Sublime

One of Judaism’s most distinctive and challenging ideas is its ethics of responsibility, the idea that God invites us to become, in the rabbinic phrase, his ‘partners in the work of creation’. The God who created the world in love calls on us to create in love. The God who gave us the gift of freedom asks us to use it to honour and enhance the free

Who is a Jew? A person in travail with God’s dreams and designs; a person to whom God is a challenge, not an abstraction. He is called upon to know of God’s stake in history; to be involved in the sanctification of time and in building of the Holy Land; to cultivate passion for justice and the ability to experience the arrival of Friday evening as

Rabbi Greenberg explained that we lost 30 percent of the Jewish people during the war, but more than 80 percent of the scholars, mystics, and teachers who could pass on ancient traditions.

Jewish tradition had always asserted that the hope of faith and the joy of living with God does not blot out the reality of tragedy in life. Until a final redemption occurs, the awareness of defeat and destruction must be incorporated into faith, thereby becoming a learning experience. The days of mourning would demonstrate that Jewish affirmations

Gott fun Avraham

a hyperliteral reading of the rabbinic dictum that the wicked are called “dead” even in their lives, whereas the righteous are called “living” even in their deaths.

Rabbi Saadia Gaon teaches that “the Jews are a people by virtue of Torah.”

from beginning to end, and especially at its center, the Torah continuously expresses this formal pattern, an elaborate structure, carefully centered around both the infinite and the impermanent, around God and death, around change and that which is beyond change; in short, around the great flow of being that is God’s very name. 2.