Mitzvot are commandments the way wanting to please your parent or spouse is a commandment.

What an amazing heritage that recounts the tale of a tzaddik, one of the righteous, who thinks that rocking a baby to sleep is more important than leading services!

The world, then, is partially self-created and self-creating,

any other faith, Judaism boldly insists on love at its core and then implements that love personally and communally, through mitzvot of spiritual intimacy and social justice.

Maimonides argues here that the motivation for observing mitzvot should be joy at the opportunity to embody God’s lure,

deriving our value and contentment from our rootedness in relationship, in our connection with each other and with all of creation.

special revelation is a blossoming of universal revelation in particular flowers.

reading and every new interpretation. The rabbinic understanding of the dynamic of Oral Torah—ever growing and always the key to fixing the meaning of Written Torah for each particular time and place—is profoundly compatible with a Process understanding and is strongly rooted in the metaphysics that Process articulates.

The sources of religious belief are always growing, though some supreme expressions may lie in the past. Records of these sources are not formulae. They elicit in us an intuitive response which pierces beyond dogma.