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In Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown tonight, triggers two distinct reactions: repentance and renewal.

Repentance (to turn from sin) is quite different from renewal (to turn from routine).

In a way, it is more comfortable to focus on evil and sin. After all, most people do not live evil lives. Paradoxically, then, a call to repentance represents less of a shakeup of their previous behavior.

Yet more lives are blighted by stultifying ways of living than by assaults from outsiders; more marriages — and loves — expire in boredom and routine than in willful misbehavior.

Similarly, it is all too comforting for the committed Jewish community to focus on intermarriage and assimilation as the danger to continuity and to blame unaffiliated "sinners" for threatening Jewish survival.

We grow enraged at Jews who drift away and blame them for betraying their long heritage in return for mainstream acceptance. This enables the affiliated community to go on with business as usual.

Communally, I submit that vapid routine is currently a deadlier enemy of Jewish survival than is "sin" — that is, conscious rejection of Judaism. For the sake of the Jewish future, Rosh Hashanah must be turned into a critique of the status quo in communal Jewish life and into a self-critique by affiliated Jews.

Some years ago, a study of Jews attending New York's 92nd Street Y's outreach-oriented Jewish Omnibus events found that the bulk of those unaffiliated Jews had been affiliated earlier in their lives, through a b'nai mitzvah or synagogue membership.

However, the previous experience was negative — or, more typically, vacuous and boring — so they dropped out of Jewish life for years, even decades.

Consider American synagogue life. The classic liberal synagogue is marked by a Friday-night service in which a rabbi and cantor lead a polite, routinized rite with Hebrew elements that many congregants do not understand, and English elements that are familiar but blasé, if not banal.

Saturday morning is dominated by the bar or bat mitzvah. In this event, family and friends come to hear a young person recite prophetic biblical texts that the guests do not understand and that the child has studied by rote, but which hold little import for his or her future life.

To serve one-time visitors, regular worshippers are penalized. Their service is taken over; the rhythms are adjusted and the explanations are addressed to the transient population. The synagogue insists this pattern cannot change.

Furthermore, the services — having been kept at lowest-common-denominator level — will have no attendance unless there are bar or bat mitzvah guests. This routine spells steady death of the soul for regulars and unaffiliated alike.

Yet the committed rationalize that synagogue life cannot survive otherwise. In sum, business as usual is a slow boat to oblivion.

The Orthodox synagogue has a stronger core of committed regular participants and in the healthier synagogues, the b'nai mitzvah is not the main event.

But most synagogues fail to build the kind of spiritual excitement that motivates people to upgrade their lives or dedicate themselves to Jewish learning and observance.

Sadly, the rabbinical seminaries of the three major denominations train most rabbis for the continuing status quo.

Yet renewal alternatives already exist. In New York City, Conservative congregation B'nai Jeshurun and Orthodox Kehillat Jacob (Shlomo Carlebach's shul) have both electrified their constituencies.

B'nai Jeshurun attracts thousands weekly by offering a singing, dancing, liturgically expressive community experience — at once more demanding and more rewarding.

Conservative Anshei Chesed in New York has broken the institutional edifice complex by offering a mix of chavurah-learning-worship options to involve a variety of people in different but deeper group experiences.

Orthodox Ohab Zedek has been born again as a tremendous draw to younger people by revitalizing community and by emphasizing hospitality and learning.

The Jewish Center, also Orthodox, has been galvanized by a rabbi's decision to offer much more serious and demanding learning opportunities, hitherto reserved for more academic settings.

Such renewal patterns can be found across the country.

Larry Kushner's Reform Temple Beth El in Sudbury, Mass., has broken the bar mitzvah syndrome by demanding more advance study and participation on the part of the families.

A congregation in Ann Arbor, Mich., has become a magnet by requiring prospective members to perform community service .

Philadelphia's Reconstruction-ist Mishkan Shalom staked out a strong social-action agenda for its members.

A host of Orthodox congregations host beginners' services that meet attendees wherever they are and enable them to grow rather than repeat the same rote forms each week.

The synagogue is not the only institution where the status quo is suffocating.

The federation world is also caught between its current agenda of doing good and supporting Israel and its increasing distance from the unaffiliated and the next generation. Here, too, lies real danger of a slow death.

Throughout the Jewish world, the road to hell is being paved with good intentions and entrenched routines. We need a profound self-critique within the establishment. We need more philanthropists to concentrate on nurturing changes for the community and on financing risky but needed new institutions and initiatives.

In the words of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, repentance should not be narrowly defined "only from the perspective of atonement"; rather it must become an "act of Creation — self-creation."

In renewal lies the secret of redemption.