To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility

God commands in generalities but calls in particulars. He knows our gifts and he knows the needs of the world. That is why we are here.

Praise is an essential part of moral education. The best teachers are not necessarily those with a gift for instruction.

When God calls, he does not do so by way of universal imperatives. Instead, he whispers our name – and the greatest reply, the reply of Abraham, is simply hineni: ‘Here I am’, ready to heed your call, to mend a fragment of your all-too-broken world.

know that God empowers us to take risks, forgives our failings, lifts us when we fall and believes in us more than we believe in ourselves – that is one way, the best I know, to write, in the record of our days, a story worth leaving as our legacy to those who come after us, of whose future we are the guardians.

Perhaps faith is only created in the doing, happiness in the giving and meaning in the courage to take risks for the sake of an ideal.

Happiness can never be obtained by being pursued. Like the coming of the Messiah in Jewish tradition, it is one of those things that only comes when you are not thinking about it. It comes from a life well lived, in pursuit of the good for its own sake.

Courage is born the moment we decide not to complain but instead to make a personal protest against the evils of the world by doing good, however slight.

Just as every life has a task, so every day brings an opportunity. If we are where we are because God wanted us to be, then there must be, in every situation, something he wants us to do, some act of redemption he wants us to perform.

‘Everyone can be great’, said Martin Luther King, ‘because everyone can serve.’