Rabbi Harold Kushner notes, rather than suppressing our desires (like the folks who imprisoned the yetzer hara), or mindlessly indulging them, we can sanctify our desires with the mitzvot—elevating them and ensuring they’re in the service of something beyond mere bodily satisfaction.

We’re acknowledging that we can work as hard as we can, and worry as much as we want, but in the end, we’re not in control of everything—God is. And even if, like me, you don’t necessarily buy the “God is” part of that last sentence, what comes before it is still undeniably true.

it argues that there is one God and many faiths—and only one world in which to live together in peace. That means that for Judaism the great spiritual challenge is not so much finding God within oneself as finding God within the other, the stranger.

God loves diversity; He does not ask us all to serve Him in the same way. To each people He has set a challenge, and with the Jewish people He made a covenant, knowing that it takes time, centuries, millennia, to overcome the conflicts and injustices of the human situation, and that therefore each generation must hand on its ideals to the next, so