Sublime

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

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

Avishai,

Buber’s articulation of the paradox of prophecy comes to mind: “It is laid upon the stammering to bring the voice of Heaven to Earth?”

Jacob never knew how to answer the question “Are you religious?” He’d never not belonged to a synagogue, never not made some gesture toward kashruth, never not assumed—not even in his moments of greatest frustration with Israel, or his father, or American Jewry, or God’s absence—that he would raise his children with some degree of Jewish literacy a

We may not know why, but this we know, that from the vantage point of heaven there was a reason for it and we must accept it as God’s unfathomable will. The alternative is that God does not exist, and thus the universe is blind to our hopes, deaf to our cries, indifferent to our existence. In such a world there is no reason not to expect an Auschwi

Rabbis ensured that the core truths of revelation would not be forever trapped in the specifics of ancient laws developed for an ancient people.

when all was said and done, the Rabbis’ work represented a profound discovery: The covenant was being renewed. The original covenant remained, but humans became more active and responsible. The Destruction was a call from God for a fundamental shift in the paradigm of the human role in the covenant. The Rabbis’ faithfulness showed itself in followi

The Jews who remained Jews, who remained faithful to the historical character of the Exodus, continued to insist that redemption could not be fully realized without social, political, and economic liberation as well as spiritual fulfillment.