A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World's Oldest Religion

human life is sacred, that the individual may never be sacrificed for the mass, and that rich and poor, great and small, are all equal before God.

It is the courage to see the world as it is, without the comfort of myth or the self-pity of despair, knowing that the evil, cruelty and injustice it contains are neither inevitable nor meaningless but instead a call to human responsibility—a call emanating from the heart of existence itself.

The Jewish community in the United States, the largest in the world, is disappearing faster than any other since the Lost Ten Tribes vanished from the pages of history more than two and a half thousand years ago.

Unlike capitalism it believes that the free market, without periodic redistributions, creates inequalities that are ultimately unsustainable because they deprive some individuals of independence and hope.

The point of the dialogue between earth and heaven is not to receive answers. It is to acquire, through our encounter with God, the strength to carry on, to reengage with life, to build, rescue and heal.

Judaism argues that despite the irreducible differences between faiths and cultures, all people are the children of one God.

He had striven to appreciate music and poetry, Russian literature and the history of ideas. He knew that one can live a life without these things, but it will be a smaller, more circumscribed and impoverished life. How much more so in the case of faith.

not in what Jews are but in what they are called on to be.

So the wrestling match between Jacob and his mysterious adversary is not just something that happened once long ago. We are to understand that it will recur at critical moments throughout Jewish history as an intimation of who we are.