This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and

A robust sense of Judaism as a living organism requires a way for its component parts to connect in dynamic integration; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That integrated whole is precisely what halakhah offers us. Without a systemic commitment to contextualize mitzvot in the evolving conversation of the Rabbis across the generations,

we can now envision the life cycle not as stages in the life of each Jewish individual, but rather as the unfolding expression of the covenant at every moment of each person’s life. It is not our life cycle we celebrate; it is the life of the covenant linking God with the Jewish people that is worthy of our attention and that justifies our celebrat

Suddenly, because of circumstances not of their own choosing, the Israelites would have to reimagine what it meant to be part of their people. On more than one occasion in the millennia that followed, that would be the very challenge…

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