Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, ever

So biblical Judaism has a carefully elaborated theory of the state. Oddly enough, though, this is only its secondary concern. Far more fundamental is its theory of society and its insistence that the state exists to serve society and not vice versa.

individual character.”2 The Rambam in The Guide for the Perplexed says that this is a basic feature of the human condition. Homo sapiens is the most diverse of all life forms. Therefore cooperation is essential – because we are different, others are strong where we are weak and vice versa – but it is also difficult, because we respond to challenges