Sublime

Mordecai teaches an important lesson: How does one show gratitude and happiness? By helping to improve the lot of those less fortunate.

Living according to the Torah means, in this view, aligning yourself with the forces that make for human flourishing, especially if you are a tiny people surrounded by enemies.

As Rabbi Emanuel Rackman stated (and note that he was an Orthodox rabbi), “A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty, not only because certainty is the hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, but also because doubt is good for the human soul.”

The biblical concept of a lawful world operating as the creation of God, by fixed and reliable principles, was the fundamental assumption needed to conceive the laws of nature and utilize them for human benefit.

In an age of death and destruction, Rabbi Yohanan taught that a fundamental religious response was to increase loving-kindness and multiply life itself.

What an amazing heritage that recounts the tale of a tzaddik, one of the righteous, who thinks that rocking a baby to sleep is more important than leading services!

Parents are tasked with enabling their children to participate, both cognitively and emotionally, in the inexhaustible conversation that is Judaism. To learn Torah is to be reminded in countless ways every day that we have responsibilities and therefore obligations. Through Torah we teach our children to orient their lives not only around what they

a free society must be a moral society, for without the rule of law, constrained by the overarching imperatives of the right and the good, freedom will eventually degenerate into tyranny, and liberty, painfully won, will be lost.

We are calling it a yeshiva to reclaim the cultural valence of the term—an intellectual and spiritual center where Torah radiates forth into the broader community, and the community feeds back into the yeshiva.