Sublime

Tzedakah lies close to the core of what it is to be a Jew. So much so that the rabbis said, ‘If someone is cruel and lacks compassion, there are sufficient grounds to suspect his lineage.’ Not to give is prima facie evidence that one is not a Jew.

It’s as if, notes Rabbi Telushkin, the Hebrew Bible is one long answer to the question Cain asked in its earliest pages: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”*6 (Spoiler alert: The answer is yes.)

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.

As Herzl was writing in German in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the best-known Jew in the English-speaking world was Israel Zangwill.

Every society requires that members, or wannabe members, signal they’re serious about giving as much as they get and not just eating the kugel and running.

Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The J

A man went looking for Rabbi Hillel and said to him, “I want to become a Jew. But only on the condition that you teach me the Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Hillel looked at this smart-aleck and said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the entire Torah—all of it. The rest is commentary. Go and study.”

The requirements for cooperation in a community are tied to all three moral foundations we considered above: a preference for fairness (tit-for-tat), the ability to defer pleasure (low discount rates), and loyalty to the community and its institutions (signaling trustworthiness).