Sublime

As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, “A Jew is asked to take a leap of action rather than a leap of faith…We do not have faith in deeds; we attain faith through deeds.”

Greatness, even for God, certainly for us, is not to be above people but to be with them,

the character of time as it functions in the Bible: time as linear rather than cyclical, an arena of growth and development rather than eternal recurrence.

In the aggadic realm, differing views can be legitimate; but in the halakhic realm, communal cohesion requires a single, normative view. God delights in both of these scenarios, and fittingly it is Elijah who tells how God acts and feels about each of them.

The book of Exodus here brings a key aspect of Jewish theology to light: for the accomplishment of divine aims, God chooses to need people.

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.

Only if my desires have been educated beyond selfishness to the common good do I experience law as freedom itself—as the Psalm put it: “I will walk in freedom for I have sought out Your law.”

There is much enthusiasm for the idea that God is present in the universe, but that idea is taken to mean His presence in space rather than in time, in nature rather than in history; as if He were a thing, not a spirit.

But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness—or Misnagdism, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigorous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement