Sublime

In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be.

What is hessed? It is usually translated as ‘kindness’ but it also means ‘love’ – not love as emotion or passion, but love expressed as deed.

Bialik was fascinated by the worlds of Western culture and the Jewish Enlightenment (the haskalah). A movement that began in the 1770s and lasted until the 1880s, the haskalah sought to reform the Jewish emphasis on tradition and collectivism and to import into Jewish society a more rational, analytical, intellectual, and individualistic way of lif

exclusion. It is time to reclaim chesed, covenantal love, as the imperative of this age, and to assert chesed as the central Jewish religious value.

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.

The sum of the Rabbis’ educational and halachic efforts was that participation in religious life was democratized.

Darkhei shalom is essentially hessed universalized and applied to those who are not members of our faith.

As Herzl was writing in German in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the best-known Jew in the English-speaking world was Israel Zangwill.