Monotheism relocates conflict from ‘out there’ to ‘in here’, transferring it from an objective fact about the world to an internal contest within the mind. This changes our view of God, and fate, and history. But it changes, also, our view of the soul, the self, the human personality.

Yisrael—he continually struggles with God and with man, rails against his lot in life, tries to take that which is not his. Yet here we learn that he is this way because this is how God has made him. This is his uniqueness, the source of his power in the world, and this no doubt is precisely why he can’t stand this quality in himself.

God asks one individual – eventually a family, a tribe, a collection of tribes, a nation – to serve as an exemplary role-model, to be as it were a living case-study in what it is to live closely and continuously in the presence of God. This is – as Jewish history testifies – a weighty and risk-laden responsibility. Since

Judaism is not peace of mind. ‘The righteous have no rest, neither in this world nor the next’, says the Talmud.12 I remain in awe at the challenge God has set us: to be different, iconoclasts of the politically correct, to be God’s question-mark against the conventional wisdom of the age, to build, to change, to ‘mend’ the world until it becomes a