Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

those who don’t identify with a tight-knit community inevitably undervalue the moral foundations, loyalty and restraint, that require a community, an attitude that further alienates them from any such community; these indispensable moral foundations are thus liable to continue to lose appeal.

As the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrate in a long series of experiments on the psychology of decision-making, intuition is hopelessly flawed as a basis for making decisions about anything, let alone moral questions.

A public square and an education system that systematically undermine the virtues required to sustain a society will, unsurprisingly, produce a generation of citizens who lack those virtues.

some prior body of halakhic knowledge, as summarized in the codes and other halakhic literature, serves as a foundation for individual intuition that, in aggregate, converges to consensus on various issues not covered by the extant body of halakhic knowledge.

My views are consistent with those who hold that moral instincts in individuals are genetic adaptations sometimes detectable even in non-human primates;1 that social norms are products of interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution;2 that natural selection can act at the level of the group and not just at the level of the individu

Rawls and Heidi simply assume that there is some “unencumbered self,” as political philosopher Michael Sandel puts it,2 independent of and prior to the affiliations that constitute my identity, and that we can somehow imagine the preferences of these unencumbered selves as they organize themselves politically. But, in fact, we only have preferences

the multiplicity of communities has the ironic consequence of highlighting the common core of halakha that is common to all these diverse communities.

Unlike legislation, which is a discrete event and is typically determined by a small group of legislators who are liable to have their own interests, social norms tend to be stable, adjusting gradually and in accordance with consensus.

Every society requires that members, or wannabe members, signal they’re serious about giving as much as they get and not just eating the kugel and running.

halakha lies on a continuum between language and law.