Were Jewry just a family, one could not join Judaism. Either one is born into a family or one is not. Such a pattern would make Jews a “master race” and turn the Torah into a doctrine of tribal improvement.

Blessing the light celebrates human capability, our independence from nature and our capacity to reshape the world.

Many people go to pieces on vacation or retirement. For the same reason holidays are, notoriously, periods of higher rates of depression and suicide. The ability to stop working is, therefore, an assertion of an inner freedom.

is the absolutists among these groups who have been anti-Semitic.

The sum of the Rabbis’ educational and halachic efforts was that participation in religious life was democratized.

Sometimes people hear the signals but hesitate to act.

The Temple had been destroyed, but the Divine Presence was everywhere, yearning for the Jews to uncover it. Wherever people ate and said words of Torah, wherever people sat as a court and gave justice, whenever the sick were visited or the hungry fed, there was the Divine Presence.

The decision not to go to America or back home meant being condemned to an indefinite number of years in limbo in a D.P. camp, or it meant having to board leaky, suffocatingly crowded tramp steamers to run a British blockade, and most likely end up in another prison camp in Cyprus until further notice. Yet by their refusal to go elsewhere, by placi

Performing this capitalist function of increasing wealth is a fulfillment of the call to do good to others and participate in the work of redemption.