The existence of a covenant with God means that all human sovereignty is delegated, conditional and constitutional.

The word tzedakah is untranslatable because it joins together two concepts that in other languages are opposites, namely charity and justice.

There is something inspiring in a worldview that has such power to turn negative energies into a renewed commitment to the good.

A command between us and God requires a blessing – because a blessing is, in effect, the declaration of an intention. It is a way of saying, ‘I am doing this because I am commanded.’ It places the act within the context of holiness. A command between us and other people needs no blessing because it requires no special intent. Someone was in need; w

Meaning takes place when something within us responds to something outside us: not when we choose but when we are chosen.

The Hebrew Bible embodies serious concerns about technology as a source of hubris on the one hand, social control and human enslavement on the other. In Judaism, power must always be subordinate to purpose, science to ethics, technology to human dignity. The why matters more than the how.

peace can come to seem to be a kind of betrayal. It involves compromise and settling for less than one would like. It has none of the purity and clarity of war, in which the issues – self-defence, national honour, patriotism, pride – are unambiguous and compelling. War speaks to our most fundamental sense of identity: there is an ‘us’ and a ‘them’,

the prophets were right to envisage peace not within historical time but at ‘the end of days’, and even more so to see this as the work of God, not humankind. The attempt to bring prophetic peace by human action creates not peace but war

strengthen him in such a manner that his falling into want is prevented.