Thursday is Yom Kippur, the holiest and most solemn day of the year for the Jewish people. It is the Day of Atonement, of fasting and prayer.

Jews ask God for forgiveness of our past year's sins and God, like the judge He is, weighs us on His scales of justice.

The great 12th-century rabbi Maimonides (The Rambam) writes: "A person should see himself and the whole world as being on a knife edge, precisely and exquisitely balanced.… If he does one sin he tips the balance of his own life and that of the whole world to the negative side."

But with one mitzvah, or good deed, Maimonides says, "he can alter the balance of his life and the whole world to the side of blessing and life." God's law is intricate but fair.

Humanity on its own

But things get complicated what with all this calibration.

The Lord, to take an example, may be weighing the souls of subprime lenders even as you read this.

(What He would make of the mess on Wall Street I can only guess. But I like to think God might call for more oversight in our houses of finance. If individuals, Jew and gentile, must tightly regulate their behaviour, why not our institutions?)

Or, He may be hiding, continuing His retreat from history.

If you trace the movements of the Lord in the Hebrew Bible you'll notice He begins to withdraw His presence throughout the narrative until, pretty much, He disappears.

That's the judgment of Jack Miles, a priest turned journalist, in his 1989 book, God: A Biography.

At first the Lord is a Holy Busy Bee, intervening in everybody's business. When He really gets angry, He drowns the world (except for Noah, his family and his assembled menagerie).

Alas, He starts again. He commands Abraham to leave his home in ancient Mesopotamia, well in advance of the American invasion. He puts the stuttering Moses ahead of his "stiff-necked people," and leads them out of slavery in Egypt.

The Lord calls Moses up to Sinai and delivers his Ten Commandments (twice!). Then He keeps the children of Israel wandering in the desert for 40 years, without a global positioning device. Eventually the bedraggled Israelites reach Canaan, a land of milk and honey (and unfortunately, no petroleum).

(Did the Lord know that millennia later, His children would still be fighting for this patchy piece of real estate?)

But then, as Miles and other commentators tell us, like a parent who must accept His role, He begins to retreat. As a fading character in His own great story, He leaves the stage to His bewildered people.

Some call this abandonment. Others, maturity.

I know God has a great second act in the New Testament, but on this Yom Kippur, I will leave that aside for another time.

Wanted: leaders with strong character

So, God's chosen people find themselves on their own. It's lonely and terrifying.

Yes, they have His laws. But they must interpret madly. That's what the rabbis and their descendents do: They debate, they write commentary. Combine this with a little Greek rationality, and you have Western civilization (now festooned with multiculturalism).

But we in the West all now find ourselves living in a new Tower of Babel, where people shout and can't or won't understand each other. We now live in ideological silos, where a small plurality — the undecided — exercise great power.

(With all this attention, if you were undecided, why would you want to make up your mind?)

Out there, as the seasons change and the icecaps melt, a great hunger for leadership is emerging in our lands. Not leadership by policy — who knows what tweaking will work? — but guidance through strong character.

That's why we expect our leaders to have a firm hand. Face it, folks. Our leaders must become like Commander Bill Adama of Battlestar Galactica.

Strong judgments, no panic

For those who are not fans of the series, Adama, played by the beefy and pockmarked Edward James Olmos, is the military leader of a band of humans fleeing the Cylons.

The Cylons are robots, created by human beings to serve them. But they turn on their makers. And like angry, abused children, they now seek to destroy their parents.

At the head of his ragtag fleet, and in his aging warship, Adama is the rock upon which the human race depends. But what horrible pressure he is under! He's always working with incomplete information. He must gamble and guess. He is forced to make snap judgments. And he has to do all this without panicking.

Adama is in charge of a tempestuous crew (some of whom are Cylon agents). He is steely eyed, ruminative and simmers with repressed, sullen energy.

This is no New Age guy who lets his feelings show. He's a real 1950s grown-up, plunked down in a new century.

When Jack Layton blustered at Prime Minister Stephen Harper during the leaders' debate to intervene in the economy, Harper responded by doing a Bill Adama — albeit, very temperate and Canadian. He wouldn't be panicked into proposing a mini-budget, he said.

Now, Bill Adama has more to worry about than Harper (survival of the human race vs. a forming a majority government). And he'd never be caught dead in a blue V-neck sweater.

Still, during this tumultuous time, perhaps we're seeing a new icon emerging: The wounded, inner child — much talked about for decades — is being nudged aside by the cool "inner grown-up."

Cool exteriors in heated times

Here's another piece of evidence from one of my favorite U.S. conservative pundits: Charles Krauthammer, much disdainful of Barack Obama, has just praised the Democratic nominee by noting that he is "cool, as in collected."

"He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory," he writes. Krauthammer, who rarely pays a compliment, also notes that Obama has a "first-class temperament and intellect."

It just might be these two cool dudes, Obama and Harper, will meet one day in Ottawa or Washington.

But let me end by returning to this holy day, Yom Kippur.

It is a day of judgment. Our souls are being weighed. This might be all just a pretty metaphor. But in these troubled times, we seek guidance anyway. We wonder, we fret. Some of us may be panicking.

We are all travellers on our version of the Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons aren't chasing us. But we're chasing our houses, our jobs and our money. A way of life may be transforming itself.

On the bridge, our commanders' stomachs must be churning, even if they keep their options close to the chest.