Ariel Burger — Be a Blessing | The On Being Project

Who is a Jew? A person in travail with God’s dreams and designs; a person to whom God is a challenge, not an abstraction. He is called upon to know of God’s stake in history; to be involved in the sanctification of time and in building of the Holy Land; to cultivate passion for justice and the ability to experience the arrival of Friday evening as

Feel it all like a weight, soaked with the blood of centuries. Let it make you feel uncomfortable. Or (3) From a place of love, learn how to listen. Step back to make room for the voices of those who can’t afford to be hopeless, and also step forward into your best, most hopeful self. Or (4) All of the above.

discussion about a large, meaty, theological subject began by framing it as a question, and then asking everyone around the table to begin to answer that question through the story of their lives: Who is God? What is prayer? How to approach the problem of evil? What is the content of Christian hope?

Side by side with gratitude lives protest, a deep and unabashed conviction that the world as it is is a very far cry from the world as it should be, and a demand that the gap between them begin to be closed.

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