Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life

Virtue cannot be limited to those with the means to practice it.

having personal projects and commitments is what gives us a reason for living at

To be a human being is to have interpersonal loyalties and commitments. It is unreasonable to demand that these be shunted aside in the name of impartialistic moral reasoning.

human warmth is fundamental to what it means to take human dignity seriously, and it is elemental to what it means to be a religious person.

Sincere, thoughtful caring-about is crucial but its main contribution, Noddings writes, is in “suggest[ing] ways to extend caring-for to many more recipients.”15 In the same vein, I think, the laws of tzedakah enshrine the primacy of caring-for.16

“From being solicitous about the honor of other people all the interpersonal commandments flow.”

Caring-about is empty if it does not culminate in caring relations.”

Judaism is not a religion for the individual seeker alone; it is a vision for how human beings ought to live together in pursuit of the right and the good.

People are not monads. A real, live human self is always already partial to certain, select others. Morality needs to take this essential fact about human selfhood into account rather than pretend to override it.

Partiality to loved ones is justified because it is an essential ingredient in one of the highest of human goods.”