the central ethical moment, the paradigm for all others, is when one person attends to another, cares for her, and acts to ameliorate her suffering.

God loves diversity; He does not ask us all to serve Him in the same way. To each people He has set a challenge, and with the Jewish people He made a covenant, knowing that it takes time, centuries, millennia, to overcome the conflicts and injustices of the human situation, and that therefore each generation must hand on its ideals to the next, so

its nature, hesed (generous giving) reproduces itself; hesed begets hesed. An act of hesed is, as Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner (1906–1980) writes, “the planting of a seed that cannot but bring forth fruit similar to itself.” When someone performs an act of hesed for us, “a seed of hesed is planted in our world,” and when both we and the world function “hea

Words create moral obligations, and moral obligations, undertaken responsibly and honoured faithfully, create the possibility of a free society. So – always do what you say you are going to do. If we fail to keep our word, eventually we will lose our freedom.