Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

abandoning traditions that have proven to be useful for reasons that we don’t understand is likely to lead to consequences that we don’t anticipate.

All the fine properties of halakha considered above – robustness, adaptability, intuitiveness, and so forth – are possible precisely because halakha is a communal, rather than a governmental, process.

this codified version doesn’t capture what’s going on in Shimen’s mind;

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

while a messianic era will come one day, we must wait for it patiently.

The anticipatory nature of redemption in Jewish belief paradoxically softens eschatological fervor and prevents the calamities associated with “hastening the end” that afflict societies in which messianic longing is either too overt or too repressed.

To generalize, a key, and usually under-appreciated, advantage of balancing egalitarianism with heavily weighted leadership is the increased chance of occasionally escaping a sub-optimal equilibrium in a coordination problem.

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.

For Shimen, the “community” is a set of concentric circles beginning with his (dead) family, extending to Gerer Hasidim, and extending further to others committed to the Jewish way of life; the farther out the circle, the less weight it earns in Shimen’s calculus.