For I belong here, in this world, with all its wonders and pleasures. And of all those earthly delights, you are chief among them.

Kamtza and Bar Kamtza are like matter and antimatter, thesis and synthesis, light and shadow. To hate one and love the other is to lose sight of the essential similarity between the two, and thereby to engage in a useless and all-consuming kind of violence. The War of Gog and Magog, and all struggles for total annihilation, emerge from the clash of

if the primary purpose of the verse is to keep people from submitting to human authority, then we might say that the whole relational dynamic of ‘God as Master and we as slaves’ is fundamentally a mechanism for preventing slavery. It is less about God’s desire to rule over people and more about how divine rulership undermines all earthly power

It is a lesson we see running through the Bible – in the freeing of the slave, or the sabbatical resting of the land – there is no real property. The earth belongs to the Lord. Try too hard to hoard things to yourself, and you will have them ripped away from you.

this is not a question of what he “deserves,” for it is not meant as a “kindness” to him, per se. He must go free. He has no choice.

the very thing that once was meant to remind people of God could, over time, cause them to forget about God.

“Everyone heard him” – but no one listened. If he had no home, it is because we gave him none. If he cursed, it is because we allowed him to feel cursed. If he is guilty, then we are guilty.

the point of it all – the sacrifices, the purity laws, the holiness codes, all of it – is to come close to God. We are being trained, throughout Leviticus, to see the ultimate Oneness that underlies the dizzyingly manifold nature of our existence.

This is not a religion for individuals; it is the religion of a people. These people need me, and I need them. We cannot escape from one another.