Reboot.

In 2001, a small group of imaginative young Jews looked at the traditions they had inherited and asked a question that sounds obvious now and sounded heretical then: what if we could reboot them? Not discard them - reboot them. Restart the system, keep the good parts, and see what runs.

They had backing that most start-ups would envy. Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw's Righteous Persons Foundation and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies put weight behind the idea. But the money was never the interesting part. The interesting part was the bet: that Jewish identity would survive the 21st century only if each generation got to make it their own, rather than inherit it under glass.

Two decades later, that bet has a track record. Reboot has grown from a gathering of trendsetters into a network of more than 600 creators, artists, entrepreneurs and activists - Hollywood writers, San Francisco technologists, New York journalists - stretched across New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and London.

Return to that comedian, that filmmaker, that designer. What they share isn't a belief system - it's permission. Permission to treat something old as raw material rather than a relic. The bit about Passover isn't mockery; it's affection with an edge. The documentary about the rabbi isn't a sermon; it's a portrait. The app that mails your answers back to you isn't a gadget; it's a ritual wearing modern clothes.

That is the change Reboot has quietly engineered over two decades. The 3,000-year-old tradition that walked into the writers' room doesn't walk out diminished. It walks out with new material, a wider audience, and a fair shot at the next generation - which was, from the very first meeting in 2001, the entire point.