Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

As King avows in one of his religious sermons, “I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose.”84 Given this acquiescence of religious faith, the very idea of an “ultimate purpose” (a

priority of the ethical over the ritual in Jewish tradition. This frequently comes as a surprise to those exposed to traditional Jewish practice today, but the priority is ancient and runs deep.

social contract. The idea behind it is that without law, or at least a central power capable of enforcing it, social life is at constant risk of anarchy, the state of affairs described in the book of Judges as “everyone doing what is right in his own eyes.”

ethics is about responding not to human beings in general but to human beings in particular—and in all their particularity.