Sublime

Imagine a society and culture that promotes excellence of character as the key to happiness. Judaism always has.

John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail: He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results f

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.

that it is what we do for others, not what others do or what God does for us, that transforms us.

Where do you get the strength to go on, when you have used up all of your own strength? Where do you turn for patience when you have run out of patience, when you have been more patient for more years than anyone should be asked to be, and the end is nowhere in sight? I believe that God gives us strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritua

Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

« Que s’est-il passé ? » avons-nous demandé. La discussion du groupe, la semaine précédente, l’avait aidée à prendre une décision essentielle : elle allait offrir à ses enfants l’image d’une femme affrontant la mort avec élégance et courage. Cette femme était la preuve même qu’avoir le sens d’un but dans la vie suscite un sentiment de bien-être. Et

You’ve probably heard the starfish story. There’s a boy on the beach who finds thousands of starfish washed ashore, dying. He picks one up and throws it back into the ocean. A passerby asks him why he bothered. All these thousands of other starfish are still going to die. “Well,” the boy responds, “I saved that one.”

Frankl a été placé dans un camp de concentration. Là, il a compris que les questions se rapportant à la carrière – Qu’est-ce que j’attends de la vie ? Que puis-je faire pour me rendre heureux ? – ne sont pas adéquates. La vraie question, c’est : « Qu’attend la vie de moi ? » Frankl a pris conscience que le devoir d’un psychiatre dans un camp de con