Sublime

Much more than the state’s honor was at stake, however, and Ben-Gurion had failed to recognize the full gravity of the mistake he had made. By 2014, Haredim constituted approximately 15 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, and the percentage was growing; the average fertility rate for Haredi women was 6.2 children, while for the non-Haredi Jewish

It might be instructive to think of the power of rabbis to establish halakha as something like the power of merchants to set prices. It looks to all the world as if merchants are free to set prices as they wish. In fact, however, supply and demand determine a very narrow range of supportable prices.

Any covenant that respects freedom must allow for process.

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

I wrestle with and write about theology because I care about it to the depths of my being, because questions about who and what God is, and about what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the twenty-first century matter to me like almost nothing else does.

“To speak as a Jew is to quote … [and] to quote is to see the present through the prism of tradition.”

“The Orthodox Jewish community is third world in theology and philosophy. Having a political state of Israel now, I’m convinced the great religious challenge is going to be the pluralist issue. Each culture can no longer present itself as self-evident.”

There are countless examples of rabbinic activism in which the Sages of Israel harness the tools of legal analysis and interpretation in the service of the ethical values that infuse the Torah to this day.

A society must ensure equal dignity – the Hebrew phrase is kavod habriyot, ‘human honour’ – to each of its members.