Sublime

we actively decided not to make Yeshivat Hadar a pluralistic environment. For instance, all the full-time students are expected to daven together in a single service that is egalitarian and traditional. Students must also commit to living a life engaged with Torah and mitzvot. All of the faculty we hired also support this form of prayer and commitm

The experience of prayer is greatly enhanced if the siddur is treated like so many other texts in Jewish heritage, as a starting point for interpretation rather than a surface statement of dogma.

Many religious people think that concessions to human limitations are incompatible with divine law. An eternal truth should not be qualified by socioeconomic realities or cultural norms. Halacha’s pragmatism bespeaks a different understanding of Judaism.

By living everyday life with a dimension of depth, people become at once more human and more holy.

What is wrong in Jewish life today is that we have forgotten Zis gut zu zein a Yid, “It’s good to be a Jew.”

Jews who are deeply engaged in traditional language and practice, knowledgeable in their textual heritage, and open to the wider world have the power to alter the course of contemporary Jewish life. They may never be the majority in the Jewish community, but they have the potential to engage the majority of Jews in a deep way.

The second wall is the wall of bad listening. There are a certain number of religious people who come into each conversation armed with a set of off-the-shelf maxims and bumper-sticker sayings. Instead of actually listening to the questions from the people in front of them, they just unfurl the maxims regardless of circumstances.

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

Our division in the church in America is rooted in disconnection from one another.