EXOD336 Thus the Jewish and American understandings of the nature of community and of the status of the individual within the community have some important similarities. In the minds of many American Jews, these mask the significant differences between the two concepts. Indeed, many American Jews want to believe that their Jewish self and their American self fit neatly together, like hand in glove, with no contradictions or even tensions. As we have seen, though, American ideology depicts the community in a “thin” sense, by which membership is completely voluntary and may be revoked by the individual at anytime and by which the purpose of the community is predominantly pragmatic. In contrast, Judaism’s sense of community is “thick,” which means that its members are organically part of the communal corpus and cannot sever themselves from it and that the purpose of community, while partly pragmatic, is essentially theological, to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”