Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

while a messianic era will come one day, we must wait for it patiently.

if we were to characterize actual Jewish belief such as it appears in the wild, we would find that different people codify it at different degrees of abstraction.

Failing to adapt at all is exceedingly maladaptive.

All the fine properties of halakha considered above – robustness, adaptability, intuitiveness, and so forth – are possible precisely because halakha is a communal, rather than a governmental, process.

Our beliefs are, in aggregate, like an operating system: they sit in the background and serve as a framework within which it is possible to organize our lives.

To generalize, a key, and usually under-appreciated, advantage of balancing egalitarianism with heavily weighted leadership is the increased chance of occasionally escaping a sub-optimal equilibrium in a coordination problem.

social norms must encourage our prosocial instincts and discourage our selfish instincts. If you and I both know that we share a commitment to such norms, we can trust each other and cooperate in mutually advantageous ways.

the consensus that emerges gives weight to the practices of all those committed to tradition, but gives more weight to those who are recognized as authorities. It is crucial to note that the influence of these authorities is not a function of their position. Rather their position is a function of their influence.

All of the types of social norms we have considered here promote trust and cooperation, sometimes in subtle and indirect ways. This is why they are so crucial to a society’s flourishing.