was a dying congregation. Then Marshall Meyer became its rabbi and he understood what the big churches discovered: that we as individuals are collapsing upon ourselves, imploding with self absorption and lives empty of meaning. Our spirits starve and history and rules are not enough. Open my heart to God, however, and maybe I'll come back and to learn a little more.

Marshall Meyer loved his God and his Judaism, and he knew that was what he had to offer. His shabbos was a time of love: He loved praying, singing, and dancing with his people, and he loved them. Behavior is contagious, and little by little, the word went out. BJ is the place to be if you want to feel communal, divine, and self-love. BJ is the sacred space of healing.

Meyer died in 1993, but because his message was bigger than he, his community lives on. Come with me to BJ for a moment for a different synagogue experience. At 5:25 I walk in for the first service, wearing slacks. I see someone slipping off his roller blades next to the talleisim at the door. Someone hands me a weekly bulletin and wishes me a Shabbat Shalom, by name. Reflective, low-key music comes from a keyboard, helping me to leave the world outside and enter the interior, unseen world, the island in time, Shabbat.

I read the bulletin for a few minutes and see that the coming week includes a poetry reading, a Talmud group, a lesbian/gay Shabbat dinner, and a speaker talking about the religious right. This is a sampling; many more opportunities for making a big place small are offered. There is also a job bank. I close my eyes and let the music enter me.

The service begins with caressing Psalms and lively Shabbat melodies. Everything is transliterated. After twenty minutes, a rousing Lecha Dodi gets people singing and clapping. Suddenly I see movement, unheard of in most synagogues. People are dancing in the aisles! Kids, old ladies, gorgeous guys and pretty girls, the rabbi himself, looking like ecstatic Hasidim, a half an hour ago they were closed, downcast, and subdued. Now the roof can hardly contain them. After ten minutes of holy aerobics, I take my seat panting, ready for the Borchu. I take three steps forward and feel I am closer to the holy. I am firm where I stand, in myself, close to the eternal, and surrounded by those who feel as I do.

I weep during the service, tears of relief that I have left my niggling concerns, tears of delight that I have reconnected with my best self. I recognize myself here, feel accepted for who I am. I am not wearing my mother's clothes and I am listening to music that is part of my life's experience. Most importantly, they talk my talk, the talk of hope, that I do matter to God, and that what I do does make a difference. BJ, by the way, is not new age. It's enlightened conservative. When I leave singing Adon Olam an hour later, I see people standing in line on the street, waiting to enter for the 7:00 service.

You can imagine the organization of such a place. For the next synagogue to grow and thrive it must operate with the clarity and efficiency of a NY industry. Let's ask the three key questions and see if we have answers: What is our business? Who is our customer? What does the customer consider of value?

Our business is selling community, a place to belong, but more than that, we are selling membership in a holy community that embraces the past, present, and future. As with any loving relationship, the community and I have a claim on each other. I cannot be a Jew without community, because it gives me identity, purpose and encouragement.

Our customer is the baby boomer who has everything, has done everything, and still hasn't found what he needs; it's the questing Jew who has been to the ashram; and it's everyone who needs a new shelter. A place like BJ attracts those that I've mentioned as well as singles, gays, and young people, groups that traditionally have no place in the synagogue.

By creating small groups, the synagogue becomes heterogeneous and pluralistic. It becomes a model of the Sukkat Shalom, the tent of peace that will one day hold all the nations of the world. The Sukkah will be made of the skin of the Leviathan, and so our temple should be made of skin composed of thousands of disparate cells and souls, connected to each other by our tradition and strengthened by each member. In this shelter we come to understand that while each of us is in the divine image, together we create the place for God to dwell.

Our tradition reflects and bridges the conflict between self and community, between past and present. Hillel said we pray to our God as well as the God of our ancestors, because we need both our immediate relationship and the original relationship that has led us to our being here tonight. Each generation transmits its wisdom to the next. Like a tree with long, penetrating roots that sends branches to the sky, may our eternal community, with its memory of creation, weave roots into our collective consciousness that will bear fruit for countess generations.

We are a people of the book. We ask at this time of year to be inscribed in the book of life. Each generation is a page in an eternal book to be read as we read Torah, with awe, love , and discernment. We here at Temple Beth Shalom have the chance to write the next page of Torah by making our congregation a community, a place where its members feel they can be their authentic selves and be loved.