For futher reflection

Why is there difference, if everything is part of one God?

And that’s really the driving question for many mystical texts.

It’s closest to Mount Sinai. It’s closest to the origin. But it’s really the white space around the edges that ultimately is most important, because that’s where we get to write our questions, and we get to expand and grow and evolve a tradition that, without us, would have long since become either dormant and rigid, or would’ve disappeared... See more

the discussions that you describe in that classroom about good and evil and how to be moral, and how to engage difference and how to engage serious, complex questions and disagreement, where good and evil are not at all clear, or what to do with that, it all feels so resonant with, I think, the questions we know that are with us, not just in this... See more

It is an exercise in what Wiesel’s friend and teacher, the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke of as the religious calling to be maladjusted with positive moral force, neither indifferently conformed to the reality of evil and suffering, nor inured to wondrous and redemptive possibilities we can make real.

I feel like some of the things we’re learning scientifically, or maybe that those of us who aren’t scientists are being invited in a new way to take in, is how even — so we say one of the things that feels most reliable is, you look up and the sky is blue, right? But that the sky is not blue; [

laughs

] that our eyes make color of light. So even... See more

There’s a place for simplicity, too, but there’s often a speed — we’re moving with such speed, instead of taking time to really question, how am I seeing this, and how am I perceiving, and how am I hearing, and what am I missing? And who’s missing around the table? And what tools are we missing in our work? And what are we taking for granted? Those... See more

perhaps Elie Wiesel’s favorite phrase was “and yet.”

What do religious people and traditions have to offer and teach as we do the work ahead of repairing, renewing, and remaking our societies, our life together?

And so we know that education isn’t a guarantee of moral sensitivity, but he taught us that memory is the ingredient.