As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression.”

The bible quickly surpassed the scripts themselves in length and depth—the explanatory material overwhelmed what it attempted to explain. So Jewish.

(Unlike Jacob, she never gave an ostensible explanation for moving away from him, she never “forgot something.”

“You had a talk? You think talk got us out of Egypt or Entebbe? Uh-uh. Plagues and Uzis. Talk gets you a good place in line for a shower that isn’t a shower.”

(could any two people really be referring to the same thing when speaking about God?),

Julia liked calculators that printed—the Jews of the office store, having stubbornly out-survived so many more-promising business machines—and while the kids assembled school supplies, she would tap out feet of numbers. Once, she calculated the minutes until Benjy went to college. She left it there, as evidence.

“Judaism has a special relationship with words. Giving a word to a thing is to give it life. ‘Let there be light,’ God said, and there was light. No magic. No raised hands and thunder. The articulation made it possible. It is perhaps the most powerful of all Jewish ideas: expression is generative.

Because of those texts? Destroy everything because of the arrangement of a few hundred letters? What did he think was going to happen?

Because the Jewish Bible, whose purpose is to delineate and transmit Jewish values, makes it abundantly clear that life itself is not the loftiest ambition. Righteousness is.