“All are judged on Rosh Hashanah and the verdict is sealed on Yom Kippur,” says the Tosefta, an early compendium of talmudic teachings.

Nothing happens to us when we sleep, and it is precisely this nothing that restores us.

Maybe then they won’t have to spend so much of their life’s energy defending against the truth of their own lives.

the compassion that usually comes when we realize that we and our fellow human beings are all fellow sufferers.

We reconnect with the nothing that gives our life meaning by stopping.

The Torah has a very strong sense of what is, and an equally strong sense of what ought to be, and it recognizes very clearly that if the second ever gets too far away from the first, the Torah will become a repository of irrelevant and impossible ideals.

Everything was aspiring upward toward the light and would continue to do so until it died and fell back to the forest floor. Then Divine Intelligence, embodied in a seed cone, would begin to push all this dead matter upward again in the form of new life. The forest was a single purposeful organism, and every one of its cells, living and dead, was p

This is because the ability to sit calmly is one of the most important prerequisites of clear-headedness.

while a balanced budget is a perfectly legitimate social goal, it is totally irrelevant where social welfare is concerned, at least according to Jewish law. By Jewish law, the only thing that may be considered when helping the poor is the need of the poor. We are not allowed to say, We will not care for the poor because the budget won’t be balanced