Sublime

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.

In the synagogue, Jews were able to keep alive the three things on which their existence depended, Torah or Jewish study, avodah or Jewish worship, and gemilut hassadim, acts of social welfare.28

a dream of an intensive, passionate Torah environment for laypeople.

rabbis as teachers are in critical demand. And after a year running Hadar, I knew that my life’s focus was not only to build one specific community but also to spread the model of Empowered Judaism.

The options are these: become an academic, a rabbi, or Orthodox.

for Jewish ethics, the path to universal love is through partiality rather than around it.

Rather than a system of distilled ideas or a code of behavioral ideals, Jewish observance is living Jews living Judaism and interested non-Jews enriching their own path with nuggets of Torah.

Liberal rabbis often become sacred social workers, mainly focused on pastoral and lifecycle moments in their communities.