Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays

On Tisha B’av, he said, ver ken essen (who can eat)? On Yom Kippur, he said, since a Jew is like an angel, ver darf essen (who needs to eat)?

We have no answer to ultimate problems. We really don’t know. In this not knowing, in this sense of embarrassment, lies the key to opening the wells of creativity.

Having forsaken all commandments, if the people had at least continued to study Torah, the light of the Torah would have brought them back to God.

Jewish existence is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances but primarily the living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people, the living in the Jews of the past and with the Jews of the present.

Perhaps the most striking expression of the relationship between the Torah and the people is the classical maxim by Rabbi Simeon ben Menasya, Palestinian Tanna of the second century, and contemporary of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi, in his interpretation of Exodus 31:14, You shall keep the Sabbath therefore, for it is holy unto you. “The words ‘unto you,’”

Jewish existence is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances but primarily the living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people, the living in the Jews of the past and with the Jews of the present. It is not only a certain quality in the souls of the individuals; it is primarily involvement and participation in the covenant

What we do as individuals may be a trivial episode; what we attain as Israel causes us to grow into the infinite.

The essence of Judaism is the awareness of the reciprocity of God and man, of man’s togetherness with Him who abides in eternal otherness.

Again and again we are taught that the Torah is not an end in itself. It is the gate through which one enters the court in which one finds awe of heaven.