A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World's Oldest Religion

God lives wherever we dedicate our lives to Him.

However, this power can be brought into being only if individuals are prepared to hand over certain of their rights of property and liberty.

He meant this: Now that there was no Temple and no High Priest, atonement need no longer be vicarious. The sinner could obtain forgiveness directly.

At Sinai they acquired herut, their “constitution of liberty” as a nation.

Ambivalence spells the end of an identity because it cannot be passed on to our children. They will seek, for their own psychic health, to escape from it; and that in effect is what a whole generation is doing by leaving Judaism.

Shabbat is also a way of living out another idea, the concept of possession without ownership which is at the heart of Judaism’s social and environmental ethic.

God has chosen only one dwelling place in this universe and that is the human heart. Whenever we banish God from the heart, tragic things happen.

The first-ever democratic mandate takes place, the idea that there can be no valid rule without the agreement of all those who are affected by

Jacob, who was none of these things, wanted to be Esau, not Jacob the younger, the weaker and the apparently unloved.

God loves diversity; He does not ask us all to serve Him in the same way. To each people He has set a challenge, and with the Jewish people He made a covenant, knowing that it takes time, centuries, millennia, to overcome the conflicts and injustices of the human situation, and that therefore each generation must hand on its ideals to the next, so