From the very beginning of Jewish history, with the emergence of Abraham, three elements were intertwined: an Idea, a People, and a Land. The Idea was "ethical monotheism," later incorporated in Torah; the People was the "seed of Abraham"; and the Land was Eretz Israel. We were able to survive without the third, but only so long as we recognized that we were in "exile" in every place outside the Land. Our situation today is unprecedented. Israelis today have a Land, but very little of a common Idea, and increasingly tenuous connections with a People. Diaspora Jewry, especially American Jewry, is highly ambivalent about the Land as well. This means that our fragmentation is far advanced. I am therefore not at all sanguine about the future cohesiveness of Am Yisrael. Nevertheless, we must exert every effort to get a maximum number of Jews to share a sense of peoplehood and a common destiny.The unraveling of the fabric of Jewish identity began with the Emancipation and has accelerated since then. When there was at least a minimal standard for Jewishness (the halakhic norm that a Jew is one born to a Jewish mother) that was accepted by almost all groups, religious or secular, one could hope to unite the People around an identity rooted in a reality, in this case a biological one—not dissimilar to the statement that a Frenchman is one born in or who lives in France, a geographical reality. However, with the current abandonment of this "reality rooted" identity in favor of a completely, or almost completely, voluntaristic one, as advanced by the adoption of patrilinealism by the Reform movement and by certain decisions of the Israeli judiciary, the common basis for Jewish peoplehood becomes more and more remote.Can some compromise be found? A basically voluntaristic standard for Jewish peoplehood that stands some chance of successfully holding most of us together can best be achieved by searching for a common strand that can best pass the "reality test," i.e., that is le…