Sublime

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.

In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be.

What is wrong in Jewish life today is that we have forgotten Zis gut zu zein a Yid, “It’s good to be a Jew.”

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

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

One of the most stunning gestures of Judaism was to overturn the whole idea of a hierarchy of knowledge,18 for if there are inequalities of learning, they will be replicated through all other social structures, giving some people unwarranted power over others. This is the great insight of the Jewish vision, from which all else followed: A free soci

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.

In the past, Jews had generally kept themselves to themselves, not intervening in wider social debates. But that was due to circumstance, not principle. Times had changed, and with them our responsibilities.