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

Judaism is powerfully focused upon goodness because to be good takes work. A simple exhortation to be good is not enough; both our history and the world as we find it today remind us that human beings have enormous appetites for cruelty and destructiveness.

Parents are tasked with enabling their children to participate, both cognitively and emotionally, in the inexhaustible conversation that is Judaism. To learn Torah is to be reminded in countless ways every day that we have responsibilities and therefore obligations. Through Torah we teach our children to orient their lives not only around what they

Powerless, stateless and often living under conditions of great poverty, Jews throughout the centuries of their dispersion created a communal equivalent of a welfare state. They did so voluntarily, because it was a mitzvah (religious deed), because it is what Jews do, and because they knew that no one else would do it for them.

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.