Ahavat yisrael is not—cannot be—the religious equivalent of “our country, right or wrong.”

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world m

The prohibition on embarrassing another is one of Judaism’s cardinal sins, they say, and one should sooner die than transgress

When you judge someone favorably, the Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Bratzlav (1772–1810) teaches, you elevate them and bring out the best that they are capable of being.

The prophets count on us to be appalled by injustice.

Covenantal living is intergenerational living—it is to know oneself as the descendant of ancestors and the ancestor of descendants, all sharing a dream of a world in which human dignity is real and the presence of God is manifest (more on this dream in chapter 12).

the Torah insists that if we are grateful, we must share; yet on the other, it suggests that if we are grateful, we will want to share, because the urge to share is a significant part of what it means to be grateful.

to be a Jew is to cry out, even when silence would be safer, easier, and more convenient.

The words “image” (tzelem) and “likeness” (demut), which are used in the Bible to refer to forbidden idols,20 are the very words used to describe the human being created in God’s image: