GEN1152 People looked up to as role models must act as role models. Piety in relation to God must be accompanied by exemplary behavior in relation to one’s fellow humans. When people associate religiosity with integrity, decency, humanity, and compassion, God’s name is sanctified. When they come to associated it with contempt for others and for the law, the result is a desecration of God’s name. [A] radical idea, central to Jewish self-definition, [is] that God has risked His reputation in the world, His “name,” by choosing to associate it with a single and singular people. God is the God of all humanity. But God has chosen Israel to be His “witnesses,” his ambassadors, to the world. When we fail in this role, it is as if God’s standing in the eyes of the world has been damaged. For almost 2,000 years the Jewish people was without a home, a land, civil rights, security, and the ability to shape its destiny and fate. It was cast in the role of what Max Weber called “a pariah people.” By definition, a pariah cannot be a positive role model. That is when Kiddush Hashem took on its tragic dimension as the willingness to die for one’s faith. That is no longer the case. Today, for the first time in history, Jews have both sovereignty and independence in Israel, and freedom and equality elsewhere. Kiddush HaShem must therefore be restored to its positive sense of exemplary decency in the moral life. That is what led the Hittites to call Abraham “a prince of God in our midst” [this verse].   It is what leads Israel to be admired when it engages in international rescue and relief. The concepts of kiddush and chillul Hashem forge an indissoluble connection between the holy and the good. Lose that and we betray our mission as “a holy nation.” The conviction that being a Jew involves the pursuit of justice and the practice of compassion is what led our ancestors to stay loyal despite all the pressures to abandon it. It would be the ultimate tragedy if we lost that connection now, at the very moment that we are able to face the world on equal terms. Long ago, we were called to show the world that religion and morality go hand-in-hand. Never was that more needed than in an age riven by religiously motivated violence in some countries, rampant secularity and others. To be a Jew is to be dedicated to the proposition that loving God means loving His image, humankind. There is no greater challenge, nor, in the 21st Century, is there a more urgent one.   SACKS 198-9