To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility

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

What we possess, we do not own – we merely hold it in trust for God.

in creating humanity, God empowers humanity.

Our human situation as embodied souls, physical beings, means that we share needs and vulnerabilities. When it comes to acts that address such needs, it is irrelevant who performs them, for whom they are performed, and with what motive or intention. What matters is that they do good, relieve suffering, bring comfort.

compassion itself must be guided by a duty to help the victim recover his or her capacity for independent action.

‘Children…have a right to be taken seriously. The unknown person inside each of them is our hope for the future.’

Judaism is not about the truths we know, but about the truths we live.

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

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