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

And since they are free, God does not prevent them from committing evil. God, who seeks only justice and righteousness and peace in the world, must therefore create the possibility of violence and torture and bloodshed in the world.

For Paul, people achieve atonement through someone else, the son of God who died for our sins. For Akiva, they achieve it by themselves, by relinquishing their sins.

that rest is an achievement, that the Sabbath is Judaism’s stillness at the heart of the turning world, and that it was this that God created on the seventh day. “After six days,” said Judaism’s sages, “what did the world lack? It lacked rest. So when the seventh day came, rest came, and the universe was complete.”26

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.

Today a view prevails that all ways of life, all lifestyles, are equally valid. Judgment itself is held to be morally wrong because it assaults the principle that each of us should be free to live as we choose. There is a kernel of truth in this—namely that each of us is unique, and there are many different ways of living well. But as for the rest,

So the Hebrew Bible became part of the Christian canon, albeit renamed and reinterpreted as the Old Testament.

Jews did not want to belong to the club that would have them as a member. They were Jacobs who did not want to be Jacob.

But such is not the case.

Why the drawn-out hopes, the repeated disappointments, and the final joy only to be so nearly shattered for all time? The answer is this. What we have, we eventually take for granted.

Judaism argues that despite the irreducible differences between faiths and cultures, all people are the children of one God.