Essays on Ethics: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Covenant & Conversation Book 7)

Freedom, choice, moral agency, accountability, merit, guilt, retributive justice, atonement and forgiveness are interlocking concepts that were born together, and have their genesis in the Hebrew Bible.

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

Living according to the Torah means, in this view, aligning yourself with the forces that make for human flourishing, especially if you are a tiny people surrounded by enemies.

What is striking about Judaism is not just its emphasis on responsibility but its insistence on elaborate support structures.