Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993) boldly insists that in this amazing encounter, Moses serves as a paradigm for what is true of every human being: to be created in the image of God is to be assigned a specific task by God.

hope, the belief that present circumstances can be overturned, that they need not—that they must not—have the final word.

For Luria, in other words, tzimtzum yields divine absence; for the sages, in contrast, it yields intensified presence.

Knowing that we matter, Jewish theology insists, is not pride; pride would be the insistence that we have earned all of the worth we have, or the pretension that we matter while others do not.

hope, the belief that present circumstances can be overturned, that they need not—that they must not—have the final word.

To live a spiritual life is to seek to grow in love and kindness—and to persevere even when love as a perfect integration of emotion and action seems daunting or out of reach.

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10

And for me faith is at least as much about possibility as it is about certainty.

If we truly took the Bible seriously, I’m not sure we’d ever get past the first chapter. The claims that Genesis 1 makes about who and what we are as human beings are so potent, so stirring, so breathtaking, and ultimately so demanding that we can’t just read it and move on. The chapter demands nothing less than a radical reorientation of our lives