Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures

this kind of discounting of the future does not remain stable; it leads to a cycle of decline.

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.

in an ideal world, halakha is meant to be uncodified, like the rules of grammar, precisely so that its practice remain fluid much the way a native language is spoken. In the real world, codification is often necessary to prevent too much drift during times when collective intuition is compromised;

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.

Most of the world has been and continues to be committed to one or another version of monochromatic utopianism:

the subject matter of Jewish belief is Jewish practice.

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.

the purity of practitioners’ intentions aside, those who are faithful to communal rituals do in fact reap the rewards of communal solidarity.

All of the types of social norms we have considered here promote trust and cooperation, sometimes in subtle and indirect ways. This is why they are so crucial to a society’s flourishing.