As the State of Israel looks toward the future, it will be essential for the country to confront these challenges and find a way to reconcile its Jewish and democratic values. This will require a willingness to engage in difficult conversations and to make difficult choices, but it is ultimately the only way to ensure a bright and prosperous future for the State of Israel.

So long as we regard the state’s religious character as a matter of the identity of the state itself, no subpopulation can sit down at the discussion table with true willingness for compromise. Yet if we agree with the contention that the state is an apparatus meant to ensure the Jewish people’s survival and continuity, then the discussion ceases to be one of values and becomes, instead, one of means, i.e. – what are the means that will serve this end without undercutting the state’s other functions as a democratic state?

Israeli society, Jewish and non-Jewish, needs to make the right and appropriate choice: that of every group and individual integrating its glorious past with the new reality imposed upon it as a necessary part of the process of establishing the state. Difference is not a flaw. It is a fact. Lack of mutual love and respect are the disease.

There are indeed 70 faces to the Torah. This is also true for Israel’s definition as a Jewish state. Yet although they may sharply diverge, there is no need, or reason, to shrink from making decisions in the spirit of the overall outlook that imbues real substance into Israel’s existence as a “Jewish and democratic” state.

Is the state of the Jews about to turn into a theocracy, as its opponents predicted? We are still far from such a situation, but the processes underway before our eyes are frightening.

It seems to me that the way to overcome the problematic genetics of Jewish sovereignty is to set limits to it – not just mutually acceptable physical limits but also a healthy boundary between religion and state.

The actual collective picture is better than the image Israelis have of themselves. Still, the identity crisis casts its shadows on Israel’s sovereign existence, and its gravity should not be downplayed.

The basic infrastructure that gives the state its legitimacy is rooted in the democratic model itself and in the contract at its core, and not in its Jewishness. On the contrary, Israel’s democraticity is the basis for Jewish flourishing, as we shall presently see. Israel is indeed a “democratic and Jewish state.”

The religious establishment in Israel relates to the entire aliyah from the FSU with suspicion and hostility and their every meeting with religious institutions from birth to death is fraught with difficulties. Those of us who are Jewish according to Halacha have to undergo a humiliating process with the rabbinate to prove our Judaism.