The Jew in the Lotus

if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

Remembering Jeremiah, the sages formulated a third way: to sustain their faith through institutions that (unlike the Temple) could be established anywhere – the synagogue, the school, the house of study and the home. In the meanwhile they would practise what today would be called active citizenship in the countries of their dispersion.

Questioning, debating, and interpreting aren’t merely tolerated in Judaism—this is Judaism, and this process is the key not just to our survival, but to our success as well.

Insofar as there were still Jews, they lived, spiritually speaking, in suspended animation, mere ghosts among the living. The result was a failure, among Christians and even sometimes among Jews themselves, to understand that Judaism had not died with the loss of the second Temple. To the contrary, it underwent one of most creative moments in Jewis