Sublime

The ideal, we might say, is to combine the best of what particularism and universalism have to offer (and demand): we care about everyone but we start local and we allow other people to be who they are. This is the dialectic that Jewish ethics at its best seeks to express.

Freeing the people from the mass of contemporary experiences, Shabbat restores the root and the goal—the Exodus and the messianic vision—to the center of life. Through

a free society must be a moral society, for without the rule of law, constrained by the overarching imperatives of the right and the good, freedom will eventually degenerate into tyranny, and liberty, painfully won, will be lost.

American Jews, I held, should uphold Israel’s right to defend itself and to exist as the Jewish State. They should respect the responsibility that Israelis bore by choosing their leaders democratically. Israel, for its part, must acknowledge American Jewish pluralism and behave as the nation-state of all the Jewish people.

The ideal, we might say, is to combine the best of what particularism and universalism have to offer (and demand): we care about everyone but we start local and we allow other people to be who they are. This is the dialectic that Jewish ethics at its best seeks to express.

While Shimen wants freedom to participate in a specific communal project that connects the past with the future and that gives his life meaning and purpose, Heidi wants freedom from such projects.

in the Hebrew Bible, God reveals himself primarily in the form of laws, for Judaism is concerned not just with salvation (the soul in its relationship with God) but also with redemption (society as a vehicle for the divine presence).

reading and every new interpretation. The rabbinic understanding of the dynamic of Oral Torah—ever growing and always the key to fixing the meaning of Written Torah for each particular time and place—is profoundly compatible with a Process understanding and is strongly rooted in the metaphysics that Process articulates.

Jews in America are yearning for someone to show them the way into the meaning and deeper beauty of our tradition.