When the Jewish people were wandering in the desert, during those 40 formative years following the Exodus from Egypt, they became a nation. They left Egypt as a tribe, and through the giving of the Torah and the subsequent trials and tribulations of almost half a century wandering through the Sinai, they slowly became the people we are today. These early members of the nation didn’t have synagogues or JCCs or the institutions we view as central to the Jewish people today, but