The Jewish community in the United States, the largest in the world, is disappearing faster than any other since the Lost Ten Tribes vanished from the pages of history more than two and a half thousand years ago.

His overwhelming concern is with guilt.

Judaism was the first religion to reject idolatry, insisting instead that only one thing in creation is worthy of being considered as an image of the transcendent God, namely man himself, the living, speaking, choosing, acting, morally responsible person.

By the time social breakdown has become critical, it is already too late to repair. Habits have been lost and self-restraint has been jettisoned.

It meant that over the next few centuries, the Church took over many of Judaism’s ideas about atonement-through-sacrifice and transformed them from events in real time and space into mystical processes in another dimension. The son of God came to be seen as a heavenly High Priest, or as the scapegoat. At other times he was seen as an Isaac bound on

Philosophy represents truth thought, whereas Judaism represents truth lived.

free society—that precarious balance between the conflicting principles of liberty and order—exists not through the rule of law alone, but through a system of education that allows every individual to internalize the law and thus become its master, not its slave.

Only if my desires have been educated beyond selfishness to the common good do I experience law as freedom itself—as the Psalm put it: “I will walk in freedom for I have sought out Your law.”

in protest that the world is not as it ought to be. It is in that cry, that sacred discontent, that Abraham’s journey begins.