Sublime

To be a faithful Jew means to scour one’s soul, seeking to force oneself deeper. Teshuva is a hard test; we must not only examine ourselves, we must ask forgiveness from those whom we have hurt. Without confronting those who have suffered by our sins, we cannot do teshuva.

To live as a Jew is a double statement of faith. It presumes a belief not only in God but in the resilience and importance of the Jewish people.

In the land of Israel, under the sovereignty of God, there would be a republic of free and equal citizens, held together not by hierarchy or power but by the moral bond of covenant. It didn’t happen.

We live in a time—call it a secular age—when society has devalued the pastor and yet we nevertheless yearn for ministry.

“Don’t let your neighbor drift along in lanes of loneliness,” Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik writes. “Don’t permit him to become remote and alienated from you.”

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

Torah study is a regular exercise in humility, a reminder that we are not able to grasp the overwhelming complexity of God’s world.

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.

If goodness will not be imposed by power, then the human must be educated toward perfection. The rabbis conceive of God as teacher and pedagogue—teaching Torah to Israel and to the world. This also explains why, in the words of Ethics of the Fathers (chapter 6, Mishnah 2), “the only truly free person is one who studies Torah.”