The ethic of responsibility is the best answer I know to the meaning and meaningfulness of a life.

We are here because someone wanted us to be and because there is a task that only we can fulfil. No two people, places, times and circumstances are the same. Where what I can do meets what needs to be done – there is God’s challenge and our task.

There is the common ground of the common good, and there are the semi-private domains of our diverse religious traditions. We are responsible to society for the former, to our own community for the latter.

The greater the person, the more scrupulous he should be in all such things, doing more than the strict letter of the law requires.

To be a father – implies the Bible – is to teach a child to question, challenge, confront, dispute.

stories are where theology comes off the page and begins to transform the landscape of human possibility.

For philosophy the primary question relates to the existence of God. For Judaism the primary question relates to the existence of man.

God asks one individual – eventually a family, a tribe, a collection of tribes, a nation – to serve as an exemplary role-model, to be as it were a living case-study in what it is to live closely and continuously in the presence of God. This is – as Jewish history testifies – a weighty and risk-laden responsibility. Since

Maimonides assumes that all societies are bound by mutual responsibility. They are obliged to establish a system of justice, and if they fail to do so they are collectively guilty for the wrong committed in their midst.