Accordingly, as we stood looking across the valley toward where the Temple stood, from within the modern Jewish state, the question is unavoidable - how are we doing? How did we merit a second chance, and what are we doing with it?

A century ago, someone standing on that spot would have been amazed to see the view today. In 1907, Jerusalem was a sleepy Ottoman backwater. The idea of restoring Jewish sovereignty and resurrecting the Hebrew language would not even have passed as science fiction.

We are still scarred by the Holocaust, and an eerie complacency hovers over threats of a nuclear version of it. But it is impossible not to wonder at the achievements and resources that the Jewish people have to bring to bear against today's threats.

Still, even if the model of God punishing the Jewish people periodically for our failures is not applied literally to the present, the idea that Jews have more to fear from internal faults than external threats remains a valid one. Nor is the most obvious example of such a fault - the shallowness of our political leadership and the deterioration of democratic institutions - necessarily the most serious one.

Underlying all this is the fundamental question of whether a Jewish state has the luxury of being "normal," or whether it must have a vision and purpose. Our current travails suggest that normalcy is not enough. It is not enough because, in aiming for normal, we have achieved something less: a progressive lowering of political standards that is eroding confidence in our system. We need to aim higher just to reach a form of political stability that other democracies take for granted.

IT IS ALSO not enough because our neighborhood is not normal. We need to be as ideologically driven to survive and prosper as our enemies are to destroy us. A state aiming for normality has trouble answering the question "Why bother?" If our state has no purpose but to be like New York or Amsterdam, then why not move somewhere easier to live?