Lessons in Leadership: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (Covenant & Conversation Book 8)

No animal ever “served” another animal; but service, giving of oneself to others, is at the core of what it means to be a human and at the core of the quest for career success.

One of the key questions the Torah addresses is: how do we create associations that honour both self and other, ‘I’ and ‘Thou’?

The message of the Hebrew Bible is that serving God and serving our fellow human beings are inseparably linked, and the split between the two impoverishes both. Unless the holy leads us outward toward the good, and the good leads us back, for renewal, to the holy, the creative energies of faith run dry.

One of Judaism’s most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility, the idea that God invites us to become, in the rabbinic phrase, his ‘partners in the work of creation’. The God who created the world in love calls on us to create in love. The God who gave us the gift of freedom asks us to use it to honour and enhance the free