What will you be thinking about on July 4th this year?

By the time you finish reading this article, I hope the answer will be different.

I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. While studying in Israel, I met my future husband, a Chicago-born American who was very American through and through. We married in Toronto and moved to Israel—forever, or so we thought.

A few short months into “forever,” the Toronto Jewish community made a passionate appeal for us to return. We committed to three years with Aish in Toronto. Three years became thirteen as we helped build a new outreach synagogue, The Village Shul, from the ground up.

Eventually, after creating something from nothing, we handed the community over to another rabbi and moved to the United States with our five children to help Jewish communities across North America grow and innovate.

As a Canadian, America fascinated me.

In sports terms, it felt like getting called up to “the show”—the major leagues. It was bigger, louder, and more confident than anything I had known.

It was also a glimpse into the future of Canadian Jewry. America was further down the road. Jews had been there longer, and I saw a troubling pattern: Jews weren’t leaving Judaism because of what they knew. They were leaving because of what they didn’t know.

And then there were the holidays.

I was constantly asking women in my classes, “What do........

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