Sublime

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

They never allowed the exhilaration of the present to obscure the lessons of the past or responsibility to the future. That is why Jews were and remain an important voice in the moral conversation of mankind.

Israel, he says, ‘thought it was different because it was different: it constituted an egalitarian social system in the midst of stratified societies.’

The message of the Bible for the politics of the contemporary West is that it is not enough to have a state. You also need a society – meaning, that common belonging that comes from a sense that we are neighbours as well as strangers; that we have duties to one another, to the heritage of the past and to the hopes of generations not yet born; that

as Jews we have a responsibility to work across the borders of faith and be a blessing to humanity as a whole, seeking neither recognition nor reward.

and present danger to the future of liberty.

The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”7

Jewish history is a living testimony to the power of ideas,