Sublime

For Jonas, Diaspora is not a matter of geography; it is a matter of existential distance from life lived truly. In rabbinic parlance, one might say that we are no longer capable of observing God’s will completely.

if services are meant to jolt our consciousness so that we experience the words of the siddur in a new light, then the “good old” melodies stand in the way.

was reluctant to give up my love of art and literature, music and poetry, most of which had been created by non-Jews and had nothing to do with Judaism.

if we were to characterize actual Jewish belief such as it appears in the wild, we would find that different people codify it at different degrees of abstraction.

Maimonides lays out: learn the truth from whoever says it.37

Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor worked with Patterson (who later described Trumpeldor as “the bravest man I ever knew”) to form the Zion Mule Corps.

As Rabbi Kalonymos Shapiro taught, the mission of the Jew is to teach the world how to sing. This is the call of Nishmat on Shabbos morning. Nishmat pleads to “arouse the sleepers and awaken the slumberers,” drawing on the language of Psalms 146:7–

even for the leaders of this form of Judaism, life is not linear, and serious progress is often the result of messy journeys.