What is wrong in Jewish life today is that we have forgotten Zis gut zu zein a Yid, “It’s good to be a Jew.”

The first accepts the reality of evil, the second the reality of God. The first says that if evil exists, God does not exist. The second says that if God exists, evil does not exist. But supposing both exist? Supposing there are both the palace and the flames?

Acceptance of what is, is a failure to hear the call of what ought to be. Judaism has its moments of serenity, such as the Sabbath. But these are mere resting places on the journey; pauses of withdrawal before reengaging with the world.

The years of waiting, the disappointment of Ishmael, the near-loss of Isaac, burned into Jewish consciousness the knowledge that generational continuity does not simply happen. Judaism became, and still is, that rarest of phenomena, a child-centered faith.

was only when politics were secularized and prejudice could no longer be given a religious justification, that hatred became racial.

He meant this: Now that there was no Temple and no High Priest, atonement need no longer be vicarious. The sinner could obtain forgiveness directly.

The experience of slavery became, for an entire people, the matrix of the passion for freedom.

The natural world consists of causes and effects, events that, given the circumstances, could not be otherwise. The human world is different. It is made in freedom out of choices made possible by ideas. What we think shapes what we do.

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.