Sublime

They are looking for more than a class; they want to build real community. They want substance, and they want the skills to own their Jewish lives.

Judaism’s mitzvot, then, are the deeds that allow us to meet and respond: to the Divine and to each other through our behavior. The commandedness of the mitzvot comes from within—the imperatives that emerge from empathy, love, and belonging—and blossom into the sacred actions that can transform our world and bind our hearts.

Like judging people favorably and cultivating a “generous eye” toward them, caring for and about people is obviously noble and virtuous. But what would it mean to truly treat caring and loving as “the great principle of the Torah”?

A medieval sage, Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (Rosh, 1250?–1327), insists that this mitzvah of receiving people warmly applies not just to one-on-one encounters but also to the way we carry ourselves in public. “Let not your face be angry toward passersby,” he says, “but receive them with a friendly countenance.”48 How we comport ourselves in the world m

Yet inside this discussion of alienation we can begin to see that eroding commitment has nothing directly to do with an excess of resources, a surplus of encouragement, or even an understanding of the mission. It has a much deeper source. Commitment is eroded because the overall lives of late-modern people are fundamentally disintegrated.

Through Jewish law, itself dynamic and evolving, Jews come together to integrate the raw and nonverbal aspects of universal revelation with the emerging words and positions of special revelation that can, in turn, radiate holiness and purpose back into our lives, our communities, our world.

The Jewish philosopher Will Herberg once spoke of “cut-flower ethics.” He argued that Jewish ethical norms will last for a brief while, even apart from Jewish teachings, just as flowers uprooted from the soil stay in bloom for a short time after cutting. But soon the flowers fade. Behaviors, too, disintegrate if cut from the soil in which they were

become Judaism’s most controversial proposition: that since mankind in its diversity cannot be reduced to a single image, so God cannot be reduced to a single faith or language. God exists in difference and thus chooses as His witness a people dedicated to difference.

for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.