Biblical truth, a truth that cannot emerge at once but only through the experience of formative events, is a movement from acts done by God for the sake of human beings, to acts done by human beings for the sake of God.

Humour gives us a way out from what, until the last line, seemed an impossible situation. What we can laugh at, we can rise above.

Whatever our fate, we always have a choice between seeing it as a tragedy devoid of meaning, or as a possibility to achieve something positive.

though it is highly anthropomorphic, the entire biblical tradition tells us that if we seek to understand God – something we can never fully do by any act of the imagination – the best way to do so is to reflect on what it is to be a parent, bringing new life into being through an act of love, caring for it, protecting it while it is young, and

If ancient Greece spoke about the virtue of democracy, Judaism speaks about the democracy of virtue – the good that is real because it is done by people like us.

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

What is hessed? It is usually translated as ‘kindness’ but it also means ‘love’ – not love as emotion or passion, but love expressed as deed.

Every Jewish soul is, he says, literally a part of God. Just as there can be no divisions within God, so there can be no divisions within the collective Jewish soul. As Jews, we are individuals only as bodies, not as souls. When we live at the level of the body, giving primacy to physical perceptions and desires, there can be conflict between us.

The significance of these scenes of tender concern on the part of God are not incidental to the narrative but of its essence. God is He-who-cares. He has given his word, his book, to a people so that it will become a nation-that-cares.