Sublime

Confusion of selflessness with inner poverty can be especially difficult for women. In our male-dominated culture, a woman can grow up feeling that she doesn’t really count, that she will not amount to much in this man’s world, that a woman’s fate and work is not of value. This powerful conditioning can lead to an identity riddled with depression,

Great spiritual texts describe the what — what it means to be free. The Work is the how.

It is accepted that each member of the community, formally trained or not, officially sanctioned by a religious organization or stepping up as a rogue sage, has something of value to offer the whole.

“Uttered faith must come out of a surplus of silence,” wrote Heschel.

The God of freedom summons humanity to freedom: responsible, law-governed, self-restrained, the liberty that honours the liberty of others, but never less than freedom.

there is no escape from life, only a chance to confront it, day after day in all its sanctifying tedium and blessed boredom and glorious agitation in the communities of which we are a part at any given moment of our lives.

The peace of self is dependent upon the peace of the other. God created the world in a web of relationships that overflowed with forceful goodness.

Hence the significance of one remarkable feature of Judaism: its principled insistence – like no other civilisation before – on the dignity and integrity of the individual. We believe that every human being is in the image and likeness of God. The sages said that every life is like an entire universe (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:4). The Rambam says that eac