(RNS) I salute New York Yankee Derek Jeter, who recently recorded his 3,000th base hit. But I also have an eye on another statistic: my own.

Since 1991, I have written nearly a thousand Religion News Service columns, numbering about 640,000 words.

While that may represent lots of verbiage, crafting 700-word columns is like squeezing into tight clothes. Everything has to fit and look good.

In addition to deadlines that always come too quickly, columnists must survive an editor’s fearsome obstacle course: abandon passive verbs and most adverbs, use only one adjective per noun, don’t pad a column with quotations, shun cliches, express opinions clearly — oops! there’s an adverb — and always avoid this kind of sentence: “On the other hand, the clergyperson seemed to appear to nearly break into a hint of a faint barely visible almost hidden half smile.”

A bewildered reader only wants to know if the person smiled.

Two column subjects attracted the biggest responses during the past 20 years: family life and the Bible.

Since 1991, I have written columns about Marcia and me seeing our daughters graduate from college and embark on their careers — Eve is a rabbi and Jennifer a casting director for films, TV and the stage. Max, my wife’s father, died in 1998, and her mother, Betty, in 2000; the same year our granddaughter, Emma, was born. Such events — the universal stuff of life — evoked positive responses from readers.

Every time I wrote a column about Scripture, I received praise and criticism.

Some readers believe each of the Bible’s 474,316 Hebrew words was written by God along with the 823,156 English words in the King James Version. One angry reader wrote that I am headed for hell because I don’t believe the entire Bible is literally true.

Another reader dismissed the Bible as “ancient male-centered fairy tales unworthy of reverence in our enlightened age.” That such anti-biblical folks read my columns continues to amaze.

Every December I write the “Top Ten Religion Stories of the Year” column. Choosing the first nine is exciting and challenging even if some subjects are painful: the 9/11 attacks, continuing anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, ageism, assaults on sexual orientation, Middle East wars, genocide, and the religious right. The 10th entry is sorrowful because I list prominent religious leaders and colleagues who died during the year.

I offer no apologies for three lifelong passions that appear in my commentaries: commemorating the Holocaust, guaranteeing the survival and security of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state, and improving interreligious relations.

I was born in Pittsburgh during the 1930s. Had my birthplace been Transylvania instead of Pennsylvania, I would likely have been among the 1.5 million Jewish youngsters murdered during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators.

I remember when Israel won its 1948-49 war of independence in which one percent of the new nation’s population was killed. That’s the equivalent of the U.S. today losing about 3.1 million people in combat.

Because the prophet Zechariah urged us to be “prisoners of hope,” I look forward to writing a column celebrating not only Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but also the establishment of peaceful relations between Israel and its neighbors, including the Palestinians.

Finally, the world’s religions continue to play both decisive and divisive roles on the world stage.

During the past two decades, I have criticized political leaders who minimize or refuse to acknowledge the potent power of faith communities to shape events. In the quest for global security, constructive relations among religious groups is not a luxury or a “feel-good” diversion.

Diplomats cite “realpolitik” as the basis for international affairs. But nothing is more “real” than building mutual respect and understanding among Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and people of all other religions.

I believe interreligious relations, for good or ill, will be the biggest news story in the next 20 years, and I look forward to covering it with another 640,000 words.

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)